Union and Liberty: An American TL

[wilcoxchar]

Here's the next update!

Part One Hundred Twenty-Nine: Revolutions and Revolutionaries

The Philippine Revolution:
The Republic of the Philippines was the first independent republic to be formed in East Asia, and the first Asian country to be free of European influence. The Philippine independence movement was led by the nationalist Katipunan group, formed in the 1890s mainly by members of the Filipino intelligentsia. Over the next decade, Katipunan grew as nationalist sentiment surged among educated Filipinos, or ilustrados, following increased taxes imposed on Filipinos and other perceived transgressions by the Spanish colonial administration. Even Filipino members of the Spanish colonial government including Emilio Aguinaldo and Mariano Trias. Once the Great War started, the Katipunan had gained a wide network around the Philippines and even with Filipino emigrants in Spain and California. In 1908, bolstered by this international support and the faltering Spanish government, the Katipunan movement launched its revolution.

With the disorganization of the Spanish colonial government, the Katipunan movement quickly captured much of the area north of Manila as the revolution spread. By the end of the year, much of the provinces of Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, Tarlac, and Zambales had been captured by the Katipunan. The first major rebel activity south of Manila occurred on December 12, 1908 in one of the most celebrated events of the Philippines. Antonio Luna, a Filipino junior officer in the Spanish army and member of the Katipunan movement, launched a mutiny at the arsenal in Fort San Felipe south of Manila. Within two days, the fort had been captured and the revolution had spread through much of the city. Fort San Felipe's fall supplied the Katipunan with weapons and ammunition that allowed the revolution to launch offensive attacks on Spanish positions. Through the rest of the Great War, the Katipunan rebellion gained control over a large area of central Luzon and by the Treaty of Saint-Denis had surrounded Manila, thought the Spanish colonial government remained safe within the city.

The transfer of the Philippines from Spain to a joint Franco-German administration provided the window the Katipunan sought to declare an independent republic. Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the Katipunan, formed a national assembly at Malolos and declared independence on May 1, 1911. Aguinaldo directed the Katipunan army to move on Manila as the Spanish colonial governor and much of the colonial government slipped out of Manila harbor under cover of night. Even after the occupation of Manila, Aguinaldo kept Malolos as the seat of government of the Philippines. Many of the higher ups in the Katipunan formed the cabinet of the early Philippine government. For example, Aguinaldo appointed Mariano Trias Minister of Finance and appointed Antonio Luna Minister of War. Aguinaldo soon consolidated independent control over the entirety of Luzon. The Franco-German joint administration never materialized in Luzon, partly because Aguinaldo always refused French and German prospective governors entry into Manila, and partly because the two countries never settled on who would have what authority. Meanwhile, the revolutionary movement spread from Luzon to Visayas. After three years of bickering and little progress in much of the archipelago, the French and German governments finally determined that the endeavor of administration was too expensive and recognized the Philippines as an independent republic. Today, the little remnants of the French and German colonial efforts can be found in the French regional office in Taytay on the island of Palawan, and the remains of a German fort on Samal Island near the city of Davao[1].


Morelian Mexico:
For the decades after the breakup of Mexico, the Mexican Republic was the only state to still retain any connection with the old government, owing mainly to its possession of Mexico City. Even so, the Mexican Republic still fell into the same corruption as the republics to its north. A succession of elite landholders dominated politics in the Mexican Republic and the peasants who worked the hinterlands continued to work for little. Resentment toward the wealthy owners of the haciendas, many of whom lived in Mexico City itself and rarely visited their rural estates, grew among the poorer peasantry. In 1905, two mestizo community leaders in the eastern hills of the Mexican Republic met to begin a demonstration for true land reform. These men were Pascual Claudio[2] and Emiliano Zapata.

As a string of feuds in Mexico City led to no less than three coups in as many years in the capital, Zapata and Claudio drafted their Plan de Anenecuilco, which denounced the leaders in Mexico City and sought to bring land rights to the people and the village councils. Zapata had been influenced by socialist teachings, and adopted an ideology that would come to be known as Morelismo after the region of Morelos that Zapata operated in. Zapata and Claudio organized with other village leaders in Morelos and Tlacotepec to launch an insurgency against the Mexican government. The rebel movement swelled as Zapata's reforms were implemented and villages began to plant staple food crops instead of cash crops for export, and news of the rebellion spread. By 1910 the Mexican Revolution had consumed the country in a brutal civil war, but the Zapatistas had a majority of the population on their side. In March 1910 Mexico City was largely surrounded by Zapata's forces, and a famine broke out in the capital. When the citizens heard of how well the villages under Zapata and Claduio's control were eating with their subsistence crops, the citizens of Mexico City joined the revolt and ousted the president of Mexico and the mayor of the city. Many hacienda owners fled to neighboring republics, while Zapata and Claudio set up their new revolutionary system as the Mexican Peasant's Republic.

Pascual Claudio died soon after the victory, and Zapata appointed fellow revolutionary Plutarco Elias Calles[4] the mayor of Mexico City, effectively making Calles the second most powerful person in the new government. Calles' popularity among the urban labor movement gained him favor from Zapata. Additionally, as Zapata's expertise lay in agrarian socialism, Calles had largely free reign to adapt the socialist ideas to the more dense and urbanized capital. Morelian Socialism was largely characterized in the Mexican Republic by the breakdown of the hacienda system and its replacement by smaller plots of land collectively owned by each village through its council. The village councils were granted a high level of autonomy, and they were expected to be self-sustaining through the growth of staple crops such as maize. Calles, meanwhile, looked toward the Viennese Workers Republic in the reorganization of Mexico City, creating an odd mix of state centralization in the capital and decentralization in the rest of the country.

The success of the Mexican Revolution caused a shockwave through the entire Mexican region. Jalisco and Granidalgo immediately sought an alliance to try and isolate any revolutionary expansionism that Calles and Zapata were harboring. Zapata had long written of the need to expand the revolution and reunite greater Mexico under a liberated banner and free the workers in the north. Small rebellions flared up in other states, but the Mexican Peasants' Republic was too weak to grant them any support. President Álvaro Obregón of Sonora was one of the more receptive leaders to Zapata's ideals and enacted a series of land reforms and labor laws in Sonora including dismantling a large portion of his own family's substantial landholdings. The Mexican Republic and Sonora would remain close ties, which would become crucial for the two states in the following years during the Second Mexican War. Interestingly, Zapata and Calles' anticlericalism actually created a boost for the Temporal Catholic Church in Puebla, as much of the elite in the other Mexican republics began to increase support for the church to combat the perception of godlessness of socialism in their midst. This effort revived Temporal Catholicism as a whole and Tlaxcala with it, which became a bulwark against the threat of New World socialism.


The Birth of the Hawaiian Republic:
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Hawaiian archipelago was one of the last places in the world to be colonized during the 19th century. The united islands were governed under an independent monarchy and received limited but growing interest from European and Asian merchants throughout the 1800s. In 1892, a class of wealthy immigrants had gained substantial power in the archipelago and overthrew the native monarchy to protect their business interests, largely in sugar and fruit plantations. The islands were divided between Japan and California, with Caliifornia gaining the more populated and wealthier islands east of and including Oahu. California controlled Hawaii for nearly two decades, but with the Great War and strict Californio policies regarding trade and tariffs from the islands, foreign control of Hawaii did not last very long.

The leader of the Hawaiian Revolution was a Chinese immigrant by the name of Sun Yat-Sen. Sun Yat-Sen grew up in southern China before moving to Honolulu in 1878 to live with his brother Sun Mei[4]. The family's wealth grew over the years and after receiving a degree in medicine, Sun Yat-Sen became active in liberal clubs in Honolulu advocating the abolition of the monarchy. When the monarchy was overthrown in 1892 and California took ownership of the islands, Sun Yat-Sen praised the new government as a step toward liberalizing the islands. However, the government in Monterrey began passing laws favoring Californio businesses over others and swiftly alienated many of the prominent businesses on the islands. Sun Yat-Sen and a cadre of wealthy Honoluluans formed the Society for Hawaiian Independence in 1894, and began petitioning Monterey to grant Hawaii self-governance. During the next decade, Sun Yat-Sen made several trips to California as well as to China to lend support to liberal organizations in his birth country. The Society's members included both former Hawaiian leadership including William Charles Lunalilo[5] and a large immigrant elite, including Filipinos, French, and Americans. After Monterey was occupied by American forces in November of 1910, the Society proclaimed that the Californio administration was no longer valid.

While the token Californio presence in the islands had mostly departed to the mainland as the United States invaded, a brief skirmish between militia forces loyal to the Society and the garrison in Honolulu Harbor killed six men and prevented the coup from being completely bloodless. The Society for Hawaiian Independence soon established control over the rest of the islands and, with support from the American consulate in Honolulu, proclaimed the country independent once again. Sun Yat-Sen and the aging William Charles Lunalilo led the constitutional convention that drafted a new, more liberal constitution, but disagreement arose on whether to restore the monarchy. Lunalilo's age caused him to turn down the kingship, but the Society were unwilling to support other candidates for the position. Despite opposition from some of the former royalty, the constitution was ratified and on May 14, 1911 the Republic of Hawaii was created. The United States and Japan soon recognized the restored nation, and elections were held in August of that year. The major parties reflected the divide that had long pervaded Hawaiian politics. Native Hawaiians and pro-restorationists put forth Keolaokalani Davis Bishop[6] as the presidential candidate of the National Revival Party. Sun Yat-Sen was nominated by the Liberal Party, which had support from the business elite and the significant non-native population. The Liberal Party won the elections, and Sun Yat-Sen became the first president of the Republic of Hawaii in 1911.


[1] The Germans tried to establish their main port in Zamboanga but Vicente Alvarez' Republic of Zamboanga controlled much of western Mindanao at the time.
[2] I couldn't find much info about Pascual Claudio, other than he was a revolutionary leader in Guerrero and there are schools naned after him.
[3] Not entirely sure if Calles works in this role, but I had trouble finding people actually from Mexico City.
[4] This is OTL. Sun Yat-Sen lived in Hawaii for much of his early life and organized his first revolutionary activities in the 1890s with Chinese expatriates in Honolulu.
[5] Lunalilo in OTL was the last king of the Kamehameha dynasty, reigning from 1873 to 1874. ITTL he lives longer but doesn't become king after Kamehameha V.
[6] Son of Bernice Paulani Bishop.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Part One Hundred-Thirty: Vienna, City of Peace

The Peace of Vienna:
Once the guns of war fell silent on September 27, 1911, the lengthy peace process began. Though France, Germany, and the United States emerged the clear victors in the war, the great powers of the New Coalition, Great Britain and Russia, were not entirely defeated and still had a leg to stand on in terms of negotiating power. The peace process was held in the German city of Vienna, symbolic of the city's long history as a diplomatic center of Europe and of the Congress held there a century before to end the First Napoleonic Wars. The parallels between the Peace of Vienna and the Concert of Europe were not lost on many of the newspapers of the time. Le Moniteur[1], the largest Parisian paper of the time, was the first to call the peace conference the Vienna Concerto No. 2, and the headline was soon repeated in other major papers including the New York Tribune and the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch.

The full peace process in Vienna lasted from October into late December. The American delegation was headed by President Theodore Roosevelt himself. The President was boisterous about being part of the negotiations, and marked the first official state visit by a sitting president to Europe. The American delegation also included Herbert Hoover, who had become close to Roosevelt for his relief activities in Europe and the Canadian border states during the war, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, an authority on admiralty law. The French and German delegations were headed by Joseph Caillaux and Friedrich Naumann. Prior to the beginning of negotiations, the French and German delegations had secretly contacted each other to discuss territorial demands. Naumann and the German delegation were to primarily demand land from the Russian Empire, while France would seek concessions in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. This was largely in line with the general foreign policy espoused by Naumann with a shift toward the east and German expansion in Slavic lands through annexation or carving satellite states.

During the peace conference, the five major players in the Alliance Carolingien were the United States, France, Germany, Corea, and South Africa. However, Korea and South Africa played little role for much of the negotiations. South Africa's participation mostly consisted of affirming its treaty arrangement with Germany to divide the Portuguese colony of Mozambique between the two. Corea, while it had French support, sought further territorial gains in East Asia and the Pacific. The Russians and British, who were the only Coalition members allowed a full presence in the negotiations, prevented Corea from even receiving Tsushima. Corea did succeed in securing a size reduction in the Japanese Navy and an exclusive trade concession in the Zhoushan islands.

A large majority of the peace conference's territorial exchange focus was in Europe as Great Britain was still a formidable power and refused many of the original demands to relinquish large parts of its colonial empire. Joseph Caillaux headed a commission to rework the terms of the Treat of Saint-Denis with members of the German and British delegations and the token Spanish and Italian delegations. In the end, a large part of the terms were left unchanged. France relinquished control of Piedmont, Sardinia and the Tuscan coast save a small sector around Pimobino to the Italians. The German delegation gave up control of its Venetian corridor, and of the Trento region. Most of the cession of territory made by the Spanish were kept, although Valencia remained an independent republic after France recognized the city-state. The revisions to the Treaty of Saint-Denis were codified in the Treaty of Schönbrunn, signed at the historic Habsburg palace.

The various commissions in the Peace of Vienna met at various locations around the city and its suburbs, leading to various treaties. The Western European negotiations were held in the Schönbrunn Palace, while the Eastern European negotiations took place in the Hofburg Palace in the city center. Naumann was at the center of the peace process between Germany, Russia, and Hungary, attempting to maximize the Russian loss of territory. A small Polish delegation was also present, invited by Naumann to lend credence to the creation of an independent Poland. Ultimately, German gains in the east fell far short of the Mitteleuropa envisioned by Naumann before and during the war. With the Hofburg Treaty, the eastern border of Germany was extended to much of what Prussia had gained from the partitions of Poland in the 1700s, but was not granted to its fullest extent. An independent Kingdom of Poland was carved out of the remainder of Congress Poland and Galizien. The restored Polish kingdom was set up as a constitutional monarchy similar to Germany's governing structure. Jozef Korzeniowski was appointed the country's first chancellor as a continuation from the temporary Polish government, and the elderly Prince Karol von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen[2] became King Karol I of Poland on January 1, 1912. To appease the Zionists and some of the right wing politicians, the Reichstag enacted the Bodenheimer proposal for a Jewish autonomous province in the Polish territories. The resulting German province of Judenland consisted of the northern third of the former Kalisz Voivodeship and had its capital in the city of Kolo, a longtime Jewish center in Poland.

During the three months of the Peace of Vienna, President Roosevelt was actively involved in the peace process, primarily in the discussions on the treaties with California and regarding British possessions in North America. Roosevelt saw the opportunity of the first American state visit to Europe as a display of American power, and treated the journey from Brest to Vienna as a grand tour to present himself to the French and German people. He was also very boisterous during the discussions, which pleased his aides and other members of the delegation but occasionally displeased the delegates from other nations. The North American commission began with some of the less contentious parts of the negotiations; trade and naval matters. President Roosevelt affirmed the international status of the San Juan Canal, which was due to open in 1912, with profits from fees set by the Joint Commission on the San Juan Canal Zone[3] being divided between the American and Costa Rican governments for maintenance of the canal. Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Holmes led the negotiations for the Maritime Convention on the Caribbean, which established the Caribbean Sea barring coastal economic zones as international waters.

While President Roosevelt was engaged in the smaller discussions of the Peace of Vienna, his true aim with his presence at the conference was to gain international acceptance for the enlargement of American territory and the dominance of the United States over the North American continent. To this end, Roosevelt focused havily on promoting American gains in California. Roosevelt's seeming obsession with the full annexation of California, which even France was reluctant to assent to, cost the United States in other possible areas of expansion, such as in British North America. Throughout the peace process, the President pushed for annexation, and when it was finally established as an agreed article in the Treaty of Schwarzenberg[4], Roosevelt took it as a personal triumph. The annexation did come with conditions, including that the United States would take on all of California's debts, which totaled over $600 million. Besides California, the American delegation concentrated its efforts on securing American dominance of the Caribbean and diminishing British possessions in the region. The Treaty of Schwarzenberg ceded the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos islands to the United States, and arranged the sale of British Honduras to Mesoamerica. While Roosevelt pushed for American annexation or independence for Jamaica as well, the British delegation refused to part with it. Britain was more willing to cede the Bahamas and British Honduras as they had been struggling economically for decades, but Jamaica had become profitable once again, and looked to become more so now with the shedding of two colonies under its administration. Additionally, while agreements between Wilfred Laurier and Roosevelt during the war had made the Laurentian region an afterthought for American gains, minor border adjustments with Canada were made and Deseret and Acadia received full independence.


The Weltkongress:
With the revival of the Concert system of diplomacy during the closing stages of the Great War, many influential figures in foreign policy, especially among the victorious powers, brought up the idea of a continuous Congress system to follow the Peace of Vienna. The creation of the Weltkongress was spearheaded by German and French ministers. Herbert von Bismarck, Foreign Minister and Otto von Bismarck's eldest son, and King Ernest August II of Hanover[5] led the German efforts, while Maurice Rouvier, echoing Frédéric Passy's previous calls for a permanent international conference before his death, was the main French proponent along with Caillaux. Rouvier, Bismarck, and the Hanoverian king had held frequent discussions during the war to set up a Committee for Global Peace, and had already drawn up proposals for a global assembly of nations, which would arbitrate disputes between nations. These first drafts included the creation of an international court within the congress framework for general disputes, as well as special commission to hear trade and tariff disputes between nations.

However, the Hanover Committee proposals for trade and international courts being handled within the assembly were opposed by British and American representatives once the discussion of a permanent World Congress began to take shape in 1912. The British were loudly opposed to what they thought of as efforts to secure the Franco-German dominance of European and world affairs and walked out of the discussion in February. The American delegation was more hopeful for negotiations but had some reservations. President Roosevelt, supportive of the idea of a World Congress, had returned to the United States at the new year to oversee the new Congressional session and in preparation for the 1912 election campaign. In his stead, he sent Vice President Taft, one of the Roosevelt cabinet's major proponents of the World Congress[6], and presidential adviser Elihu Root to Vienna. The United States opposed the idea of an international trade court, claiming that European intervention in American bilateral trade relations with other nations would be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Additionally, the United States opposed having other members' delegates be the arbitrators in court decisions, instead desiring panels of independent judges appointed by the Weltkongress, and opposed a proposal that members had an obligation to protect each other if attacked.

Although the Peace of Vienna was generally concluded by the end of 1911, the formation of the Weltkongress was almost continuous with the peace negotiations in the early months of 1912. The Charter of the Weltkongress was finally completed in March of 1920, with the first informal meeting of the signatory nations taking place in Vienna the next month. Due to the objections raised by the United States' delegation, the trade court idea was dropped and the International Court was separated from the Weltkongress itself, instead taking the form of the International Court of Arbitration in Brussels with panels of judges to hear the cases sent to it by the Weltkongress. The signatory nations to the Weltkongress Charter included the victorious Alliance members and most neutral nations in Europe, most Ibero-American nations, Persia, China, Corea, and Japan. The United States attended the first meeting of the Weltkongress, but as Congress had not yet ratified the Charter it was not yet officially a member state.

