WI Alice Roosevelt marries an African American.

Kaze

Banned
Good News - scandals
Bad news - scandals.

Good News - a change in race relations. Whether good or bad.
Bad News - women's voting delayed by a decade. TR's daughter was a proponent of women's suffrage and one of the unsung heroes of the female vote.
 
Good News - a change in race relations. Whether good or bad