The first meetings of the Weltknogress were held in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, and elected international lawyer Charles Albert Gobat of Switzerland as the organization's first Secretary General. The official languages of the Weltknogress at the time of the founding charter's passage were French, German, English, and Spanish. While Great Britain and Russia were notable exceptions during the founding of the Weltkongress, Russia became a member in 1915. The Weltkongress held scheduled meetings of the assembly twice a year, with special sessions for emergency events. Soon after the Weltknogress was founded, Gobat proposed the construction of a new building with the purpose of housing the Weltkongress. In 1922 in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Weltkongress, Viennese architect Karl Ehn was commissioned to build a new site for the congress in the Donaustadt district of Vienna on the opposite side of the Danube from the city's historic center. This was intended to create an international diplomatic complex, and to extend the urban center of Vienna across the river. Ehn, an adherent of the Rotes Wien designed the complex not as a sprawling palace, but as an efficient and compact garden city for diplomats, their staff, and any curious members of the public. The Weltkongresshalle is a grand eight story building stretching along the bank of the Danube, lined with a terra cotta stucco facade[7]. Opposite the river from the hall lie a large park and courtyard, which is flanked by more conference halls and diplomatic apartments for the representatives and their families and staff to stay in during sessions.


[1] Le Moniteur Universel was privatized ITTL during Louis-Napoleon's presidency.
[2] OTL Carol I of Romania.
[3] The Joint Commission is an international body primarily made up of representatives from the United States and Costa Rica.
[4] Signed in the Palais Schwarzenberg in eastern Vienna.
[5] With hostilities between Britain and Germany, the Hanoverian line was deprived of its title of Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale.
[6] Speculation abounded that Roosevelt wanted to keep Taft away from the early stages of the 1912 campaign, but there is little to substantiate these rumors.
[7] Something like the OTL Karl Marx Hof of the Jakob Reumann Hof.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Next update is here!

Part One Hundred Thirty-One: A Matter of Territory

The Weltkongress's First Steps:
Almost immediately after the charter forming the Weltkongress was passed, the international organization dove into debate over its first crises. While the Great War was over, the aftermath of the war in many places around the world were still unresolved. The most pressing concern for the powers attending the Vienna Peace Conference was the situation with the civil war in Spain. After the French invasion, the Cantonalist insurrection in Andalucia made quick advances north and as of the armistice were nearing the capital. The Cantonalists had already reached as north as Toledo by the end of 1911, and were preparing to cross the Tajo River. Days after the Spanish delegation signed the Schönbrunn Treaty, an uprising against the king and the Cortes broke out in Madrid. The Cantonalist forces launched an offensive north from Toledo to reinforce the rebels in the capital. King Alfonso XIII was in the Escorial palace at the time, but with the uprising growing stronger every day he fled to the more royalist city of Valladolid. The Madrid uprising led to the Zarzuela Declaration[1] by failed mayoral candidate Alvaro de Figueroa[2] and the brief tenure of the Madrid Commune. Alvaro de Figueroa led the Commune for nearly two months before the Weltkongress mediation of the Spanish Civil War concluded.

As the Weltkongress met to call an end to the conflict in the Spanish Civil War and mediate a peace treaty between the two factions, the Cantonalists were permitted to send a small diplomatic delegation to the proceedings in Vienna. The Cantonalists used this opportunity to make a bold statement, and sent Isabel Oyarzabal Smith, a 34 year old activist and a Federal Deputy from Malaga[3], as the lead delegate. She became the first woman to officially speak at he Weltkongress during the ceasefire negotiations. On May 1, 1912, the Weltkongress announced that a ceasefire had been agreed to, and a permanent peace process for Spain would begin. Neither the conservative Spanish delegation or the radical Cantonalists could agree to a copmromise that would allow for a return to a united Spain. The resulting agreement, signed on June 14, set the border between the Kingdom of Spain and the now internationally recognized Spanish Federative Republic. The Tajo River, as it was close to the de facto border at the ceasefire, was designated the border between the two states for much of its course, though near the headwaters the border followed the Guadiela tributary. The designation of the Tajo as the border still caused contention among both sides, as the Federative Republic was giving up control of not just Madrid but Toledo as well. After the war, Toledo became a heavily militarized city. The city's famed Alcazar became a fortification once again, overlooking the Tajo to the south, and during the Third Carlist War following King Alfonso XIII's assassination, there were constant fears that the Federative Republic would cross the river and occupy Toledo, sparking another widespread conflict.

While the Spanish Civil War was the Weltkongress's major concern during its first meeting, other smaller issues were also discussed. The United States, while not yet a chartered member due to the ratification of the charter in Congress, still brought one of the first cases in front of the Weltkongress. The US delegation, with Oliver Wendell Holmes as the main representative in the case, agreed to settle a longstanding maritime dispute with Acadia-Tirnanog[4]. Since the Peace of Madrid ended the Oregon War, a dispute over the fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and over the ownership of the Grand Manan Archipelago and Machias Seal Island had remained unresolved[5]. Holmes was selected as head of the American side due to his extensive experience with admiralty law. Under Dutch and French arbiters, the American and Acadian sides eventually came to a workable agreement. The United States would gain sovereignty over the entire Grand Manan Archipelago and Machias Seal Island, but Acadia-Tirnanog would receive fishing rights over a wider range of the Gulf of Maine. In particular, Acadia-Tirannaog was granted sovereignty of over half of the lucrative Georges Bank and the cod and halibut grounds on its eastern shelf. Additionally, fish products were granted duty free entry for going between the American and Acadian borders. This was one of the first modern instances of the establishment of a maritime boundary between two nations. The boundary establishment only temporarily solved the fisheries dispute, however, as industrial fishing methods over the next decades quickly depleted the Gulf of Maine fishing stocks for many species.


The Insular Cases:
The United States gained nearly two thirds is previous territory with its annexations after the Great War. However, the matter of taking a swath of land this large became a matter of some contention among the existing states as to what to do with the new territory. For areas such as California, the main question was how to divide the former Californio Republic into territories and how soon to transfer the lands from military governance to being organized territories. While California in total had a substantial population, many people especially in Congress were concerned over the creation of more Catholic-majority states. THis was a reflection of a growing Nativist sentiment in many parts of the country, especially the rural areas of the Old Northwest and the South. The proposed 1912 Organic Act as originally proposed by Senator Tomás E. Palma[6] split the California Military District into territories based on combinations of the former Californio states. However, it faced such opposition and amendments that by the time the bill passed, only Trujillo and Espejo became territories, while the rest of the lands remained part of the military district.

Outside of California, the matter of the newly annexed lands was not as controversial in whether they should get statehood. Instead, the disputes arose between states over certain acquisitions and which state should gain the new lands. The first case to erupt following the Vienna Peace Conference was, naturally it seems, between Michigan and Ohio[7]. The United States took Pelee Island and the nearby islands in Lake Erie as part of its gains. The state government in Michigan assumed that as they received Essex County, Pelee Island and the surrounding waters would obviously become part of Michigan. However, governor Mark Hanna claimed that as Pelee Island was closer to the Ohio coast, it should become part of Ohio. The dispute was only verbal at first, but in June 1912 it escalated. Led by Arthur Schlessinger[8], a student at Ohio State University, a small group of students out to Pelee Island and planted the flags of Ohio and Ohio State on the highest point on the island. Two days later, a group of people from Michigan replaced the flags with that of Michigan. John Bricker, a freshman at Ohio State from the first flag planting, went out again the next day with a group of five others. However, the Michigan group was still there and a brawl ensued. Three were injured in the brawl, including Bricker receiving a broken nose. The dispute was taken to the courts where, based on the Staten Island precedent, it was decided by the Supreme Court. In the case of Ohio vs. Michigan, the area surrounding Pelee Island was granted to Ohio in October of 1912.

Meanwhile, the Bahamas in the Caribbean remained a source of tension between the southeastern states and among the population of the islands. The military occupation of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands was originally planned for a year in order to establish a naval base in the archipelago then organize the islands into a singular territory. However, the proposed Organic Act caused protests among the Turks and Caicos islanders. When America annexed them, the Turks and Caicos had been administered by Jamaica after petitioning a transfer out of Bahamaian governance in the 1840s[9], and few islanders wanted to go back to being governed by Nassau. Additionally, the proposal to make the Bahamas itself a state was met with heavy opposition from mainlanders due to the islands' majority black population. A possible solution was to make the Bahamian Archipelago part of Florida or Cuba, but this was also met with opposition, particularly in Florida. Democratic Governor Sidney Johnston Catts opposed the incorporation of the Bahamas to Florida, with racist comments denouncing the black population and comparing the Bahamians to "the undignified revolutionaries of Haiti who want to export their society to America." In 1913, the Turks and Caicos were incorporated into the state of Cuba, but the issue of the Bahamas remained unresolved. In 1915, after Catts lost reelection, an act was again proposed to make the Bahamas part of Florida, but it was still rejected by the state legislature in Florida. The reluctance to grant the islands to Cuba or to make them their own territory put the status of the Bahamas in limbo for a long time. The Department of the Interior continued to administrate the islands through the end of the decade. The status of the islands made it a boon for naval development with the construction of Port Lucayan Naval Base on Grand Bahama, but it led to unrest among the 40,000 people living on the archipelago[10] and contributed to the unrest in Florida in the 1910s as Bahamians moved to Jacksonville and Gadsden.

[1] The declaration is named after the Zarzuela Palace in Madrid where it was made.
[2] Alvaro de Figueroa was in OTL mayor of Madrid in the 1890s, Prime Minister of Spain in the 1910s, and given the title Count of Romanones. ITTL his political rise is cut off early and so he takes a different opportunity for advancement.
[3] Isabel Oyarzabal Smith was a writer and feminist activist in Spain. Incidentally she's one of the few early 20th century Spanish feminists I could find who weren't Basque or Catalan.
[4] Naming conventions for Acadia got weird after independence with arguments over English or Gaelic names, so by now the formal name of independent Acadia is the Republic of Acadia-Tirnanog but the short form is either Acadia or Tirnanog.
[5] In OTL Grand Manan and Machias Seal Island are still disputed between the US and Canada.
[6] Tomás Estrada Palma is a Progressive Senator from Cuba ITTL.
[7] Like snakes and mongooses, Ohioans and Michiganders seem to be natural enemies.
[8] This is Arthur Schlessinger Sr., who was an Ohio State alum.
[9] The transfer of the Turks and Caicos from the Bahamas to Jamaica happened in OTL and is a major reason why the Turks and Caicos are still British.
[10] OTL's population of the Bahamas at the time was about 55,000. The stagnation of the Bahamas' economy in the later 19th century is more visible with the new opportunity to move to the mainland or Cuba.

 

[wilcoxchar]

I finally have another city focus update for you all. Here's the link to the first one in case you want to go back and read that one. I probably won't have a map to go with this one unfortunately, but this map is a good overview of the OTL renovations of the street layout done by Baron Haussmann.

Spotlight on the City #2: Paris, France

The presidency of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte brought about many changes to France during the late 19th century. His thirty-one years as president transformed the country from a nation in decline wracked by wave after wave of instability and upheaval to one of Europe’s leading powers with a military, economic, and cultural presence felt around the world. Louis Napoleon brought a much needed extended period of stability and prosperity to France. One of the most striking effects of Louis Napoleon’s presidency can be seen and felt in the French capital itself. Louis Napoleon continued the legacy of the French Revolution in throwing out the old system, modernizing and elevating Paris to a global cultural center.

In the early 19th century, Paris was still much the same as it was during the French Revolution. The neighborhoods at the center of the city on the Ile de la Cite and north of the Louvre were still densely populated and camped. In many areas of the city, the narrow, winding streets that had been laid out in medieval times remained. King Louis Philippe began some public works projects to improve the city during his reign. The Place de la Concorde was constructed in 1836, along with the final completion of the Arc du Triomphe de L’Etoile. The Comte de Rambuteau, Prefect of the Seine[1], laid out what is now the Rue Rambuteau between the Palais Royal and the Marais district. The widening of this avenue served as a precursor to the later planning for the city under Louis Napoleon. Additionally under Louis Philippe, the July column was erected in the Place de la Bastille where the fortress and prison had once stood in the east of the city center.

However, much of the city still had problems. Riots occurred almost yearly during the reign of King Louis Philippe, culminating in the destruction of the monarchy in the Mid-Century Revolutions. During the first half of the 19th century, the population of Paris more than doubled from 500,000 to over a million people, and the city strained to accommodate such growth. The central arrondissements were packed tight with people. The sewers emptied directly into the Seine, making outbreaks of cholera and other diseases increasingly frequent. Cholera outbreaks in the Ile de la Cite and nearby neighborhoods in 1830, 1848, and 1852 killed over twenty thousand people in each epidemic. These issues in Paris and other urbanizing cities throughout France were a major spark in the ousting of Louis Philippe.

When Louis Napoleon was elected president of France, he consulted with the Comte de Rambuteau and other architects and planners from throughout France on renovation plans for Paris. After many applications and personal input by president Bonaparte, George Eugene Haussmann was chosen as the Prefect of the Seine to replace Rambuteau. The Prefect of the Seine position held authority over Paris, and Haussmann’s renovations began soon after his appointment in 1851. The first phase implemented by Haussmann was the consolidation of east-west and north-south axes through the center of Paris. The main east-west axis already largely existed as the Champs-Élysées stretching from the Arc du Triomphe de L’Etoile to the Louvre. Under Haussman’s direction, the axis was extended east as the completed Rue de Rivoli between the Louvre and the Hotel de Ville, and a widening of the Rue de Saint Antoine to the Place de la Bastille and the Place Bonaparte[2]. The north-south axis went along the Boulevard de Saint-Denis through the Ile de la Cite and on the Rue de Saint Michel south of the Seine. These two paths through the city created a cross along which traffic from all directions could flow more easily into, out of, and through Paris. However, this was only the start of the renovation that Haussmann would have planned for Paris.

Haussmann continued to wash away the older sections of Paris by widening more streets, destroying the old city walls from before the Revolution to create new treelined boulevards, and constructing railway stations on the outskirts of the city center to connect Paris with outer cities. The most important of these became the Gare d’Arsenal located between the Place de la Bastile and the Seine and the Gare du Nord where the Rue Saint Denis met the Boulevard du Lafayette[3]. Both stations served as vital arteries to the city. To facilitate the construction of tracks outward from these locations and other projects put forth by Haussmann, Louis Napoleon and Haussmann also officially annexed several suburbs surrounding Paris. In 1855, the suburbs of Montmarte, Belleville, and Bercy were annexed into the city of Paris. By Louis Napoleon’s death in 1881, Paris had further expanded to all the area within the outer ring of fortifications and more.

Haussmann’s renovations also included the construction of many parks and monuments throughout Paris. The parks were envisioned by Louis Napoleon during his exile in London and his fascination with that city’s Hyde Park. When he was elected president of Paris, Louis Napoleon turned the two former royal hunting grounds on either side of the city into large park areas as large as some of the arrondissements, far larger than any public park in Paris before. These became the Bois du Boulogne on the west, south of the Champs-Elysees and the Bois du Vincennes on the east, along the extension of the Rue Saint Antoine. The Bois du Vincennes also features the Chateau de Vincennes, renamed the Chateau Daumesnil after the park’s creation, with the keep and much of the castle restored during this period.

Other monuments constructed in Paris during the late 19th century were primarily dedicated to the French Revolution or to the major wars of the era. Following in his uncle’s footsteps, Louis Napoleon wanted to construct a triumphal arch similar to the Arc du L’Etoile and the Arc du Carousel in the Neoclassical style following the European Wars. From 1872 to 1875, workers built the Arc de Triomphe de Bonaparte in the center of the Place Bonaparte in eastern Paris. Unlike either of Emperor Napoleon’s arches, the Arc de Triomphe de Bonaparte was built of a red sandstone brick from the Vosges. The monumental construction continued after the era of Louis Napoleon and Haussmann as well. On the centennial of the French Revolution in 1889, a grand statue was unveiled on the western promontory of the Ile de la Cite dedicated to the revolution. The statue is a bronze recreation of Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. A young woman, the personification of Liberty waves a flag above her head in one hand while clutching a rifle in the other. The base of the statue depicts a group of people following Liberty as in the painting. The statue’s ingenious construction comes from a collaboration between Isidore Bonheur and Gustave Eiffel. Eiffel, who later designed the Jefferson Tower in Saint Louis, Missouri, designed a hollow iron lattice similar to that of the Jefferson Tower in order to support a statue as large as that of Liberty Leading the People. The statue’s location required the movement of an older statue of King Henri IV of France, which is now located nearby in the Place Dauphine.

The final piece of the grand Parisian monuments was completed in the years following the Alliance victory in the Great War. President Paul Déroulède, who succeeded Leon Gambetta after the latter’s death in 1913, gathered support nationwide for a large memorial to be built in Paris dedicated to those soldiers lost in the Great War. Architect Hector Guimard[4] won the extensive design contest with his blending of the older themes of Parisian architecture with more modern 20th century architectural innovations. Guimard proposed a triumphal arch similar to the ones previously built in Paris, but massively scaled up. With the planned site for the memorial on the Champs de Mars, it had to be large and grand enough to be a suitable memorial. Guimard scaled the arch’s design up to be 125 meters wide at its base, and 140 meters in height[5]. This made the arch over twice as large as the Arc de L’Etoile. To make sure the Arc de Triomphe d’Alliance was structurally sound, Guimard incorporated cast iron bars on both the interior, as well as partially decorative cast iron columns around the outside of the legs of the arch. The Arc d’Alliance was the largest undertaking of modern Parisian construction yet, taking six years to complete. Guimard also added an additional functional aspect to the Arc d’Alliance. The interior of the arch above the ceiling included several spaces for offices. Since the opening of the Arc d’Alliance in 1917, this office space has mostly these have been occupied by government ministries.

[1] As far as I can tell, the Prefect of the Seine was essentially mayor of Paris.
[2] OTL Place de la Nation, formerly the Place de Trone.
[3] ITTL the Rue de Lafayette goes west all the way to the Madeleine.
[4] Guimard is one of the most renowned art nouveau architects, and is known for designing among other things the Paris metro entrances.
[5] For the Arc d’Alliance I basically scaled up the dimensions of the Arc de Triomphe to the base of the Eiffel Tower.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Next update's done. I had another section planned for this but didn't really feel like writing it yet, so this update's a little shorter.

Part One Hundred Thirty-Two: British Invasion Literature
The Great War and the turn of the shifting geopolitical reality with the rise of Germany and the United States as world powers had a significant impact on the literature of the era. One of the curious hallmarks of the era's culture is the rise in popularity of "invasion literature" in Britain and around the Empire. This genre of literature began largely in the 1870s following the Second Napoleonic War and the resurgence of France as a power. One of the founding examples of the genre was The Battle of Guildford, written by George Tomkyns Chesney[1] and published in 1872. Chesney was a lieutenant in the Second Napoleonic War serving both on the Spanish front and in Britain. Chesney lamented the state of the British armed forces in the war, and after the French victory he used The Battle of Guildford to bring the nation's attention to the poor state of Britain's defenses[2]. The Battle of Guildford has the French continuing to rise after the Second Napoleonic War, and launching an invasion of southern England in the 1880s after conquering Belgium and the Netherlands. The book provides a detailed account of the last British line of defense in Guildford south of London. The poor state of training in the army due to Irish conscription and poor morale after the destruction of the Royal Navy by the French lead to the British losing the battle and the French occupying London and dismantling the British Empire with support from the United States. The Battle of Guildford was originally published as a serial, and was later compiled into a novel in 1884.

While The Battle of Guildford and other early stories in the invasion genre with a successful invasion of the British Isles, later stories in the invasion genre were mixed on the outcome. Particularly, in the early 1900s and especially following the Battle of Flamborough Head, British invasion literature increasingly ended with Great Britain victorious and repelling the invasion force. This also marked a surge in popularity of the genre in Great Britain, with hundreds of serials being published about a hypothetical invasion of Britain. William Le Queux and Edgar Wallace are some of the more prominent authors to have written invasion literature, with both authors' works having Britain triumphant. Le Queux gained particular notoriety for his series The Invasion of 1910, published in the Daily Mail in 1906 prior to the outbreak of the Great War. The Invasion of 1910 featured a German invasion of northeast England that turned out very similar to the actual German invasion five years later. The Daily Mail's nationalistic bent made it a common publishing medium for invasion literature during this time, and regularly published Le Queux's serials. Le Queux also gained fame in Britain for penning some of the first modern spy fiction, with his Secrets of the Foreign Office stories. These stories involved British agent Alfred Harmsway, who repeatedly foiled plots by the French, Germans, and Russians to undermine British interests on the continent and unite it in alliance against Britain. Because of the active promotion of Le Queux's work by newspaper magnate Lord Thanet[3], who owned several major papers at the time including the Daily Mail.

While Great Britain was the main producer of invasion literature during this time period, the genre spread to other countries around the world and influenced science fiction. Geographically, authors in other countries also produced invasion literature to encourage militarism in their respective countries. William Le Queux wrote another invasion serial, The Copenhagen Interpretation, in 1912 about a German invasion of Denmark repulsed by Danish and British forces that gained a large readership in Denmark. Other examples of invasion literature at the time include a novel recounting a Russian occupation of Germany and stories depicting a Korean invasion and occupation of Japan. In particular is the story Still Wind or Madakaze in Japanese, by Shunro Oshikawa. Oshikawa combined the Korean occupation with a science fiction element to make Madakaze one of the pioneering examples of Japanese science fiction. The infusion of science fiction into the invasion genre also occurred in European and American stories. French writers Arnold Galopin and Eugene Torquet both wrote stories of invasions of France by alien forces[4]. Galopin's Guerre de l'Ether in 1913 featured his Doctor Omega character fending off a Venusian landing in Normandy, and gained a following throughout France. In the United States, it would be pioneering science fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs who brought the invasion genre to the country. Burroughs' 1915 and 1916 serials, later compiled into the Carson Napier collection, depicted a civilization on Mars landing on Earth in the northwestern United States. The main character, the eponymous Carson Napier, fights off the invasion force and in later serials steals one of the invading ships and takes the fight to Mars itself[5]. While the early stories of the Carson Napier series are more typical invasion literature, the series also is one of the first to heavily expand upon the Martian culture and civilization and influenced the depiction of alien civilizations in science fiction going forward.

[1] Chesney wrote The Battle of Dorking in OTL.
[2] This was the original reasoning for invasion literature in OTL as well. The Battle of Dorking was published to convince the British public a larger military was needed after the Franco-Prussian War.
[3] OTL Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, also owner of the Daily Mail and a major patron of Le Queux's. Alfred Harmsworth is also partly where I got the TTL Secrets of the Foreign Office protagonist's name from (the other is for the 'in harm's way' pun ).
[4] Jules Verne? You mean the mediocre playwright who worked with Aristide Hignard?
[5] I cobbled the summary from a mix of plot elements from the Barsoom series, the Amtor series, War of the Worlds, and possibly the Flash Gordon serials.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Theodore Roosevelt is back!

The Undisclosed Adventures of Theodore Roosevelt #6: The Ravager of Roaring Fork

The train reserved for the president and his staff wound through the wide canyon, following the roaring waters of the Colorado River below. President Roosevelt looked out of the private train car, admiring the jagged granite and sandstone walls carved out by the mighty river. The train slowed and Roosevelt stuck his head out of the window. Ahead of the train lay a small town snaking up and down the valley where another river entered the Colorado. The station was small but packed with people eager to catch a glimpse of the visiting President. Theodore took a deep breath and smiled. The crisp mountain air rushed into his lungs, and he already felt refreshed. His whiskers tickled the top of his lip as he took another deep breath.

This was the third time President Theodore Roosevelt had chosen to vacation at Glenwood Springs, Colorado for the annual summer holiday. It was one thing to get out of the stifling Washington heat, but Theodore was enamored with the openness of the Great Plains and the natural beauty of the Rocky Mountains, and scheduled regular visits to the area. Glenwood Springs was a small town near the California border high in the Colorado Rockies. There was one major reason Roosevelt visited this far west; the hot springs. The revitalizing powers of the springs and the clear mountain air was always sure to energize the President's spirit.

The train hissed as it stopped at the platform. The President stuck his head back into the train car and stood. "It's good to be back in the wilderness again," the President said to no one in particular. He and his entourage stepped off the train. After the usual greeting of the crowds, they beelined for the hotel and the luxury of the town's riverside hot springs.

The cream colored Roman brick edifice of the Hotel Colorado was a welcoming sight to the President after the long train journey[1]. The presidential staff checked in, and Roosevelt, Interior Secretary John Muir, and two aides retired to the saloon attached to the hotel.

“This should be a lovely week!” Roosevelt said as he slumped into a large armchair. Muir and the two aides joined the President.

“Yes sir,” Muir said. “It’s so nice to get out of the crowds and explore the real beauty the continent has to offer.” Roosevelt nodded in agreement. He and Muir shared an admiration for the natural beauty of the country’s lesser populated western half. It was part of the reason why he had selected Muir for the position of Secretary of the Interior. Muir leaned forward. “Perhaps, Mister President, we could take a walk up one of the canyons while we are here.”

Roosevelt’s eyes lit up. “Splendid idea Mister Muir! Nothing to restore the vigor of a man’s spirit like a trek through the wilderness!”

Muir pulled out a surveyor's’ map of the area surrounding Glenwood Springs. Muir pointed to where Glenwood Springs was on the map. The four men scanned the map for a moment before Muir spoke up again. “There is a town a dozen miles from here.” He pointed to another collection of black squares on the map that indicated a town. He read the name by the town. “Carbondale. It’s just south of here.”

Roosevelt ran his finger along the map. “Looks like we could follow the Roaring Fork River between the two.” He slapped his knee. “Bully! It’s settled then. Tomorrow we hike from here to Carbondale and back. I’m starting to feel more energized already!”

Behind Roosevelt, a man loudly spat into a nearby spittoon. He shuffled a deck of cards on a oval-shaped felt covered table. “I couldn’t help but overhear you over there, your excellency.”

The two aides glanced at the faro dealer. Roosevelt and Muir paid him no mind.

“I would advise against making that trip. Men have been lost along the Roaring Fork. Devoured by wolves, they say.”

Roosevelt kept an ear to the dealer’s talk, but continued working with his staff on the plans for the next day’s adventure.

The dealer shuffled again. The cards snapped like a cascade of bones breaking. The dealer chuckled. “‘Cept, it’s not really wolves. Not as such, anyway. It’s a man what’s eating all them farmers up at Carbondale. Sheep too.”

Roosevelt turned around in his chair. The President looked over his pince-nez at the dealer. “Alright, you had my idle curiosity. Now you have my attention. Why are you trying to scare us out of going up to Carbondale with this nonsense? What’s your agenda?”

“Oh, nothing.” The man set the deck of cards aside and faced the President. “Just a friendly warning to you, Mister President.” The man tipped a wide brimmed straw hat and the President. He had an unusually youthful complexion. His brown hair was short and matted against his scalp. The only blemish visible was a crook on the bridge of his nose that caused it to veer slightly to the right. Roosevelt guessed the man had seen his fair share of bar fights in his time. “Name’s John Henry Holliday. I’m the dentist around here. Also do my fair share of card-handling as you can see.” He waved at the deck of cards on the table.”

The President raised an eyebrow. “Well met, Mister Holliday.”

The man smiled warmly. “No need to be so formal out here. Everyone calls me Doc.”

“Okay, Doc,” the President said. “Why are you warning us about this alleged man-eater?”

“I just want you to be safe. And, well, the authorities up here haven’t been able to do anything about the murders. I thought maybe someone like yourself could help stop these heinous acts. Surely a man running around eating American citizens falls under the purview of Presidential powers to stop. Not to mention the disappearing sheep threatening Carbondale’s economy.”

Roosevelt rubbed his chin. One of his aides leaned forward and hissed in the President’s ear. “Don’t tell me you believe this man? He’s talking nonsense, and he’s a gambler to boot! The only thing he’s knowledgable about is the sin of lying and deception!”

Roosevelt held up a hand to silence the aide. “You speak of strange occurrences in Carbondale. We will go up there and investigate tomorrow, see if your story plays out. I doubt it, but I’m not one to shy away from a curious circumstance.”

“If you feel you must,” Holliday said. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a card. Holliday handed it to the President. On it was printed “John Henry Holliday, D.D.S.” along with an address[2]. “Let me know what you find. I would go to Carbondale myself, but my business has been busy in the past weeks and I can’t take the time off.” Holliday flashed a bright smile at the President.

Roosevelt turned back to the others at his table. “Very well. The trek up to Carbondale is still on.” He turned to Muir. “Better mark that for all day tomorrow instead of just for the morning.”

-----

The next morning, President Roosevelt rose early to prepare for the hike ahead. He knocked heavily on Muir’s door. An incoherent mumbling responded from inside. Roosevelt shouted jovially into the room. “Get up you, the sun’s up. We’re wasting daylight!”

After a few seconds, the door opened. Muir was disheveled, his greying beard fanning out like a ruffle about his neck. “Yes, yes, give me a minute.” Muir eyed the President. He was already dressed in his khaki outfit, with his trousers tucked neatly into knee high campaign boots. Even standing still, the President’s sheer energy made him almost vibrate as if the natural forces could barely keep the president together. Muir retreated back into his room and emerged wearing a loose fitting white shirt and tan slacks. His beard had been contained in a downward direction, and he held a gnarled walking stick in his hand.

The two aides who had joined the President and Interior Secretary the day before met up with them outside the Hotel Colorado. The four men outfitted packs for the day’s trek and set off south from Glenwood Springs. They followed the right bank of the Roaring Fork River, taking advantage of the early morning shadows still cast by the bluffs to their east. A gentle slope went up from the riverbank and was dotted with scrub and sage bushes. Above them, the red iron-rich bluffs stood tall, shielding them from the sun.

The trek north to Carbondale took most of the morning. The President and John Muir kept a good clip, but the two staffers struggled to cope with the altitude and slowed them down. They finally reached Carbondale as it neared noon and the Roaring Fork split into its eastern main tributary and the Crystal River to the south. The town itself was set between the two, with wide fields and pastures covering the remainder of the shallow valley. The path from Glenwood Springs was well trodden, and Roosevelt found a number of citizens already gathered as they approached the town.

The President waved happily, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Good day to you!”

Two women in plain dark gray dresses greeted the President and his entourage in Carbondale. “Good day sir.” One of the women said in a monotone. Roosevelt eyed her strangely. “Welcome to Carbondale.” She bobbed in a brief curtsey, but the movement was awkward and stiff.

Muir and Roosevelt looked at each other. It was strange enough that neither would recognize or acknowledge the President of the United States, but the women were both oddly pale. “Ladies,” Roosevelt said removing his hat, “we come here to look into reports of a number of suspicious deaths. Do you know anything about what’s going on here?”

The women looked at each other and looked back at them. Their expressions barely changed and their eyes seemed to have glazed over. “We have not heard anything about deaths here.” One said.

“Mister Packer might know,” the other woman said. “He’s just over in the general store right now.”

“Thank you, madam.” Roosevelt nodded. The President, Muir, and the two aides started into two, but before they could take a step, a man in a tattered suit ran up to the group. “Well well, how are you all doing this fine day!” The man had a moustache and short goatee, and a pair of wild golden eyes that looked like they were about to jump right out of his head. “Miss Lucy, Miss Bella, you just run along now dears.” The two women mumbled responses and obediently shuffled off back into the town.

“Well bless my soul, if it isn’t our fine leader! My name is Alfred Packer!” He stuck out his hand. The President grabbed hit and shook it vigorously. Roosevelt winced as Packer’s long untidy fingernails dug into his wrist.

“Pleasure to meet you, Mister Packer.” Muir said as they in turn shook hands. “Who were those two ladies?”

“Packer’s eyes darted around as if he were watching an invisible fly. “Oh, they were two of my maids. Not sure why they were wandering about like that. I truly hope they didn’t cause any discomfort to you, Your Excellency.”

“No harm given,” Roosevelt said.

“Come, come, let me treat you to a meal! It’s the least I could do for you!” Packer led them quickly to the only restaurant in the sleepy mountain town.

Roosevelt leaned over to an aide as they walked and whispered. “Alexander, while we eat, go and look after those two ladies. There was something off about them, and with all that’s going on I’m concerned for them. This Packer fellow seems a bit off.” Alexander nodded and lagged behind the rest of the President’s group, before breaking off on his own.

-----

“Good morning, Alfred,” the waiter said as he walked up to their table. The waiter had a bright face that lit up even more as he noticed who Alfred’s guests were. “And a good morning to you too, Mister President! It is an honor it is to have you in our little town.” Roosevelt smiled back and nodded respectfully. “What can I get for you gentlemen?”

“Give me the biggest steak you’ve got!” The President beamed, earning a stern gaze from John Muir and pursed lips behind his long beard.

Muir turned to the waiter and spoke in an almost apologetic tone. “I will have a bowl of hominy if you please.” The waiter nodded and turned to Packer.”

Packer leaned back in his chair. “Mister Roosevelt has good taste. I’ll also have a steak.” He cast a friendly glance at Roosevelt. “But make mine as rare as you can.” The waiter nodded and left.

John Muir was sitting in between the President and Alfred Packer. He shifted in his seat. As the waiter went out of earshot, Muir finally spoke, mumbling. “I will never understand how you can eat such great creatures as you do. It’s a sacrilege is what it is.”[3]

Packer tensed, but Roosevelt jovially slapped the Interior Secretary on the shoulder. “Oh come on, Muir, lighten up. I take your advice plenty in Washington. Let me live a little while we’re here.” Muir sighed. Roosevelt winked at Packer and added, his voice booming so it could be heard around the small dining space, “Besides, I hear the steaks around here are the best in the country.” Even on vacation the President was always conscious of a chance to connect with voters without any formal meeting.

Packer chuckled. They chatted for a time until the food arrived. Roosevelt and Packer both immediately dug into their steaks, much to Muir’s chagrin and mild disgust. Packer moreso than the President ate voraciously, practically ripping at the meat. Muir eyed Packer suspiciously as he munched on the bowl of cooked hominy in front of him.

The lunch lasted another hour. Packer graciously paid for their meal and announced he had to return home. They said their goodbyes, and Muir hoped to get a chance to talk alone with the President. However, that would have to wait. Once Packer left, a line of people almost immediately formed to speak with Roosevelt. Roosevelt sighed but met everyone happily and vigorously shook any hands that were offered to him.

At last, as the sun sank below the horizon, Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir left and walked around Carbondale. The small town was almost deserted. “Did you notice anything odd about Alfred Packer?” Muir asked suspiciously as they began walking west along the bank of the Crystal River from where it flowed into the Roaring Fork.

“Oh John,” Roosevelt clasped his hands behind his back and stared at the darkening grey band of lingering sunlight that separated the horizon from the night sky. “I apologize about the steaks.”

John let out a deep breath. “No, it’s not about that. There was just something odd about that man. Did you notice if he ever used his silverware? I don’t believe I saw him touch his utensils at all, and when eating a steak! That was the most unsettling part.” Muir gulped, forcing down an unpleasant reaction in his stomach.

“Hmm, now that you mention it that is odd.” They walked on for a few minutes as Roosevelt pondered the meeting with Packer.

The night was peaceful, a nice diversion from the noise of Washington. Coyotes howled in the distance. The stream bubbled as it tumbled over the well worn rocks on its journey east. The rising moon cast visible shadows of the two men as they walked.

The peace of the night was cut short as Roosevelt’s keen eyes spotted a dark figure moving in the bushes about fifty yards ahead. “What is that?” He pointed at the figure. It looked like a particularly large dog. As they watched, it dragged a slender figure out of the brush with its teeth.

“It’s got someone!” Muir shouted. They two began running toward the two figures. The figure’s ears flickered at the sound of Roosevelt and Muir and turned its head toward them. Two golden eyes narrowed into slits and the creature dragging the body let out a loud howl.

Roosevelt and Muir continued running toward it, but it slung the body up on its back and bounded across the stream. Growling, it scrabbled up the bluff on the opposite bank. Roosevelt and Muir followed the trail of the creature for half an hour. Bits of the grey cotton dress on the body had been torn off on branches and sagebrush. Roosevelt and Muir looked at each other. “You don’t think it was one of the women that met us this morning?”

“Whoever it was we have to help them!” Roosevelt said. The thrill of the chase seemed to reinvigorate the President and Muir barely stayed with him. They followed the trail to a cabin near the edge of a bluff overlooking the Roaring Fork valley.

-----

The brush had been flattened and broke where the beast had dragged the woman’s body up to the cabin. THe moon shone bright enough for them to see clearly. Roosevelt, Muir, and Alexander crept in the sage, trying to stay out of sight until they neared the cabin.

“Mister Roosevelt!” A loud whisper made the three jump. Roosevelt turned around. In the shadow of a lone tree, his eyes could make out the slim figure that he soon recognized.

“Doctor Holliday? What are you doing here?” Holliday crouched against the tree, peering around it at the cabin.

“One of my clients had disappeared. I finally tracked them up here. I assume by your presence that you’ve found the culprit in the Carbondale murders?”

Roosevelt nodded, and sped from the sage to the tree to converse more quietly with Holliday. “A beastly creature murdered a young woman and dragged her body up to this cabin. We’re waiting to go in.”

“I see, I was afraid of this,” Holliday said somberly. “I believe I know why all these murders are occurring.”

“Oh?” Roosevelt raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. Based on the nature of the disappearances, and the bodies found with teeth marks in them and dismembered as if they were ripped open by rabid animals, I fear we may be dealing with some kind of werewolf.”

Roosevelt was taken aback. “And what makes you say this? Werewolves are a legend, a fiction!”

Holliday shook his head. “I wish they were. I worked with a man by the name of Van Helsing back in Calhoun some years ago. He clued me in on this type of thing - vampires, werewolves, and the like. They were common in Europe, but had not been seen in this country until recently.” Holliday reached into his pocket with a gloved hand and pulled out a small box. “If we are dealing with werewolves, you’ll need these.”

Holliday handed the box to the President. He opened it. The box contained a number of small bullets, each glistening in the moonlight. “Pure silver,” Holliday said, spitting next to the tree. “One thing ol’ Van Helsing taught me; that’s how you kill werewolves. Tough bastards can take most rounds aside from that.”

Roosevelt emptied his revolver. He put the old ammunition in his pocket and slotted six of Holliday’s silver bullets into the gun. He returned it to his holster. “Thanks, Doc. Now let’s go in there!”

Roosevelt led the charge into the cabin. Muir, his aide Alexander, and Doc Holliday followed behind. The path to the front door was littered with scraps of clothing that had torn off on the brambles and thorny bushes that lined the path. The President slammed the full weight of his body against the cabin door. It exploded into a mass of splinters as the President’s bulk filled the doorway.

“Stop right there, criminal scum!” The President shouted into the cabin.

The front room of the cabin also served as the living room, and in this case, the dining room. The body of the young woman lay on the center of the floor eviscerated. Alfred Packer was crouching on the floor over the woman’s body[4]. Packer looked up, his yellow eyes wide as drops of blood clung to the corners of his mouth.

Roosevelt stood wide eyed too. The cannibalism was not what gave him pause. When the concept of werewolves had sunk in, the feasting on human flesh became expected. But Roosevelt was at least expecting to see a living werewolf when he burst into the cabin. Instead, the human form of Packer threw the President off.

Alfred Packer stood up calmly. He let go of the woman’s right arm. A chunk had been torn out of it and it flopped to the ground. A moment of tense silence filled the cabin as Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Packer eyed each other. Roosevelt glanced at the body and could see it was indeed one of the women who had welcomed them. The face was disfigured, but the President guessed it was Lucy.

Packer saw the President’s distraction and sprinted to the back wall and retrieved a shotgun. The cannibal displayed almost superhuman speed, and Roosevelt had only a moment to act has Packer turned around and leveled the weapon.

“Get down, everyone!” Roosevelt shouted, taking a step back. As Muir, Holliday, and Alexander made a hasty retreat out of the cabin, Roosevelt dove into the side room as a shotgun blast peppered the wall behind him.

Roosevelt scrambled up from the floor. He was in the cabin’s kitchen now. Cups and bottles of alcohol sat along the four foot high bar separating the kitchen from the main room. In the opposite corner a wood stove burned softly. Roosevelt put his back up against the brick wall of the bar as he gathered his wits.

“You can’t escape, Mister President! I got you cornered!” As punctuation, another shotgun blast exploded and broken glass rained down on the floor in front of the President.

Muir and Holliday positioned themselves on either side of the front doorway. “What are we going to do? We need to get in there!” Muir shouted over the blast.

“Uh,” Alexander adjusted his glasses as he lifted himself off the ground. “I’ll run back to town and get the police!” Alexander began running off but Muir grabbed him by the back of his collar.

“Oh no you don’t. We need to make sure we get out of this alive, and the police won’t be much help now!”

Alexander squirmed against Muir’s grip. “Nope! I am making sure I get out of this alive. By running!” He wriggled out of Muir’s hold and bolted off down the path into the night. Muir sighed and looked at Holliday. “Remind me to tell the President to fire him when we’re done here.”

Holliday nodded toward the inside of the cabin. “Let him go. We have more important matters to attend to.” Muir nodded in agreement. “So what are we going to doi?”

Muir held up a pistol of his own and grinned like the President on a hunt. “Normally I’m for protecting wolves in their natural habitats, but in this case we can make an exception.” Muir turned and shot two rounds into the room. Packer emitted an oddly dog-like yelp as one of the shots hit his shoulder.

Muir took cover behind the doorframe again. “Hopefully we can buy enough time for the President to get out of there.

Roosevelt heard the shots and chanced reaching up to the bar. He grabbed a bottle of whiskey and pulled it down to him. The President looked at the bottle thoughtfully. He looked around the kitchen and crawled over to a shelf near the hearth. He opened it. spotted the folded rags inside, and grinned.

Another shotgun blast sent a stream of splinters through the doorway of the cabin. “We can’t just take potshots at Packer with Roosevelt pinned down!” Holliday yelled. He sucked in a breath between his teeth.

“I know, but-” Muir said but stopped. “What are you doing?” Holliday had already turned and had pulled out a knife. He ran into the hallway screaming. “Damnit Holliday!” Muir turned and watched through the door as Holliday raised the knife and leapt at Packer.

Holliday ran into the front hallway, screaming at the top of his lungs. He lifted the knife above his head as he came within two feet of Packer.

Packer swiveled and caught Holliday in the chest with his right elbow. Holliday went silent as the remainder of a breath was abruptly expelled from his lungs. THe knife fell awkwardly but still found contact with Packer’s back.

Alfred Packer turned and snarled at Holliday. “Why are you in league with this meddlesome politician? I have consumed dozens of men more powerful than you, you are foolish if you think you can stop me!” Packer knocked Holliday off of him. Holliday fell to the ground and in an instant Packer had pinned Holliday’s arms. Holliday’s eyes went wide as Alfred Packer’s eyes gleamed and a savage grin spread across Packer’s face.

Packer sunk his teeth into Holliday’s arm. Holliday uttered a curse under his breath and shouted loudly at the heavens. Muir and even Roosevelt shivered at the noise.

Packer retracted his teeth from Holliday’s arm and Doc shoved the cannibal off of him. He winced as he slowly rose to his knees.

“Doc, get away!” Roosevelt’s head popped up above the bar counter. The President waved his left arm wildly in the general direction of the front door. Holliday scrambled on his hands and knees, limping with his bitten arm.

Packer had been thrown against a wide oak beam in the main room that held the central rafters up. He was dazed from the impact but looked up. Madness coursed through his veins as his eyes darted from the President to Holliday. Suddenly, Packer whimpered as he saw the President thrust something from his right arm that looked like a bottle.

“Taste the fiery depths of Hell, foul beast!”

Roosevelt leapt over the bar and ran for the door. Packer’s eyes went wide as the bottle neared him. It was filled with whiskey and was corked with a bundle of rags. Roosevelt had set fire to the edge of the rags.

Roosevelt turned back and fired two shots from the pistol as he ran. One lodged in Packer’s chest. He screeched as the silver bullet pierced his heart.

The other missed Packer but with a stroke of luck hit the whiskey bottle in midair three inches from Packer’s face. The bottle exploded as the fire lapped up the alcohol and shards of glass from the bottle. The fire quickly spread along Packer’s alcohol-soaked body and licked at the wooden beam.

The President dashed out of the cabin and urged Holliday and Muir to follow him. As they retreated, the support beam caught fire and buckled under the heat and flame. The roof of the cabin came crashing down as a plume of flame erupted from the door and fallen roof. Roosevelt, Muir, and Packer turned once they reached a safe distance.

The President sighed and looked at his pistol. “At least we stopped him.”

Holliday nodded, clutching his arm. The teeth marks left a semicircular tear in his white cotton shirt and etched grooves into his skin. “Yes. That madman’s reign is finally ended.”

Muir looked at Holliday’s arm. “Good god man, your arm! You must find a doctor!”

Holliday held up his arm to look at it, rolling back his sleeve and breathing heavily. The marks where Packer’s teeth had sunk in had already turned a purplish red, but there was no blood on his arm or his sleeve. “It can wait until the morning. I can treat it with supplies in my bag here and give it proper treatment when we return to Glenwood Springs.”

Roosevelt and Muir looked at each other. “Are you sure?” The President eyed the bitten arm suspiciously. Holliday nodded and bent down to grab a cloth and a small bottle from his bag. Roosevelt stood over Holliday as he tended to the wound. “Then the least I can offer you is to stay in the Hotel Colorado as my guest!”

Holliday stayed squatting, rubbing the cloth on his arm. He thought for a minute before standing back up. The President extended a hand. Holliday smiled and grasped it. “Thank you, Mister President. It would be an honor.”

-----

Roosevelt awoke to a loud thump and a crash near his head. It sounded like someone in the next room had thrown a chair against the adjoining wall. The light from the moon shining through the window gave Roosevelt enough light that he could navigate to the door without igniting a lamp. He opened the door slowly. The hallway was darker. The deep maroon carpeting gave the hall a sense of foreboding. Behind him, outside the hotel, the Colorado River let out its perpetual dull roar. In the next room where he heard the crash, the President could hear movement and a fervent scratching on wood. The President in his tired state realized only too late; that was Doc Holliday's room.

Roosevelt took two hurried steps forward before the door to the room burst outward. Splinters and small chunks of the door scattered around the hall. The President shielded his eyes, but through his hands he could see the massive hulking silhouette now standing before him. Its glowing yellow eyes narrowed to slits as the President balled his hands into fists and immediately went into a fighting stance. The beast snarled at him. "Stay out of my way, Mister President! This does not concern you!"

The President's eyes went wide. The werewolf's voice was deep and growling, but beneath it he recognized the now familiar cadence in the voice. "Mr. Holliday?" Roosevelt lowered his hands slightly. "You... you're a werewolf too?"

"Yes, sir. I suppose you know my secret now. I was immune to Alfred Packer's bite because I am already a werewolf. Now you just run back to bed. I have no quarrel with you, so I'll just be on my way." Doc Holliday growled at the President. His massive canines dripped with saliva and contempt. "As I said before, these matters do not concern you."

The President brought his hands back up. "On the contrary, Doc, your reign of terror does concern me. You and your kind endanger my citizens, and I will not sit idly by while you murder good Americans in cold blood!"

Doc Holliday laughed slowly. His deepened voice and heavy breaths between each laugh was unearthly sent shivers down Roosevelt's spine. "You think you can stop me," Doc Holliday said. "With Packer and his wolves out of the way, I am unstoppable. Soon my pack will be all over these mountains! You are a fool, Theodore, if you think you can prevent me from gaining my rightful place as master of this land. You are powerful, but you are still just a mortal man. Step aside, or I will end you."

Doc Holliday dropped to all fours and snorted. The President shifted his footing to a better defensive position. The holster rubbed against his right thigh. The President stared down the three hundred pound beast in front of him and spat back one word. "Never!"

Doc Holliday snarled and charged forward toward the President. With each lunge the glass fixtures in the hallway shook violently. Roosevelt stood his ground as if he were a matador in the ring. At the last moment, the President jumped. But Holliday anticipated the President's move and barreled into the President. The two tumbled back down the hallway. Roosevelt lashed out a foot and planted his boot firmly on Holliday's stomach. Holliday grunted and stepped back, holding his gut and wincing. Roosevelt squirmed backward and rose to his feet. Still unsteady, the President reached for the pistol in his holster. Holliday charged at Roosevelt yet again as he raised the gun.

Before the President could get a shot off, though, Holliday slammed his body into the President's again. They fell backward, smashing through the window at the end of the hallway. They tumbled through the air, scratching at each other to try and direct their fall. The man and wolf hit the hot spring pool below with a loud splash. Roosevelt was the first to recover, and saw his pistol a few yards away from him in the clear, moonlit water. He kicked off of Holliday and swam to the pistol, grabbing it. The impact of the ninety degree water of the spring had startled both of them, stunning Holliday more. Roosevelt turned in the water to face Holliday. Holliday thrashed at Roosevelt, but the President was quicker on the draw as Holliday's matted fur and bulky wolf body slowed his lunge.

Underwater, the shot appeared to move as in slow motion. The silver bullet exited the pistol with a muted flash that was soon extinguished by the pool. The bullet punched through the water and hit Holliday's neck with a squelch. Holliday thrashed in the water as the pool around him turned an inky red. Roosevelt swam up, breaching the surface with a gasp. The crash had attracted members of Roosevelt's entourage to the broken window. Roosevelt swam to the edge of the pool and lifted himself out of the water. After a few minutes, Holliday went still in the pool and his lifeless body bobbed in the water. Roosevelt stood in the cool air, letting the water drip from him.

"I suppose that's settled then," Roosevelt said between heavy breaths once he noticed Muir had run to his side.

"Yes." Muir replied curtly.

"It's a shame, really. Doc Holliday was, from what I saw of him, a good man. It is too bad he succumbed to this bloodlust." Muir nodded. The President regained his breath. "At least this heinous activity has been ended and Glenwood Springs can live in peace now. With Holliday and Packer dead, the wolf packs shouldn't bother them anymore."

“Agreed.” Muir nodded. A thought popped into his head. “Oh, that reminds me, Mister President. You ought to fire Alexander for fleeing up at the cabin.”

Roosevelt grimaced. “Has he shown up since then? I don’t recall seeing him at all yesterday.” Muir shrugged.

Roosevelt and Muir went back inside to the warmth of the fire in the hotel lobby. Two days later after the Colorado and local authorities were brought in, the President ended his vacation and returned to Washington.

[1] In OTL the Hotel Colorado often hosted Roosevelt and Taft in the summers during their administrations.
[2] A lot of this is taken from bits of Doc Holliday's OTL life. One of his odd jobs as he made his way west was as a faro dealer. Holliday also lived his final days in Glenwood Springs where he hoped the springs would help cure a bout of tuberculosis. He's buried in a cemetery in Glenwood Springs.
[3] I couldn't find any definitive info on whether John Muir was a vegetarian, but he was definitely against hunting.
[4] Alferd Packer, one of the more colorful legends of Colorado history.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Next update is done!

Part One Hundred Thirty-Three: Twin Causes of Progressivism

All Created Equal:
The issue of women's suffrage had been a major issue in the United States since before the National War. While there had been few national organizations prior to the 1860s, John C. Fremont's presidency greatly boosted suffrage's prominence in the national discourse. While Fremont never made any statement of support for granting women the vote, his wife Jessie Benton Fremont was politically active during and after Fremont's presidency and advocated suffrage frequently. Jessie Fremont organized a meeting of prominent women in Washington, D.C. in 1870. In the Georgetown Conference, over two hundred women gathered to call for action on granting women the right to vote at federal and state levels. However, there was little support nearby in the Capitol for the movement at the time. Several members of Congress, mostly Democrats, made statements calling for President Fremont to keep his wife under control. President Fremont replied in support of Jessie pursuing her own independent politics, but he stopped short of giving any support to her cause. The Georgetown Conference ultimately made little headway in national women's suffrage, but its organizational efforts helped pave the way for statewide suffrage efforts.

One of the attendees of the Georgetown Conference was Frances Willard. Willard was elected president of the Women's Christian Union in 1877 following her attendance of the York Convention in 1876 and her support of the White Rose Movement[1]. She used her influence to support progressive causes such as primary education, universal suffrage, and prohibition. The Women's Christian Union became one of the primary organizations pushing the suffrage movement in its early stages. Champoeg became the first state to grant women the right to vote in 1879. Colorado and New Mexico followed in 1880 and 1882. Oregon and Kootenay had enacted women's suffrage for local elections while they were territories, and universal suffrage was enshrined in their state constitutions when they were admitted in 1891. The WCU and Willard were most influential in spreading support for universal suffrage back east. As the Women's Christian Union worked to assist immigrants upon arriving in the United States, the suffrage movement also gained support from poorer immigrant communities. With fellow WCU activist and future New England Women's Suffrage Association president Bessie Lathe Scovell[2], the WCU helped bring universal suffrage to Demoine and Marquette by the 1896 election. By 1900, Vermont, Rhode Island, Itasca, and Illinois had also adopted universal suffrage.

While women's suffrage at the state level had made significant gains in the late 19th century with the support of the White Rose Movement and the WCU, there had been little headway fro women's suffrage at a federal level. After the new century, however, that would change as the Populist and Progressive movements became entrenched in the new party system. Willard, Scovell, and others started to gain international support for the women's movement in the 1890s. After a trip to France to an international assembly of women to honor the centennial of the Convention on the Rights of Women and renew the call for women's suffrage in France, the American delegation returned with renewed vigor toward achieving the same goal in the United States. The Populist Party had included enfranchising women early in its national platform, and this continued with the Progressive Party. The Great War threatened to split the suffragist movement as pacifist activists such as Jane Addams opposed Roosevelt's overtures of support to the Alliance Carolingien. Additionally, while a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote had been introduced to Congress in 1906, the start of the Great War had sidelined the effort for the time being. As the United States entered the Great War, suffragists gained further support for the issue with speeches praising French universal suffrage while criticizing the United States for limiting the franchise similar to Great Britain. The amendment finally passed Congress in 1909, and was submitted to the states. Activists such as Addams and Scovell worked over the next year to pass the amendment in the states. The frontier states were the first to approve the amendment, and over the next three years other northern states approved the amendment. The Seventeenth Amendment was at last ratified in January of 1912 in a special session of the Missouri state legislature. President Roosevelt on his return from Vienna hailed the Seventeenth Amendment as a "significant step in American democracy", and called upon the states to have measures in place for women to vote in the 1912 elections. While the movement had ultimately succeeded, the war had created a large split in the suffrage movement. Jane Addams ran in 1912 on a National Women's Party ticket, but garnered few votes due to the lack of support from women leaders who had supported American entry in the war.


The Devil's Drink:
Along with women's suffrage, the other major progressive cause advocated by Frances Willard and the Women's Christian Union was alcohol prohibition. The origins of alcohol prohibition in the United States began in New England early in the nation's history. Neal S. Dow spearheaded the first major success for the prohibition movement in Maine, when what is now known as the Maine Liquor Law was passed in 1851. The Maine Law completely outlawed the sale of alcohol except for medicinal purposes. Within the decade, Vermont and Rhode Island had also passed similar laws[3]. After the National War, the temperance movement and prohibition expanded outside of New England.

The Women's Christian Union's support of the temperance movement was a natural synthesis of the two major demographics supporting alcohol prohibition. The first group was women. The WCU aided a perception in the late 19th century that alcohol was a moral danger to a husband's work ethic as well as the source of husbands being abusive to their spouses. This spurred a moral outcry especially among middle class women against the dangerous drink, and intertwined prohibition with advocacy for women's suffrage. It also had the effect of encouraging women to participate in politics. Aside from women, growth in evangelical Protestant organizations such as Methodists and Baptists heavily influenced the spread of prohibition around the country. Methodists, Baptists, and others saw an increase in membership during the late 19th century, mostly in rural communities. These religious groups were most popular in the rural South and preached against what they saw as a growing immorality among the urban populations, weaving in a nativist and anti-Catholic message. As Irish immigration and urbanization around cities like Cincinnati, Cairo, and Saint Louis grew, this sentiment only intensified, especially in the upper South and near West.

Outside of New England, alcohol prohibition did not gain much traction until the 1880s. The first state to join Maine, Vermont, and Rhode Island in outlawing liquor was Kearney in 1882. Neighboring Calhoun followed a year later, with support from the largely Dutch Calvinist population in the state. By 1900, Champoeg, Colorado, Itasca, Arkansaw, Chickasaw, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, and New Hampshire had also outlawed the production and consumption of alcohol. Further pushes had occurred in many other Midwestern and Southern states but had been blocked by local opposition. In Missouri, Irish and German immigration and the state's growing wine industry led to the legislature rejecting a prohibition bill in 1895 and a referendum rejecting a similar proposal in 1898. Similar legislation was defeated in Kentucky and Tennessee in the first decade of the 1900s.

At the same time as prohibition was being defeated in Missouri, Frances Willard and other temperance activists were seeking to outlaw alcohol nationally. Vice President and later President William Jennings Bryan became a fervent advocate of a prohibition amendment in the constitution, and personally gave his endorsement when one was introduced in Congress in 1900. The proposed Swallow-Volstead Amendment[4] passed the House and Senate with support not only from Republicans but from the Populists and some Southern Democrats, and the amendment was sent to the states. However, with Bryan's defeat in the 1900 election, a growing urban population turning against prohibition, and trade issues arising from the Great War, the amendment languished in the states. By 1912, only sixteen states had ratified the amendment. After the end of the Great War, there was a renewed push for passage of the Swallow-Volstead Amendment but there was also renewed opposition. In particular, Cuba Senator Emilio Bacardi of the Bacardi distillery family spoke vigorously against passage of the amendment as a looming economic disaster. Emilio Bacardi became instrumental in guiding the ultimate defeat of the amendment by authoring a deadline on state ratification. Arguing that it had already been a decade since the amendment had been proposed, the Bacardi Deadline set out two more years for the amendment to be ratified before it would be dropped and have to be passed through Congress again. Wet and Dry activists fought for that time, but the Swallow-Volstead Amendment failed sufficient ratification by 1914, and was not passed. Over the following decades, several states that had enacted prohibition repealed their laws. Notably, however, Calhoun, Vermont, and Maine have retained alcohol prohibition statewide to this day. In Missouri, the Anheuser family was one of the most vocal opponents of prohibition and helped to mobilize the German immigrant community against the measures. The brewery begun by Eberhard Anheuser and the vineyards begun by his nephew Rudolf still operate as staples of Saint Louis and east Missouri culture[5].

[1] From the last women's suffrage update here.
[2] Bessie Lathe Scovell was in OTL head of the Minnesota chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
[3] Both Maine and Vermont passed prohibition laws in the 1850s. In OTL they were repealed shortly after, but ITTL they stay.
[4] Proposed by Pennsylvania Congressman Silas Swallow and Demoine Senator Andrew Volstead.
[5] Eberhard Anheuser is of course the founder of what would become Anheuser-Busch in OTL. However, his nephew Rudolf remained in Germany in OTL and started vineyards in the Nahe wine region. In TTL, Rudolf goes with Eberhard to America, and starts vineyards in the Missouri Rhineland, and without national prohibition, the Missouri wine industry never collapses.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Next update is done! I would not be surprised if I've bungled some of the details on Catholic hierarchy and theology, so please let me know if there's anything really wrong.

Part One Hundred Thirty-Four: One Church or Two?

The Church of the Occident:
By the early 20th century, the divisions within the Catholic Church following the ouster of the Pope from Rome in 1870 had widened into an increasingly apparent separation of the two churches. Through its administration of the Bishopric of Puebla, the Puebla Papacy had entrenched itself as both a religious and political authority in Ibero America. The theological divide between the Temporal and Spiritual Catholic churches was quickly exacerbated by the geographical divide. Most European bishops remained in allegiance with the Pope in Rome, with only the extreme Integrist clergy aligning themselves with Puebla. The Church in Puebla, seeking to fill the higher ranks of the clergy, soon became more and more represented by bishops and cardinals from the Americas. This was ultimately beneficial for the Pueblan Papacy as it gained the outward support from many conservative parties in Ibero America. In 1884, the Pueblan Church de facto cemented its division with the Church in Rome. After the death of Benedict XV[1], many cardinals in the Conclave desired to select a Pope who would better reach out to the Puebla Papacy's current flock. This meant taking the extraordinary step of selecting a candidate from Ibero America. Several candidates were put forth, and conservative Ecuadorean cardinal Gabriel Garcia Moreno was elected Pope Damasus III. The name of Damasus recalled the fourth century Pope Damasus I, who fought one of the earliest struggles of balancing the temporal and spiritual powers of the Papacy against the Gallican bishops in France.

Pope Damasus III's reign last twelve years until his death in 1897. However, even after his death the Puebla Papacy continued its move toward a more independent entity. The Conclave of 1897 returned the Pueblan Papacy to an Italian. Luigi Oreglia di Santo Stefano was elected Pope Paul VI, but did not even serve five years. Paul VI died in 1902 after he succumbed to yellow fever during an outbreak in Puebla. In the first Papal Conclave of the 20th century, the Pueblan cardinals chose a more local steward to guide the Pueblan Church in its increasing administrative duties. The inability of many remaining European cardinals in the Pueblan Curia to arrive in Puebla in time for the Conclave likely helped sway the vote toward another cardinal from the Americas. Archbishop of Puebla Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza was chosen as Pope Paul VII. Paul VII's major accomplishment during his papacy was to reogranize the Pueblan Papacy's day to day administration to more fit the new reality of the Church. Paul VII created gubernatorial positions for Puebla similar to those that had existed in the Papal States, appointing governors of Tlaxcala and other cities. In 1904, Paul VII authorized a canonical coronation for the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the canonization of Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin and Brazilian friar Antonio Sant'Anna Galvao[2]. Paul VII also declared the Virgin Mary the patron saint of the Americas.

In addition to these reforms, the crowning achievement of Paul VII's Papacy was beginning the construction of a new Apostolic Palace in Puebla. Prior to its construction, the Pueblan Church had operated primarily out of Puebla Cathedral. However, Paul VII sought to create "a new house of God for a new century and a New World" and reorient the church's institutions to focus on the Americas. The centerpiece of the Apostoilc Palace complex was to be a great new cathedral. Paul VII sought out the modernist architect Antoni Gaudi from Catalonia through Gaudi's friendship with the Catalan theologian Josep Torras i Bages. Torras i Bages convinced Gaudi to come to Puebla to make his proposal for the palace. While Torras i Bages sided with Rome when the Temporal Church fled to Puebla, he remained a proponent of reconciliation between the two papacies throughout his life and stayed in contact with both Rome and Puebla. Paul VII approved the plan, and construction on the new Basilica de la Sagrada Familia began in 1909. Pope Paul VII did not live to see the construction of the first phase of the cathedral itself. However, the other buildings including the papal apartments were completed by Pope Paul VII's death in 1918. As the Pueblan Church continued to steer away from Rome, the Basilica remained under construction as Church funds were diverted to other more pressing matters. The Basilica de la Sagrada Familia was finally completed in 1966 under Pope Filippo I[3].

The Church of Rome:
With the Pueblan Catholic Church taking steps to assert its independence and authority over the Catholic clergy in Ibero America, the Roman Catholic Church sought to reconcile its loss of temporal authority. While the Temporal Catholics were fleeing to the New World, Roman Pope Pius IX was meeting with Garibaldi and Louis Napoleon to settle the matter of Papal sovereignty within the Italian state. After the meeting, an agreement of extraterrotiriality was granted to the Roman Papcy similar to the agreement the Papacy had established with the Order of Malta. The Apostolic Palace including the Papal Apartments and Saint Peter's Basilica, the Castel Sant Angelo were granted as Papal properties as were the four patriarchal basilicas. Outside of Rome, other Papal properties such as Castel Gandolfo and the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi were also granted extraterritorial status as Papal properties.

After the death of Pope Pius IX in 1881, the curia elected Carmelengo and Archbishop of Perugia Vincenzo Luigi Pecci at Pope Leo XIII. Leo XIII was one of the longest serving Popes in history, and it was during his papacy that the Roman Catholic Church made the most efforts to maintain its congregation and influence in the United States. The Plenary Councils in Baltimore were continued in the 1880s and 1890s. In the Third Plenary Council in 1884, six archbishops - Baltimore, Boston, New York, Saint Louis, New Orleans, and Havana - as well as dozens of bishops and other lower clergy. The Plenary Council, presided over by Archbishop of Baltimore James Gibbons, organized the hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church within the United States, determining the process for archbishops to recommend candidates to the Pope when a bishop's seat became vacant. The Third Plenary Council also reiterated the ownership rights regarding Church property and the importance of Catholic schooling in the United States at all levels of education. On Catholic schooling in particular, the need for a Catholic university in the United States was expressed[4]. Separately from the council, John Ireland, then Bishop of Saint Paul of Itasca and later elevated to archbishop along with the diocese, spoke in favor of establishing parochial schools for Catholics of all races in the country. This was part of Ireland's progressive leanings as a bishop as well as a way to evangelize in the United States.

The most important development out of the 1884 Plenary Council and another council in Baltimore in 1896 was the resolution of the theological controversy surrounding American priest Isaac Hecker. Hecker founded the Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle, which organized missions to convert non-Catholics throughout the United States. The Paulists as they became known spread Catholic doctrine but placed a more American emphasis on the faith and action of the individual worshiper rather than the authority of the Pope[5]. This message resonated well with many Americans, but also spread to France in the 1880s and 1890s. Hecker died in 1886, but his teachings spread in the next decade to a Europe where clericalism was increasingly viewed with disdain. In a theological debate known as the Americanist controversy[6], Pope Leo XIII at first seemed to endorse Hecker's ideas. In 1890, the Pope called upon French Catholics to swear loyalty to the French republic even as anticlerical policies were being passed in France. However, as French priests embraced Hecker's teachings and began spreading the idea of updating Catholic doctrine for the modern era with a closer relationship between priests and parishioners. Leo XIII became concerned over the growing popularity of the Americanist thought after a French translation of Hecker's memoirs was seen as endorsing separation of church and state. He summoned Archbishop Gibbons and several French priests to Rome to discuss the matter. In 1899, Leo XIII issued a surprising encyclical supporting many aspects of Americanism, including more Church support of social projects and expanding Catholic schools to include secular subjects and permit non-theologians to attend. Leo did not go so far as to endorse the separation of church and state, but in light of the recent schism, Leo XIII strayed from any language that would potentially drive the Americanist thinkers further from the Church.

The resolution of the Americanist controversy and the reconciliation of modernist American and French thinkers with Rome had a widespread effect on the Roman Catholic Church's relations with other governments. While Pius IX and early on Leo XIII had decried movements in Germany by Bismarck and Naumann to lessen the influence of the Catholic Church in the political sphere, Leo XIII later sent emissaries to Berlin to attempt to reconcile with the German state. However, Naumann was a staunch liberal and kept many of Bismarck's anticlerical measures in place. The pseudofederal structure assisted the Church's efforts, however, and they found a more receptive audience in the Kingdom of Bavaria. Karl Lueger and the Christian Democratic Party encouraged the effective nullification of many anticlerical laws in Bavaria. While the more liberal reaction to Catholicism faced a backlash in Germany, it was more receptive among English Catholics. The mass deportations of the Irish through the latter 19th century created a culture of mistrust of the conservatism in the English government, and many Catholics embraced the more spiritual turn of Leo's Papacy. In particular, writer and philosopher G. K. Chesterton praised the Roman Church and Leo XIII for moving toward a less stringent church hierarchy that connected more with the people. Chesterton also used his praises of the Roman Catholic Church to attack the state of post-Great War Britain. With the loss of temporal power over the Papal States, Chesterton extrapolated and supposed that "perhaps this decoupling of Church power and State power should likewise be adopted in England. If the Pope and Italy can live side by side in Rome, surely the Head of the Church of England and the Head of the British government can do that same." This jab at the English monarchy led to a government investigation of Chesterton, but it did not yield any results for the government. However, Chesterton's call did find many supporters among a war-weary population. In particular, it attracted the attention of John Maynard Keynes, recently elected to Parliament on the new Party for the Common Wealth for the Cambridge university constituency.

[1] Benedict XV is Luigi Bilio.
[2] In OTL, Juan Diego was not canonized until 2002 and Frei Galvao until 2007.
[3] Filippo I is the Papal name of Charles Coughlin, after Filippo Neri. I forget why I chose this name for him and can't find the connection I'd made, but I think it was Neri founded an order that Coughlin was in?
[4] Most of these were OTL decrees during the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore.
[5] A lot of this is from Isaac Hecker's OTL life and beliefs, which the core of Americanism was derived from.
[6] Without the publication of Testem benevolentiae nostrae, Americanism isn't really considered a heresy in TTL.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Next update is done finally! This update is a couple sections I wanted to include in previous updates but couldn't quite figure out how to fit them in.

Part One Hundred Thirty-Five: Progressive Era Miscellany

Canadian Progressivism and the Quebecois Awakening:
As the progressive issues of women's suffrage and alcohol prohibition surged into the national forefront in the United States, so too did these issues become subject to debate to the north in Canada. Also as in the UniteD States, both movements were spearheaded by women's Christian groups. The most prominent progressive movement in all the Laurentian states was led by Edith Archibald of Newfoundland. Archibald was first active in her birthplace of Newfoundland and in Acadia where she lived in Halifax for much of her life. It was in Halifax that Edith Archibald became a founding member of the Laurentine branch of the Women's Christian Union in 1885. For several years, Archibald and the Women's Christian Union worked to promote women's suffrage and temperance in homes throughout Acadia and the isle of Newfoundland. While the issue was soon met with sharp criticism from the British consul in Newfoundland, it gained popularity in Acadia and nearby, and by the end of the century Women's Christian Union chapters were opening up in Canada in Montreal, Kingston, and Toronto.

As in the United States, the Canadian progressive movement was boosted by the arrival of the Great War on the North American continent. The Great War had two two large impacts on the success of the women's suffrage movement in Canada. First, the conscription of men into the militay during the Great War opened up the need and opportunity for women to participate in the economy more, including in more traditionally male factory jobs. Secondly and interestingly, the Great War brought Frederick William Borden and his cousin Robert Borden into the political spotlight. The Bordens had long lived in Acadia, but moved to Ontario shortly after the Irish diaspora. Frederick William returned to Halifax as a military surgeon and officer in the Royal Army of North America, and by 1899 was appointed Canadian Minister of Defence under the Liberal government of Edward Blake. Borden's ministry only lasted until 1905, but his modernization efforts of the Canadian military is often cited as the single most important reason the British dominions resisted the American invasion in the Great War as well as it did. During the war itself, Frederick William Borden returned to Acadia and led the defence of Halifax through the war. Afterward, he returned to Canada and contributed to Robert Borden's election to Prime Minister in 1911. The Borden wing of the Liberal Party rose to prominence as a more progressive wing of Canadian politics, supporting both the causes of women's suffrage and aclohol prohibition that had grown in support in Ontario and Montreal.

At a provincial level, alcohol prohibition had been enacted as a wartime measure in Ontario in 1909 by the province's Liberal government and remained in force following the end of the Great War. Soon after the election of Robert Borden as Prime Minister, Canada was considering prohibtiion on a national level. The effort for both the provincial measure in Ontario and the national campaign for prohibition were led by the fiery Liberal MP and former Methodist minister Hartley Dewart. Dewart's campaign in Canada led to a national referendum on prohibition being held in 1913. The vote was very controversial, being opposed by the Conservative Party as well as the largely Catholic population of the province of Quebec. However, despite the opposition, it gained substantial support in Ontario and Ojibwa[1] and passed with a vote of 56.2% to 43.8%. While the Liberal Party won the ensuing election in 1914 and Borden pushed women's suffrage through by the end of the decade, the passage of prohibition only deepened divisions within the country between Quebec and the rest of Canada. The French speaking, Catholic province frequently found itself on losing side of legislation.

This discontent with Kingston quickly found a home in the form of the Mouvement pour Quebec party led by Henri Bourassa and Lionel Groulx[2]. The Mouvement's main effort was to "awaken the identity of Quebec", promoting a separate French-Canadian identity through French education in Quebecois schools and appealing to the more conservative and rural farmers in the province. Groulx's influence in the party is primarily seen in the push against the anti-clerical policies enacted by Borden's Liberals. Groulx himself was a Pueblan Catholic by 1916 when the Mouvement was founded, and led proselytizing efforts to bring the majority of the Quebecois clergy under the influence of Puebla. Groulx found support from other Catholics in the province such as Joseph-Napoleon Francoeur, who railed against Prohibition and the perceived anti-French tilt of the nationally dominant Liberal Party. Another early prominent member of the Mouvement was Louis-Alexandre Tascherau, but Tascherau's support was more reluctant. Tascherau was not a member of the Mouvement, but begrudgingly supported the awakening as an opposition to the Liberal protectionism. Louis-Alexandre Tascherau had left the Liberals after Borden became leader as Borden returned to a policy of tariff reciprocity with the United States, raising tariffs following Canada's defeat in the Great War. Tascherau opposed the clericalism espoused by the Mouvement which hampered any attempts to convince the Independent Liberal Tascherau to join the party[3]. However, Tascherau supported French-Canadian nationalism and saw independence for Quebec as moving Quebec toward freer trade and a closer relationship with the United States, which Tascherau saw as vital for Quebec's economy. These divisions in Canada following the Great War would dictate American policy toward Canada. Over the following two decades, tensions in Canada escalated while Washington debated what America's foreign policy toward its neighbors should be.


L. Frank Baum's Mary Louise:
The suffragist movement in the United States saw a flourishing of literature surrounding women in the early 1900s. During the American involvement in the Great War, many women gained temporary employment in traditional male positions as the United States moved to a war footing and many working age men signed up to fight on the front line. Women authors such as Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe had gained some notoriety in the 19th century, but American literature written by women did not gain real traction until the 20th century.

Aside from female authors, a growing number of American novelists around the turn of the century became supporters of women's suffrage and wroter ground breaking works with a more liberated portrayal of women. One of the more prominent authors in this respect is, somewhat amusingly, L. Frank Baum. His most remembered works, the Mary Louise series of novels, were written primarily for children, but the series of children's detective stories did play a role in changing the view of women. As a series aimed at children, the Mary Louise novels had the most impact on the generation growing up in the 1910s rather than his own generation. Baum was politically active in fighting for universal surrage both in the Finger Lakes region of New York where he spent his early life and in Pembina, where he edited the Aberdeen Pioneer newspaper.

The Mary Louise series of books were originally written as stories for his two daughters Joslyn and Matilda. The title charcter, Mary Louise Brewster, is named after one of L. Frank Baum's sisters, and the series of novels features the child detective Mary Louise investigating crimes and solving mysteries[4]. In the first book in the Mary Louise series, fifteen year old boarding school student Mary Louise Brewster discovers that her grandfather has been accused of treason against the United States for alleged actions aiding the Canadians in the Great War. Mary Louise looks into the allegations with the assistance of Emma Van Dyne, the daughter of a New York City detective who was trained to be an investigator by her father. The two heroines eventually prove Mary Louise's grandfather innocent[5]. This first book followed previous themes of young girls and women in more independent roles in previous books written by Baum, but the two independent young heroines took off and quickly became a best seller among teenage girls of the early 20th century.

The first novel in the Mary Louise series was published in 1910. Baum, wishing to capitalize on the success of the Mary Louise books and the increasingly prominent debate over the role of women in society after the Great War, published twelve more books featuring Mary Louise Brewster and Emma Van Dyne over the next fifteen years. In later books, the two girls traveled around the country with Mary Louise's grandfather and Emma's father. These later books featured not only independent working women as the two heroines aged, but also touched upon other pertinent issues of the time. In Mary Louise in Red Feather Lake, Mary Louise makes a case for an Indian in Pembina to be granted birthright citizenship. This was heavily drawn from Baum's own life experiences running a newspaper in southern Pembina. However, while the books were ahead of their time for their portrayal of women, there were some parts that show Baum still had to acquiesce to publishers' more conservative demands. This is most evident in the last book, Emma Van Dyne Meets Her Match, where Emma at the age of twenty-four meets and marries a man by the end of the book. Baum in private letters expressed dissatisfaction with this conclusion, having wanted Emma Van Dyne to remain single and independent. Even so, Baum's novels and others were an inspiration for a generation of women growing up and reaching adulthood at a time when women were increasingly entering the economy and had just gained the right to vote.

[1] Ojibwa is a Canadian province ITTL consisting of OTL northwestern Ontario north of Lake Superior and south of the Albany River
[2] Lionel Groulx eventually rose through the Pueblan Church ranks and would later be elected Pope Gregory XVIII
[3] I wanted to have Tascherau be supportive of Quebec nationalism ITTL, but realized he wouldn't be a good fit with the Mouvement pour Quebec with the circumstances of its founding here.
[4] The series is loosely based on Baum's OTL series THe Bluebird Books.
[5] This is a clsoe summary to the OTL first in the Bluebird books.

 

[wilcoxchar]

I've actually been on a good roll lately with my writing and got another update done already!

Part One Hundred Thirty-Six: La Mort De Deux Rois

Queen Victoria’s Death and the Albertan Era:
By far, 19th century Britain can be defined as an era by one person: Queen Victoria. THe queen, the longest reigning monarch in the history of the United Kingdom, reigned for over 73 years from 1837 to 1911. Victoria's legacy in Britain was extremely mixed. Positive views of Queen Victoria still remain confined to much of the late aristocracy. The Queen is viewed as a stabilizing force against the popular discontent among the middle and lower classes during the 19th century and consolidated the United Kingdom's hold on her colonial possessions in India, Australasia, and Africa. On the other hand, Britain's loss of the European Wars and the Great War cast a shadow over her later reign, though Queen Victoria was not as directly interested with parliamentary and military matters during this time as in her earlier reign of Albert I's reign after her.

Upon Queen Victoria's death, Albert Edward, Victoria's eldest son, succeeded her as King Albert I[1]. Albert had been more involved in politics as his mother while Prince of Wales, and unlike much of the Lords, Albert was open to increasing enfranchisement of the people. In the aftermath of the British loss in the Great War, tensions between the people and the government escalated as the war showed its true cost in lives, money, and British standing on the international stage. Albert I's reign was brief, barely lasting a few years due to the king's heavy smoking habit and other frequent health issues[2]. However, Albert's reign is notable for the election of 1912 and the crisis over the People's Budget. The 1912 election, following the resignation of the unpopular Lord Curzon in the wake of the Peace of Vienna, saw a drastic swing away from the Conservative Party. The Conservatives had been the dominant party throughout Victoria's reign, but a large swing toward expanding suffrage as calls for reform grew created a political groundswell that ended the party's political dominance. The first significant Liberal government in decades was ushered in in 1913 under Prime Minister Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Lord Landsowne.

Of course, calling it the Landsowne government is a bit of a misnomer. Lord Landsowne had won a contentious leadership battle within the Liberal Party shortly before his election as Prime Minister, and he was seen as divisive due to his stepping back from the Liberals' free trade policy. Landsowne ended up building a coalition of staunch Nationalists from both parties and was elected with a significant dissent within the Liberal Party and significant support from the Conservatives. He frequently clashed with Albert I over trade issues, although the one thing the Prime Minister and the King agreed upon was the need to extend suffrage to some of the lower classes. Parliament passed the Reform Act of 1914 which repealed the land ownership requirement for eligibility to vote in parliamentary elections. However, other events would cause both Albert I and Lord Landsowne's time in power to be cut short. The increased franchise made many Liberals as well as members of more radical parties itching to cause another general election. In 1915, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George proposed what became known as the People's Budget that would have vastly increased spending on social programs for the poor paid for by rising taxes on property and other taxes designed to tax the wealthy[3]. Lord Landsowne expressed opposition to the budget and originally intended to use its failure to discredit Lloyd George, who many believed was preparing for another challenge to Landsowne’s leadership of the Liberal Party. Landsowne acknowledged Lloyd George’s competence as Chancellor, but scoffed at the possibility of Lloyd George challenging the established tradition of a Prime Minister coming from the House of Lords. However, the House of Commons passed the People's Budget, undermining his leadership of the Liberal Party. Landsowne was able to garner support from Conservatives and Unionists in the House of Lords to enact the Lords veto of the budget. This led to a constitutional crisis as King Albert I openly encouraged the Lords to pass the People's Budget, but Landsowne and his supporters in the Lords held fast and refused. Amid the arguments over the budget, attacks on the Lords as a whole and Landsowne in particular became frequent in the Commons. Lloyd George resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer with a scathing speech denouncing the House of Lords, and Albert I began to turn against the Liberals in the Commons as their rhetoric became worse. Albert I notably commented on the division within parliament by introducing his son, the future King Albert II, to then Secretary of State for War Viscount Haldane as "the last king of England."[4] This comment would be more prophetic than Albert I could have foreseen.

King Albert I's reign would last only a few years. Albert I had a dreadful smoking habit, often smoking up to a dozen cigars every day. In his later years, he frequently suffered from severe bronchitis and in the final months of his reign was absent from public functions for fear of complications. Albert objected to his retreat away from public life. On March 15, 1917, King Albert I made his final public appearance. It was a brief speech to a large gathered crowd in Buckingham Palace. Even at this stage and with his health problems becoming too difficult to hide, Albert I made fiery statements decrying the political polarization of the era, and called for the Lords to act more in accordance with the will of the people. A month later on April 28, 1917, Albert I died in his bed. His eldest son Albert Victor was coronated a week later as King Albert II.

Albert II was very much the opposite of his father and shied away from much of political and public life. Albert II as Prince Albert Victor had already endured the ire of the press before his coronation, with his mental health and sexuality frequently being questioned by the then prince's opponents in parliament and the press. Many expected these allegations to cease after his coronation, but they did not. Albert II may have been reticent and rare in public life, but when he did enter himself into an issue he did so with just as much vigor as his father. In a time of revolutionary advances in communication and media, this was often construed as Albert II being an arbitrary ruler, and the propaganda from both his detractors on political issues and from British republicans in general only intensified. Tabloid press and radio programs accused King Albert II of being a homosexual, of fathering a child out of wedlock by a Margery Haddon during his youth while on a tour of India, of being a puppet of his younger brother Prince George Duke of York, among other nefarious claims. These have been investigated by scholars since, but none of the more serious claims against Albert II appear to have any evidence to them. The king's quiet demeanor and difficulty in his early education are often explained by pointing to a statement by one of the king's early instructors that he learned best through listening rather than through reading or writing instruction[5].

In a more prosperous time for Britain, Albert II's troubles during his reign might have amounted to little in the grand scheme of things. But the decades after the Great War were very difficult for Britain. With the conditions imposed on Britain as part of the Peace of Vienna, even at peace Britain's participation in international trade was greatly diminished. France, Germany, and the United States gladly kept high tariffs on British goods, and the Unionists in Lord Landsowne and Neville Chamberlain reciprocated those tariffs in kind. Despite these attempts to stabilize British trade, the restrictions on British trade outside of the colonies continued to hurt the country domestically. The value of the pound fell greatly relative to other currencies. Policies instituting rationing of food and other goods that had been instituted during the Great War, while reduced afterward, remained in place for several years afterward, and hyperinflation drastically stunted any hope of a British economic recovery.

Amidst this, growing discontent among the populace for both the current political system and for the monarchy allowed fringe elements to gain popularity. A strong Labour Party upended the system after the 1918 general election. Labour surged to the third most seats in the party on the backs of wealthy voters in smaller towns and mining regions who held sympathy for the working classes. However, it would be the urban revolutionary elements to ultimately break the stagnant British system. John Maynard Keynes, a vaunted Cambridge economist, had been elected to Parliament from the university constituency in Cambridge as a member of the quickly growing Party for the Common Wealth. Keynes used his economic expertise to argue against the government in the Commons and to publish academic treatises that spread his economic ideas of direct government stimulus for the country's struggling economy. After a time, Keynes' advocacy of more direct government interference and management of the national economy became an advocacy for his own rise to the top of the government as the best man for the job[6]. In 1928, everything came to a boil when a general election produced a hung parliament. Labour and the Party of the Common Wealth attempted to form a coalition as the second and third largest parties in Parliament. However, in one of the few direct entrances of King Albert II into political affairs, the king rejected the appointment and instead asked the Unionist Party as the largest party in Parliament to form a minority government. This was the final straw for many Britons, as riots broke out in struggling port and industrial towns such as Liverpool and Birmingham. John Maynard Keynes and the Party for the Common Wealth quickly rose to the banner of these rioters. With little sympathy for the British government abroad, the brief British Civil War was a largely internal affair, though France and the United States subtly backed the anti-government forces. The civil war lasted three years, but ultimately Keynes emerged victorious and Albert II and other members of the royal family fled to Denmark. What remained of Britain's colonies were granted full independence shortly after Keynes' rise to power as the economist deemed they could handle their own affairs while he fully focused on restoring Great Britain.


King Alfonso XIII's Death and the Third Carlist War:
The conclusion of the Great War also brought about great turmoil in the kingdom of Spain, again through the death of a monarch. Spanish politics had already been through a massive upheaval from the Peace of Vienna. France had established buffers in the independent states of Euskara, Catalunya, and Valencia. The kingdom of Spain was further torn asunder with the declaration of the Spanish Federative Republic in the south of Spain. The recognition of the Spanish Federative Republic led to a remarkable backlash against Alfonso XIII and the Cortes as the kingdom of Spain attempted to recover from its loss in the war. The already unstable political situation in the kingdom would soon be exacerbated as the outrage against Alfonso XIII hit its peak. On June 28, 1914, King Alfonso XIII was traveling in a procession down the Calle Mayor in Madrid. As the carriage containing the king passed a corner, anarchist Mateu Morral threw a bomb at the royal carriage. The bomb exploded underneath, throwing and overturning the carriage as the horses ran out of control. Alfonso was thrown against the side and, along with direct injuries from the explosion, received a fatal wound to the head. Morral was executed by the Cortes soon after, but the lasting damage to the Spanish monarchy was done. Morral, a Catalan who had moved to Madrid shortly before the outbreak of the Great War, was the member of an anarchist group, but some propagandists took advantage of the situation to proclaim the necessity of restoring the kingdom's hegemony over the Iberian Peninsula. This ultranationslist sentiment combined with the ascension of the six year old Jaime I[7] led to one group rising above all others; the Carlists.

The Carlist faction had been dormant since their brief but unsuccessful attempt to prevent the coronation of Alfonso XII in 1872. However, they remained influential among the conservatives within the Spanish government. During the era of the Carlist claimant Carlos VII, the electoral wing of the Carlist faction had sustained strength in the Cortes under the leadership of the Nocedal dynasty. Claudio Nocedal and his son Ramon led a nationalist conservative party in the Spanish Cortes. The Nocedal family led the Partida Nacional Tradicionalista gained a significant following in northern Spain in the decades following the European Wars. During the reigns of Alfonso XII and Alfonso XIII, however, Carlism remained for the most part peaceful. The Partida Nacional Tradicionalista regularly gained a dozen or more seats in the Cortes, but mainly acted in support of mainstream conservatism of the era. The only major difference in policy from the Partido Conservador during this time was the continued call to restore the Pueblan Pope in Europe and have the Catholic authorities in Spain break with the Church in Rome. This was ultimately a failure, but gained the Carlists substantial influence in the more rural areas of northern Spain.

During the life of Carlos VII, the Carlist royal line lived in Ljubljana and later London. His son, claimant Jaime III[8], was educated in London and then in the 1890s received a commission in the Russian army. Jaime III served in Odessa and later Warsaw, even seeing combat on the Russian front during the beginning of the Great War. Upon his father's death, Jaime III ended his service in the Russian army and returned to London. When the Treaty of Saint-Denis was signed, Jaime and Carlist politicians started to build up a column of support within Spain and abroad. Jaime published a series of widely distributed articles with scathing attacks on the Alfonsine monarchy for their supposed role in Spain's loss in the Great War. Even through the Peace of Vienna and the Cantonalist secession, Carlist politicians decried the humiliation that Alfonso XIII had brought upon Spain with the Treaty of Saint-Denis as a final nail in the coffin for the Spanish Empire. When Mateu Morral assassinated Alfonso XIII and Jaime I's mother Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg became regent, the Carlists made their move.

Ramon Nocedal may have died in 1904, but the Great War had kept the political wing of the Carlist supporters invigorated and with a large presence in the Cortes. By 1914, the recognition of the Federative Republic's independence had greatly increased the Carlist representation in the Cortes through their strongholds. Cantabria, Galicia, and northern areas of Old Castile consistently elected members of the Partida Nacional Tradicionalista through the 1900s and 1910s. When Jaime I ascended to the Spanish throne, Jaime III (then styled Duke of Madrid) made his move. With a base of support in the north, the Carlist Jaime landed at Suances in Cantabria at the beginning of August of 1914. As word of his return to Spain spread through the Carlist network, the members of the PNT in the Cortes denounced Victoria Eugenia as a pawn of Germany and called for the abdication of Jaime I in favor of Jaime Duke of Madrid. When the grievances aired publicly and Victoria Eugenia refused on behalf of her son, the Carlists rose up against the already battered Spanish government. The Third Carlist War, also known as the War of the Two Jaimes, had begun.

The populace, already angry at the monarchy for the Peace of Vienna and wanting a return to stability, saw the majority of support garnered by Jaime Duke of Madrid and largely supported him over Jaime I. From his base in Santander and Cantabria, Jaime Duke of Madrid used his military means gained from the war in Russia to gather a popular army in a March on Madrid. Jaime Duke of Madrid quickly overran Torrelavega and snuck his army through the mountains to march on Burgos. In Madrid, Carlist sympathizer Juan Vázquez de Mella garnered political support and relayed propaganda throughout the Spanish kingdom to assist the Carlist coup. De Mella had a powerful position in the Cortes, and combined with monetary support from the Carlist Jaime's ties to Russia and to Puebla, support quickly grew for the Carlist side in the war. As Jaime Duke of Madrid led his supporters to a victory over the government force in Burgos and a simultaneous capture of territory was undertaken by Carlists in Galicia, popular support for the Carlists swelled. De Mella gathered pictures of Jaime Duke of Madrid speaking to the soldiers now under his command and published them, lauding Duke Jaime as fighting for his countrymen while Victoria Eugenia and Infante Jaime cowered in Madrid. The tide quickly turned in favor of the Carlists, and by the summer of 1915 Duke Jaime was nearing Madrid. Victoria and Infante Jaime fled the country to Portugal, while Jaime Duke of Madrid was installed as King Jaime III of Spain on August 7, 1915. Juan Vazquez de Mella was elected the Prime Minister of Spain, but with the struggle of governing a weary nation much of the more reactionary aims of the Carlists remained unfulfilled as the more pressing matters of Spain’s governance took precedence.

[1] Albert Edward is OTL Edward VII. He chose Edward as his regnal name in OTL to not undervalue the name of his father Prince Albert. With Prince Albert living longer, there isn’t that motivation to choose Edward.
[2] As in OTL, Albert Edward is a heavy smoker and suffers from increasingly common bouts of bronchitis in his later years.
[3] This is similar to what was also called the People’s Budget in OTL in 1909.
[4] An OTL quote by Edward VII during the People’s Budget crisis, also to Lord Haldane.
[5] The accusations against Albert Victor and the remark about the prince being an auditory learner are all taken from OTL. Also, in TTL he does not die of tuberculosis in 1892.
[6] Here I have Keynes taking the leap from “the government needs to manage the economy” to “I should manage the economy”
[7] Jaime I is OTL Infante Jaime, Duke of Segovia, Alfonso XIII’s second son.
[8] Jaime III is OTL Jaime Duke of Madrid, the Carlist claimant from 1909 to 1931. He is numbered Jaime III because the Carlists include the monarchs of Aragon in their title numbering.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Finally got the 1910 census update finished!

Part One Hundred Thirty-Seven: The Great War Census

The 1910 Census:
In the first decade of the 20th century, the United States was still in flux as a nation. The country was still urbanizing rapidly as the industrial economy continued to outpace the growth of agriculture in many of the Northern states. This was greatly reflected in the 1910 census, as New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri, and other industrial states continued to grow at a larger rate than much of the rest of the country. The biggest milestone of the census, however, was in the national figure. In 1910, for the first time, the population of the United States as a whole surpassed one hundred million people. At the time, the total population of the country as recorded by the census was 103,867,000.

While these states did grow, New York grew at a noticeably slower rate than the other major industrial states. The Great War had a large part to play in this, as it did in the reported population of many other states that bordered British North America. The war had diverted some potential routes for immigrants away from the northernmost states as they became fronts on the war between the United States and Great Britain. However, this was not the only reason in New York's case. For the Empire State, the changing economic landscape of the county also played a significant role. With railroads having thoroughly supplanted rivers and canals as the primary means of transporting goods, the Erie Canal saw its importance decline. Coupled with the tensions along the Great Lakes, cities such as Syracuse and Rochester that had boomed during the height of the Erie Canal's traffic began to stagnate and decline in the early 20th century. New York City, Brooklyn, and Long Island continued to grow steadily through inertia as the largest urban area in the country. However, the 1890s and 1900s would be the peak of the Brooklyn-NYC area's growth. Economic activity continued to move south to better rail-connected ports such as Philadelphia and Baltimore, and a significant portion of exports from the Old Northwest and Great Plains would go through those ports and the Gulf of Mexico in future decades. As such, New York perhaps passed its height of economic importance with the 1910 census. Though the twin cities of New York and Brooklyn would continue to grow in population for another half century, the rate of growth of the population in that region would enter a steady decline after 1910.

The greatest focus when examining the 1910 census, however, is the impact the Great War had on its conduct and results. This was the first national census in the United States conducted during serious wartime. With the largest threat to the United States coming from its northern border during the Great War, the census of those states that bordered the more populated regions of British North America are believed to have been undercounted during this census. This certainly was the belief at the time following the Great War, and is the commonly held belief by population historians now. Stories of census workers avoiding towns sitting close to the border for fear of British raids, plus the American territorial gains in the Great War, created a controversy when it came time to apportion the seats in the House of Representatives and the electoral votes to each state.

The underreporting of the population on the northern border would certainly explain some apparent oddities that showed up in the 1910 census. For instance, Colorado with its 1.22 million people had supposedly surpassed both Itasca and Marquette in population in 1910. It is clear that the silver rush had led to a boom in Colorado's population, coupled with the state being the western edge of the more southerly railroads in the United States until the acquisition of California. However, there is a healthy skepticism as to the figures for the populations of Itasca and Marquette as reported by the 1910 census. Surely, the boom in iron and copper in that region in the two decades previously produced a similar population boom as the silver rush in Colorado had. The numbers for both states, hovering just above 1.1 million, produced complaints by politicians from those two states to Congress almost as soon as they were reported. The figures do seem small, especially as the census showed neighboring Demoine as having 1.47 million people when all three states had been roughly equal populations the decade prior. Frank Kellogg, attorney general of Itasca at the time, brought a case against the Census Bureau for alleged underrepresentation in 1912 following the end of the Great War. Itasca believed that the 1910 Census had undercounted Itasca's population by enough that the state deserved one more representative in the House and one more vote in the electoral college. Ultimately the case did not affect the 1912 election as the Supreme Court ruled in 1913 that the issue was a political matter and non-justiciable. Kellogg ended up bringing up the issue again in 1914, having been elected Senator from Itasca in 1912. During his term as Senator, Kellogg and other Congressmen from border states pushed legislation through to hold a special mid-decade Census to correct the population count. It would also account for the addition of the territory annexed from Great Britain during the war. This change to the census was coupled with an increase in the size of the House of Representatives, which also had not occurred in the aftermath of the census of 1910 due to the bickering among Congress as to the appropriate size of the chamber.

While the northern border states saw questionable growth during the first decade of the 20th century, the Mid-Atlantic and the states along the Ohio saw a continuation of the previous decade's growth. The reorientation of trade to the Confluence area and to harbors further south on the Atlantic seaboard continued as the Great War was fought further north benefiting the states in the middle of the country. Cities such as Baltimore, Saint Louis, and Cairo saw increased commercial opportunities as the mining and forestry industries further north continued the flow of natural resources to them. The Great War also saw a boom in manufacturing in these cities as the United States ramped up its war production.

In addition to the growth of the "Middle American" cities as the cities between the 38th and 40th parallel began to be known[1], the states further west also benefited from the growth of the United States in the early 20th century. The profitable logging and mining industries in the northwest led to massive growth in Oregon, Kootenay, and Champoeg during this time as settlers from back east flocked to the Pacific coastal states. While they were on the border with British North America and California, the front in terms of the American side of the border was relatively quiet compared to the rest of the Great War. Washington experienced a brief decline in population due to the fear of more British raids. However, the other northwestern states continued to experience a flood of settlement and many cities in the region saw a doubling or tripling of the population between 1900 and 1910. Similarly, Colorado continued to grow quickly despite the war with California and the decline of the silver boom. Many mining towns switched to more utilitarian operations producing coal, lead, and nickel and their supply centers in the foothills saw a rejuvenated economic boom as these goods were sent east to help with the industrial war economy.

[1] I'm not quite happy with this name for the region, but I couldn't think of anything better.

-----

And as a bonus, here's the list of United States cities over 500,000 people in 1910. Notably, New York City has surpassed two million people and Boston has dropped out of the ten largest cities. Boston has been replaced by Louisville, KY which is benefiting from the shifting economy.

1.  New York, NY      2,117,053
2.  Philadelphia, PA  1,677,391
3.  Brooklyn, NY      1,525,840
4.  Chicago, IL       1,381,524
5.  Saint Louis, MO     953,969
6.  Baltimore, MD       882,115
7.  New Orleans, LA     667,333
8.  Indianapolis, IN    695,276
9.  Havana, CU          612,275
10. Louisville, KY      564,014
11. Boston, MA          541,923
12. Cleveland, OH       527,587
13. Pittsburgh, PA      507,352

 

[wilcoxchar]

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.

 

[wilcoxchar]

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.

 

[wilcoxchar]

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.

 

[wilcoxchar]

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.

 

[wilcoxchar]

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.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Because I still wanted to end the timeline officially before the end of the year, the post-election update I had planned will be done later as the start of the epilogue. So this 1912 election will be the last one of the main part of the timeline.

And by my count it's still before midnight. (thanks Mountain timezone!) So without further ado, here is the FINAL update of Union and Liberty!

Part One Hundred Forty-Three: The 1912 Presidential Election

Congress and Kongress:
The armistice and the Peace of Vienna dominated a large part of the general campaign in the 1912 election. Congress had ratified the treaties made at the Vienna Peace Conference easily enough. However, ratifying the American entry into the Weltknogress was another matter. President Roosevelt had returned home from Europe to campaign for Beveridge and to push hard for the ratification of the Weltkongress during the final year of his term. After Roosevelt had announced he would not run for reelection, Theodore Roosevelt started to see making the United States a founding member of the Weltkongress the ultimate act of his historical legacy. To this end, Roosevelt instructed many of the attendees of the Vienna Peace Conference campaigning around the country to build popular and congressional support for the international body.

Broadly speaking, the Progressive Party and a significant amount of the Democratic Party was in support of the Weltknogress. Many Progressives supported the entry into the Weltkongress for idealistic reasons of reducing war through dialogue between nations and encouraging peaceful solutions to disputes. Even those who did not subscribe to what would become the liberalist school of international relations believed the United States could secure the imperial ambitions of President Roosevelt and America's position as a great power through its actions and potential mediation of other countries' disputes in the Weltkongress. The support among the Democrats took primarily the same view of that latter group of Progressives. With the concentration of support in the South, Democratic Representatives and Senators often declared support for the Weltkongress as a means to secure American interests in the Caribbean and protect the lucrative trade routes from violation of the Monroe Doctine by European powers. The main opposition came from the Republican Party who with the nomination of Lawrence Yates Sherman had staked one of their few solid positions at the time against the Weltkongress. Sherman berated the idea of the Weltkongress as encouraging imperialism around the world. A more tenuous claim from Sherman went so far as to say that with the number of Catholic nations that would be joining the Weltkongress, the Pope (he did not specify Roman or Pueblan) would gain an inordinate amount of influence over American foreign and possibly domestic policy.

During the 1912 election campaign, the issue of the Weltkongress helped the Republicans score a major campaign victory that greatly improved their image as a national party. During the Congressional debate on the Weltkongress in the summer of 1912, Democratic Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts was one of the loudest detractors of the Weltkongress in the Democratic Party. Eventual nominee Edwin Warfield had remained relatively quiet on the issue, but he did give the Weltkongress tacit support and said he would do his utmost to protect American interests in the sessions if he were elected and the United States became a member. Lodge was incensed by this, but he had a greater worry. Congressman John FitzGerald, who represented much of Boston's Irish Catholic community[1], was challenging Lodge in the Democratic primary for Lodge's Senate seat. Edwin Warfield, who had built support among the much larger Irish Catholic constituency in Baltimore to help propel him to the governorship, threw his support behind the Catholic FitzGerald. It would seem the Democrats had finally tired of Lodge's antics, as many prominent men in the Massachusetts State Democratic Party also threw their weight behind FitzGerald's campaign, despite his being a Roman Catholic. Lodge lost the primary to John FitzGerald, but he was not out of the race yet. In a surprise move, he announced he was running as a Republican, and the field was quickly cleared for him. It was a reprisal of that stubbornness of character that led Lodge to run on the separate National Democratic Party label so many years ago, and this time it became a coup for the Republicans, as Lodge was still relatively popular in the state. Sherman arranged to appear with Lodge in Massachusetts after he announced his party switch as a show of drawing members of even other parties to the Republicans.

Henry Cabot Lodge joined the Republican coalescing opposition to the Weltkongress in the Senate, but it and the smaller opposition from the isolationist wings of the other parties was not enough to keep the United States out of the Weltkongress. Roosevelt had successfully built a broad coalition of support for American participation in the Weltkongress over the months. The wide publication of the news that the United States had won its dispute with Acadia-Tirnanog in the Weltkongress in September of 1912 boosted the support for the Weltkongress among the imperialists. The judgement that the United States would gain the Grand Manan Archipelago demonstrated that throug the system, the United States could flex its muscles and still gain territory through diplomacy without fighting, and that the European powers in the Weltkongress would not solely side against American interests. With the overwhelming support of Progressives and the mild support from Democrats, the American formal entry into the Weltkongress was ratified by the House and Senate on September 29, 1912, just in time for the home stretch of the 1912 election campaign.


THe 1912 General Election Campaign:
The push to ratify American entry into the Weltkongress took a lot of political capital from the Progressives, and arguably hurt them during the election campaign. Albert Beveridge and Henry C. Wallace may have heavily garnered support for the Weltkongress, but it came as a distraction from other issues that arose during the months following the Great War. It was the dominant issue of that campaign to be sure; however there were other events in the aftermath of the Great War that swung the campaign in the end.

For one, the American economy in the years after the Great War quickly became a major issue. Roosevelt's decision to keep the United States out of the Great War at first had been a popular one in much o the country. Northern industrialists enjoyed a boost in trade during those first war years. American neutrality allowed the country to export to both the Alliance Carolingien and the New Entente members. The worldwide scope of the war and the disruption of oceanic trade also helped the poorer states in the south, whose agricultural products briefly became more valuable overseas. Cotton, so decimated by the boll weevil sweeping across the Southern states, and rice saw a brief jump in exports from 1905 to 1909. Wheat and corn, valuable staple crops flowing out of the Mississippi watershed to sustain the European powers, also saw a heavy increase in exports in those years, aided by good rains and harvests in the United States during those years.

However, when the United States officially joined the Great War and declared war on Great Britain, American exports started to suffer. The states on the Canadian border turned from profitable agricultural or logging centers and sources of products being exported to the Laurentian states to areas of uncertain conflict and uneasy peace or, in some cases like New York's northern frontier, outright warzones. The permanent diversion of trade from the Great Lakes hurt the states and cities on those coasts during and after the war, even accounting for the general economic downturn in the United States after the end of the Great War. Because of this, the Democrats retained a lock on much of the old Confederacy and the Republicans rebounded in much of the Laurentian border states. Of the border states in the Old Northwest, only Itasca remained a hopeful state for the Progressives in 1912. Itasca's location at the headwaters of the Mississippi, its bumper wheat crop and the discovery of iron at the Cayuna Range in 1903, and the connection of the Duluth, Elk River, and Eau Claire Railroad all helped Itasca muddle through the war and following recession in good economic shape. It also helped the Progressives in the state that Itasca was enlarged by one of the major territorial gains the United States made in the Peace of Vienna, gaining more valuable iron country.

However, once the Great War ended, the post-war economic slump hurt the Progressives. Albert Beveridge, in a policy conceived by his running mate Henry C. Wallace, put forth a plan to protect farmers from shock fluctuations in grain prices through government insurance for farmers, but even then the post-war recession hurt the Progressives. With the resumption of normal grain protudction and exports in France, Russia, and elsewhere, and the return of soldiers from the front, grain prices along with much of the American economy saw a downturn during much of the latter half of 1912. While the Silver Depression had been milder, primarily signified by how long it lasted, the 1912-1913 recession was much more drastic. Troops returning from the war and the switch back from a wartime to a civilian economy led to heightened unemployment during the final months of Theodore Roosevelt's administration.

Amid the economic turmoil after the Great War, both Republicans and Democrats attacked the situation as being the fault of Roosevelt's administration. Senator Sherman for the Republicans adopted anti-Catholic rhetoric during the general campaign, turning the Republican Party in a more nativist direction. While former President Bryan also used some of this nativisim in his campaigns, Sherman was the start of this nativist turn for the Republicans. While this would boost Sherman in rural areas such as Pembina and rural Missouri, it hurt them in cities in the Old Northwest such as Saint Louis and Chicago, where Catholic immigrants were becoming increasingly influential. Meanwhile, governor Warfield of Maryland, building off his support from Irish Catholics in Baltimore, tried to court these urban immigrants. The New York City and surrounding operation was too entrenched for the Republicans, but the rapidly growing Confluence urban region were vulnerable to Democratic inroads, and Edwin Warfield was close to the optimal candidate to attract those voters.

With this support largely swinging to the Democrats in 1912, it was not too surprising that the Democratic ticket of Edwin Warfield and George Oliver won the presidency. The election had a number of very tight races. The Democrats won a number of tight races, and the 1912 election could have easily had no party receive a majority of electoral votes and gone to the House of Representatives. One thing that especially hurt Warfield and the Democrats was the first emergence of a separate state party system in Cuba. Mario Menocal may have been denied the Democratic nomination, but with the increasingly anti-Catholic sentiment among not just the Republicans but also the Democrats, the native Partido Conservador opted to nominate Menocal for president. Menocal accepted the nomination with New Mexico Representative Ezequiel Cabeza de Baca[2] as his running mate. The Partido Conservador mainly focused their campaign on Cuba, but also ran on the ballot in Jackson, Tejas, and New Mexico, attempting an early appeal to Iberos in the United States. The Conservador effort did not yield much outside of Cuba, but within Cuba it became a four way race. With a decent showing by the Socialists as well, Menocal barely came out on top with 27% of the vote and denied Warfield the state's electoral votes. Despite failing to win Cuba, Edwin Warfield and the Democrats eked out a majority with 236 electoral votes - the exact minimum they needed to avoid the race going to the House. There had been rumors that some North Carolina electors would defect and vote for Furnifold Simmons, but with the danger of the election going to the House and Sherman or Beveridge being chosen, they fell in line and cast their votes for Governor Warfield.


A Woman's Place Is In Politics:
One notable element of the 1912 election was the participation of women in the election for the first time. Not only was it the first election in which women were allowed to vote, but the 1912 election also had an extraordinary participation of women in active politics and campaigning. The election of President Warfield was greatly aided by the efforts of one Edith Bolling Galt of Virginia. Mrs. Galt, a scion of a prominent southwest Virginia family, married Norman Galt, a Washington, D.C. jeweler, and moved to the District in 1896[3]. While a graduate of a music school, Edith Galt took an keen interest in conservative politics and, financed by her husband and the Bolling family, became an advocate in Washington, Virginia, Winfield, and Maryland for the Democratic Party. When she and her husband moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington in the early 20th century, Edith Galt began to associate with political circles in Rockville, Maryland. By 1912, Bolling Galt was a prominent fundraiser for the Democratic Party in Maryland. Galt, hoping to capitalize off of Edwin Warfield's run for the presidency and financed largely by her husband and her Virginian family connections, culminated a political ambition of hers and ran for Congress in 1912. In the more conservative area around Rockville in Maryland's 11th district, Edith Bolling Galt found a surprising success and with Warfield's success in the presidency boosting Democratic turnout in Maryland, Edith Galt was elected the first woman ever to the United States Congress in 1912, succeeding retiring Repuublican George Alexander Pearre.

The Republicans were not without political women of their own, particularly in the state of Ohio. Florence Harding was the wife of Republican newspaper editor Warren Harding, editor of the Marion Star and briefly state representative. The Harding family out of north central Ohio became well known in Columbus and both Warren and Florence became influential within Republican circles in the state. While Warren Harding soon returned to his newspaper business after a brief stint in the state legislature, Florence Harding continued to advocate for Republican politics and was one of the most prominent women in the state to speak for the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to enshrine the woman's right to vote in the Constitution. For her efforts, Florence Harding was rewarded. She was selected as a delegate from Ohio to the Republican National Convention. During the general campaign and even after the 1912 election, Florence Harding worked to set up so-called Florentine Clubs to encourage women to vote and run for elected office. These clubs bearing her namesake were most successful in her home state of Ohio but also became widespread around the country to varying success, though in their early years the Florentine Clubs had a clear Republican partisan bent. Florence Harding is now most remembered for her and her husband's inspiration for the musical Florence and Gamaliel. The musical is inspired by Warren and Florence Harding attempt to reconcile Florence's political aspirations and the conflict that arose between her and Warren ("Gamaliel" in the play after Warren's middle name), including a revealing affair from "Gamaliel" while Florence was campaigning that Warren Harding was rumored to have had.

Florence Harding and Edith Bolling Galt were two extraordinary women who helped two of the three major parties in the 1912 election, but there were women fighting for minor parties as well. The most notable of these was an actual presidential candidate. Since nominating Josephine Shaw Lowell in 1904, the Socialist Party attempted to present itself with an image of leading the fight for women's progress in the United States as part of its platform. Lowell died in 1907 of cancer, but her efforts as the first female nominee for executive office were not in vain. In 1912, the Socliast Party, jumping on the success of the party in Missouri in electing Leon Greenbaum to the House two years prior, nominated fellow Missouri Socialist Kate Richards O'Hare for President. O'Hare was a strong opponent to the American entry into the Great War, but being a Socialist activist, did not espouse as much anti-Catholic sentiment as the Republicans in the state. The nomination of O'Hare for President gave the Socialists an exceptionally strong showing of 5.3% in Missouri. In fact, Edwin Warfield almost certainly owes his election to the presidency to Kate O'Hare. The strong showing in Missouri with O'Hare's anti-war stance drew much of its vote from Saint Louis Republicans, and likely drew enough support to swing Missouri to the Democratic column, considering Warfield only beat Sherman in Missouri by 3%. With strong showings in Missouri and also over four percent in New York, Illinois, and Marquette, Kate O'Hare became the most successful women to run for president for a long time.

[1] John "Honey Fitz" FitzGerald, in OTL was mayor of Boston and contributed the Fitzgerald to a certain John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
[2] Ezequiel Cabeza de Baca was a member of an old New Mexican family descended from the Spanish colonial days, and in OTL was key in inserting bilingual law into New Mexico's state constitution as well as being the state's first Hispanic governor.
[3] In TTL Noman Galt doesn't die in 1908, so Edith Bolling Galt doesn't become Edith Bolling Galt Wilson.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Epilogue Post #1:

Updated list of Chief Justices:

John Jay (1789-1795)
John Rutledge (1795-1795)
Oliver Ellsworth (1796-1800)
John Marshall (1801-1835)
Roger Taney (1836-1861)
Abraham Lincoln (1861-1879)
David Davis (1879-1889)
Stephen Field (1889-1895)
Horace Gray (1895-1903)
Rufus Wheeler Peckham (1903-1906)
Daniel Lindsey Russell (1906-????)[1]

And a list of the current composition of the Supreme Court as of 1912:

Chief Justice Daniel Lindsey Russell (Roosevelt, 1906)
Chester Alan Arthur (Edmunds, 1885)
Russell S. Taft (Edmunds, 1888)
Richard Olney (Cleveland, 1895)
Judson Harmon (Cleveland, 1895)
John Fitzpatrick (Cleveland, 1896)[2]
John Marshall Harlan (Bryan, 1900)
Henry Billings Brown (McKinley, 1903)
Fred Gorham Folsom (Roosevelt, 1910)[3]


And finally, the text portion of this post:

The Midnight Ride of Theodore Roosevelt:
When Edwin Warfield was elected to the presidency in 1912, one of the concerns for the nation soon became what would happen to Theodore Roosevelt's legacy. Roosevelt had already made his mark on history with his leadership of the United States during the Great War and putting the United States firmly in the position as the dominant power on the North American continent. However, with the war taking so much focus for the Roosevelt administration, his domestic legacy was more uncertain. Roosevelt had increased the power of the executive office and with William Howard Taft made the vice presidency more involved in actual policy and less of a ceremonial position. To cement his legacy, however, Theodore Roosevelt needed something that could continue long after his time in office had ended and was not in danger of being undone by Edwin Warfield or whoever succeeded him.

This moment would came in the eleventh hour of President Roosevelt's term, and only happened by chance. On December 11, 1912, Supreme Court Justice Richard Olney caught a severe case of pneumonia during an exceptionally cold winter in Washington. Olney died five days later. This Supreme Court vacancy was the third in Roosevelt's term, and the President as well as the Progressive members of Congress were determined to fill it before Warfield could take office and nominate his own candidate. This midnight appointment was unusual enough, and President Roosevelt could have made a routine nomination to keep it from becoming controversial. But Theodore Roosevelt was never that kind of man. Opting for a grand personal and political gesture, Roosevelt announced in a public address to an extraordinary session of Congress his intention to nominate Vice President William Howard Taft to the Supreme Court.

Taft had been dutiful while Vice President and Secretary of War, but all through his service in his administration, Roosevelt had known of Taft's discontent with being in the Cabinet and his personal aspiration to the Supreme Court. As such, Roosevelt took a final chance to give his colleague the position he so desired, and stirred up a controversy in the process. Several Congressmen spoke out in uproar at the clearly political appointment of a sitting Cabinet member - the Vice President no less! - to an august body of judges. Conservative Democrats in the southern United States decried Taft's positions to their constituents, calling on Warfield to nominate someone else to the Supreme Court once he took office.

However, more liberal northern Democrats and Republicans were more conciliatory toward Taft's appointment. Roosevelt ultimately made a pragmatic choice in William Howard Taft, for Taft himself was a Republican before joining the Progressive Party to be Roosevelt's War Secretary. Additionally, many Republicans felt that Taft would make a better Supreme Court appointment than any likely appointments President Warfield would make when he took office. Edwin Warfield for his part remained silent on the issue of the Court, preferring to not galvanize the opposition to act if he misspoke. Roosevelt announced the appointment on December 20, 1912, one day before the Senate went into its Christmas recess. When the new Congress began its session on January 6, one of the first orders of business of the new Senate was to officially nominate Taft. Taft had formally resigned from the Vice Presidency in the meantime to avoid any complications with holding that office. In the meantime, Progressive members of Congress and supporters had been busy lobbying other members of the Senate to support Taft's nomination in one of the more political Supreme Court appointments of the era.

The 1912 Senate elections had delivered a smaller plurality for the Republicans, but still a plurality. Thus, much of the lobbying for Taft took the form of convincing Republican Senators to support Taft out of the worry of potential Warfield appointments. At this stage, another oddity for the era occurred during Taft's nomination process. For the first time, a Supreme Court nominee was questioned in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Taft was questioned for 4 hours, primarily on whether he could maintain proper impartiality on the Supreme Court when he had so recently held the vice presidency. The Judiciary Committee ended up nominating Taft after the hearing, and the following week, the Senate held a full vote. With the support of all Senate Progressives, a slight majority of Republicans, and a smattering of Senate Democrats, William Howard Taft was confirmed with a vote of 55 to 41 and was sworn in the next day. Taft's appointment to the Supreme Court would soon have ramifications as a landmark case was brought up in the early months of President Warfield's administration.

[1] In OTL Daniel Lindsey Russell was the Republican-Populist fusionist governor of North Carolina who fought against the Wilmington Insurrection in 1898 and fought to protect the rights of blacks in North Carolina, unfortunately failing in the face of the Democratic machine and white supremacist riots. Here I decided to give him a more influential and lasting role as Chief Justice.
[2] John Fitzpatrick was a mayor of New Orleans from 1892 to 1896.
[3] More Colorado favoritism! Fred Folsom was CU Boulder's first athletic director and the university's football and baseball coach. Folsom Field, CU's football stadium, is named after him. He also taught law at CU from 1905 to 1943 and his son Fred Folsom Jr. was an attorney in the DoJ and played a key role in the department promoting civil rights.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Epilogue Post #2

The Congo Slave Cases:
Edwin Warfield had hopes of entering the presidency with little fanfare to evoke a return to the calmer times before the Great War. However, prior events had other plans. In the first year of the Warfield administration, the nation was rocked by a scandal that was unknown to both Warfield and former president Roosevelt, and unfortunately for President Warfield was a consequence of the previous time that the Democrats had held the executive office.

After its acquisition by the United States and its incorporation into a territory by the Cleveland administration, the Congo Territory was largely neglected by subsequent administrations and left to develop in its own devices. Francis Seiberling and later governors were left free to act in the Congo Territory as they wished, with the post of governor of the Congo becoming a political appointment[1]. Corporations seeking to profit from the rubber boom through developments in the Congo were given free rein by absentee territorial governors and company towns sprang up in the small territory. While this fueled the development of the port of Banana at the mouth of the Congo River as well as the company towns further inland, it led to unforeseen consequences. The situation, already rife with exploitation of local African workers in the company towns, became much worse under the governorship of John Tyler Morgan. Morgan, who had negotiated the original transfer of the Congo Territory to the United States in 1893, had been appointed governor of the Congo Territory in 1901 by President McKinley at the beginning of his term. The appointment was partly as a favor to Morgan for shoring up Democratic support in the South, particularly Tennessee and North Carolina, after the Democrats lost both states in 1896.

John Tyler Morgan's governorship of the territory was more involved than his predecessors, but he only made it worse. Morgan took a personal interest in developing the company towns not only as a way to develop the colony, but also as a way to promote his doctrine of white supremacy. Morgan secured federal appropriations for the Congo Territory and used them to attract the corporations associated with the growing automobile industry in the United States. Producers of rubber products such as Naugatuck[2] and Goodyear had representatives in the Congo Territory to manage their company towns. Even with better transportation and communication advances of the turn of the century, contact between the central African colony and the mainland United States was slow. The corporations took advantage of this. Using the provisions of the Thirteenth Amendment, even after the Lincoln court's expansion of the amendment to abolish slavery for all United States citizens, the question remained of whether those born in territories are citizens. Thus, company towns in the Congo Territory effectively became de facto plantations during the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations. Native Congolese, as well as blacks in the southern United States who were convicted of crimes and later "sentenced" to these company towns, were enslaved by the white American upper class[3]. The extremely stratified and segregated society of the early 20th century Congo Territory is one of the darkest moments of American history since the National War.

The slavery in company towns in the Congo lasted for over a dozen years in that state under three successive presidential administrations. The resulting scandal of native enslavement in the Congo Territory finally broke when journalist and former Naugatuck Consolidated Rubber Company employee Charles Dow traveled to the Congo to investigate the business prospect of the rubber industry. Dow wrote extensively about the enslaved workers and their conditions at the Naugatuck plantation near present day Kinzao. Swathes of the Mayumbe forest in American territory had been cut back to make way for rows of rubber trees all along the approaches to the mouth of the Congo River. Slaves were subject to difficult conditions, being "paid" in company housing and with company ration stamps. While corporate economic structure elsewhere such as the company mining towns in Pennsylvania and the Hudson Bay Company's "social credit" system strove to provide services and improve workers' conditions, the Congolese company towns did not, only providing the barest of facilities for the Congolese slaves and the American prison laborers in order to maximize profits from rubber extraction in the American Congo[4]. Dow's reports came out in the summer of 1913, timed so American readers would understand the hot and humid conditions of the rubber plantations the most.

The Dow Report invigorated labor and black rights activists in the continental United States. The news of not just Africans but also African-Americans being subjected to slavery nearly fifty years after its supposed abolition shocked much of the budding African-American intellectual class, many of whom were also heavily involved in labor groups and unions. In July 1913, black dockworkers in Brooklyn led by Sheridan Leary[5] went on strike to protest slavery in the Congo, refusing to work on a dock that handled shipping from the American Congo or companies involved in the Congo. The Brooklyn strike turned violent after Brooklyn police officers were ordered to forcibly end the strike. Fourteen strikers and three police officers were killed in the ensuing riot, which also burned a number of warehouses on the Brooklyn docks.

While many ordinary African-Americans such as Leary and the Brooklyn strikers sought immediate action against the companies, others including Charles Dow sought justice through the legal system. Dow, working with lawyer Robert Latham Owen and journalist and black activist Ida B. Wells, constructed a test case to sue the Congo Territory and the rubber companies for illegally enslaving Americans and violating the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Dow found a suitable client, a Kinzao plantation worker named Abraham Kasavubu, to bring the case against the Congo Territory[6]. The case of Kasavubu vs. Congo Territory was brought up through the courts to the Supreme Court in May of 1914. During this time, racial tensions especially in the southern United States simmered with occasional violent acts from both blacks and whites that highly charged the proceedings. President Warfield, wisely for a Democrat at the time, condemned the conditions of the workers in the Congo, but did not go so far as to recall the governor he had appointed at the beginning of his administration. Nor did President Warfield pick a side publicly on if Abraham Kasavubu was a United States citizen.

For it was not just slavery that was the heart of Kasavubu vs. Congo Territory. The more technical crux of the case was whether someone born in a United States territory was a United States citizen or not. The ramifications of the decision were great, only being made even greater when one took the recent annexation of California into account. If Kasavubu was deemed to not be a citizen, were Californians, both Anglo and Ibero, and their children citizens before the territories were admitted to the United States? For that matter, were the people living in Fremont, Dakhota, and El Paso territories United States citizens, and if not could they be enslaved?

The case was so highly publicized at the time that even the men arguing the case before the Supreme Court became household named. Arguing in favor of Kasavubu was Robert Latham Owen, who argued that all citizens born within the territories of the United States were citizens, that the Congolese were citizens, and that the slavery in the Congo Territory did in fact violate the Thirteenth Amendment. This was based on previous precedent establishing that the residents of newly acquired territories were automatically granted citizenship, and on previous attempts to clarify the natural born citizen clause for presidential eligibility. Former South Carolina attorney general Asbury Lever argued for the Congo Territory. Lever argued that the Congolese were not citizens just as any American colonial territory citing indigenous tribal lands as precedent. Lever also had a backup argument in case that failed; that Kasavubu had no right to sue because by signing a contract with the Naugatuck Rubber Company under legal Congo Territory law, he had entered into a legal employment status and that by seeking employment with Naugatuck, Abraham Kasavubu accepted the conditions of the company town. Some commentators such as former Shoshone territorial governor Willis van Deventer claimed the Congolese plantations held no different legal status than the company towns in the United States, arguing that the freedom of contract should not be thrown out.

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Russell heard the case, and on June 12, 1914, issued its decision on Kasavubu vs. Congo Territory. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Daniel Lindsey Russell, stated that Abraham Kasavubu was a citizen of the United States and that the "enslavement for all practical purposes" violated the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States. Russell was joined in the opinion by Justice Folsom, Justice Arthur, and both Justices Taft. In Russell's opinion, "as United States territories are overseen and under the jurisdiction of the federal government, all citizens of those territories are thusly citizens of the United States, and furthermore under the Thirteenth Amendment slavery is prohibited in those territories." The dissent written by Justice Brown and joined by Justices Fitzpatrick and Harmon, cited the previous case of Red Deer vs. Perry which held that Indians were not citizens without consent from the United States government[7]. Justice Harlan filed another dissenting opinion separate from Brown's. Harlan made it clear that he agreed with the majority that Kasavubu was a citizen of the United States by birth in the Congo Territory, but argued that Kasavubu had willingly entered into a contract with the Naugatuck Rubber Company and that the Court should not strike down the freedom of contract that underpinned free enterprise and the American economy[8].

The case of Kasavubu vs. Congo Territory became one of the most important cases in the history of the United States. It not only affirmed United States citizenship in territories achieving a landmark civil rights victory, but also had lasting cultural effects. The realization that slavery had existed in the United States so long after the National War was a shock to the country's consciousness, especially to the African-American community. It led to a revitalized interest and studies in African culture by blacks in the United States, leading to another infusion of African culture into American and especially Cuban music and literature. The revelation of slavery in the Congo also strengthened the anti-imperialist movement in the United States. In particular paving the way for home rule in the Congo Territory and its eventual independence as the Banana Republic[9], but it also brought other anti-imperialist causes to the forefront and may have directly influenced William Jennings Bryan return to politics.

[1] See this post
[2] Naugatuck, Connecticut was a major rubber town both in TTL and in OTL, thanks in part to Charles Goodyear living there.
[3] A friend actually brought this to my attention way back that the loophole for slavery in territories remained with the rewording of the Thirteenth Amendment. The convict slavery, on the other hand, was also used in OTL in the South after the Civil War to effectively reenslave blacks by using charges like vagrancy.
[4] I realized this actually puts a really broad spectrum of what company towns are like into the public eye ITTL. Public opinion on company towns in general probably vary a lot more than OTL.
[5] Fictional son of mixed race North Carolina lawyer John S. Leary.
[6] Plessy v. Ferguson also began through orchestrating a test case.
[7] This is essentially an analogue to OTL's Elk v. Wilkins case which had the same result.
[8] I admit Harlan is probably not the best Justice to use for this partial dissent, but after listing the Justices I had trouble figuring out who I wanted to have do it. Let's say he doesn't flip quite as much as he did on slavery and civil rights as OTL after the National War (during the Civil War Harlan supported slavery but was pro-Union), and this goes somewhat with his OTL rulings on US v. Wong Kim Ark and his only partial dissent in Lochner v. New York.
[9] I completely forgot about Banana becoming a bigger port than Boma until rereading the other posts on the Congo. This punchline was entirely the reason I did that.

 

[wilcoxchar]

I'll add footnotes tomorrow but here's the next epilogue post!

Epilogue Post #3

The Second Coming:
The large crowd of nearly fifteen thousand jostled each other to get a better look at the speaker. He did not have the boyish looks he had two decades ago. His hairline had receded beyond the crest of his head, leaving the January sun gleaming off his bald head. Wrinkles crawled their way across cheeks. His eyebrows were bushier and the hair above his ears stuck out haphazaardly. But aging from forty to sixty would do that to any man. One thing, however, had not changed with age. Below those bushy eyebrows, the same fiery gaze wandered over the assembled Demoinians that had inhabited those eyes in 1896 and 1900. William Jennings Bryan clutched the podium as he leaned into the microphone.

"Two decades ago, I had the grandest opportunity afforded any man in these great United States of ours. I had the opportunity to serve you all as your President. Thrust into the spotlight of the presidency as I was, I did my utmost to guide this nation as you the people of this great land saw fit. In those two years, there were both successes and failures. In my youth, I admit I made mistakes. I paid dearly for those mistakes as you, the American people, saw me unfit to govern you and cast me out. I hold no grudge for that action."

Bryan began the momentous speech with a great show of humility. In accepting that his youth and inexperience had led to mistakes, the former president evoked the spirit of humility that had supposedly inhabited George Washington. As Bryan's speech continued, the fire in his speech roared to match the fire in his eyes. He railed against the imperialist policies of Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, Warfield, and Oliver. He called out the Progressive Party for betraying its populist roots and veering toward the spectre of centralizing socialism. At last, in his speech's final words, William Jennings Bryan fell back on the old canard that had helped propel him to the presidency once before - gold. "I carried the burden of the working man with me to the White House. Twenty years ago, the bankers and trusts of this nation did crucify me upon their cross of gold. But let this be known! I have been entombed for long enough. Now I rise again, and I shall continue the fight for the people that build this nation, the working man of America! I come before you a wiser man than I once was, and with your help we shall return this country to the hill our shining city was founded upon!"

The speech held in the Demoine capital of Waterloo would launch one of the greatest political comebacks in American history. The famous "cross of gold" speech was soon wired throughout the nation, launching William Jennings Bryan's 1920 presidential candidacy. Bryan, now sixty years old, threw himself into the campaign with the same vigor he had shown during his first runs for office. While Bryan himself criss crossed the country multiple times during his campaign in 1920, he also had the help of a pioneer in the emerging radio and film technologies. In 1915 when Bryan was in Washington for activities with the American Anti-Imperialist League, he met radio pioneer Lee DeForest, who was then working at the Tesla Technological Institute as a radio operator in Fort Reno. DeForest and Bryan became quick friends and years later, after DeForest found private success in Milwaukee with the DeForest Radio Company, Bryan sought out DeForest to help manage his presidential campaign. With DeForest utilizing the pioneering national radio broadcasts and an innovative way to reproduce sound on the same film used for the picture, Bryan's 1920 campaign embraced both the energy of Bryan's whistlestop tours and the emerging new media to bring the campaign directly to the American public.

Bryan used his innovative campaign to easily outfox his contenders for the Republican nomination. Bryan's major competition for the Republican nomination were New Jersey Senator Joseph Freylinghuysen Jr. and John Weeks of Massachusetts. Bryan leveraged his experience of being a former president with being the only Westerner in the Republican race to great success, even in the urban areas of the Confluence region. At the Republican National Convention in Indianapolis, Bryan reiterated the Cross of Gold speech during his acceptance of the nomination. For a second time, William Jennings Bryan ran the presidency leading a Republican ticket. And for a second time, he would win.

The 1920 election was not quite as dramatic as many popular historians have made it appear. The nomination of governor Sidney Johnston Catts of Florida by the Democratic Party, in many ways Furnifold Simmons' ultimate revenge on Edwin Warfield and George Oliver, saw the Democratic Party quickly removed from the picture in many states outside the South. The nomination of Catts, while appealing to the nativist sentiment that grew in the United States during the 1910s, actually did more to help Bryan than it did the Democrats. Standing next to Catts' wild theories about the Pueblan Papacy, including a plot which Theodore Roosevelt was supposedly complicit in to incite a general takeover of the United States from Cuba and the California District, William Jennings Bryan appeared downright saintly. Former President Bryan still played up his appeal to "maintaining the society that has allowed America to prosper", but was more subtle. For instance, Bryan was able to weave his anti-imperialist rhetoric with his religious fervor in calling for a restoration of Californian independence, "righting the unjust invasion by President Roosevelt" while subtly insinuating that Californios would dilute the character of the United States.

The broad appeal in the heartland of the country allowed Bryan to outmaneuver Progressive candidate Amos Pinchot. Pinchot had already been weakened after a bitter primary to fend off Herbert Hoover for the Progressive nomination, and the selection of Champoeg's Willis C. Hawley as Pinchot's running mate did not help matters. After a lacklustre campaign from both the Democrats and the Progressives, William Jennings Bryan returned triumphantly to the White House with a comfortable 279 electoral votes. Catts was also hurt by the presence of the Cuban Partido Liberal, which like the Conservadores in 1912 nominated a national candidate for president. The Liberales nominated Cuban governor Alfredo Zayas y Alfonso with running mate businessman and cigar magnate Carlos A. Ybor of Jackson. With the extreme anti-Catholicism from the Democrats, the Liberals won not only Cuba but the state of Jackson as well. In this, the 1920 election also solidifed the separate party system in Cuba, with the Conservadores and the Liberales becoming the two main parties in the state.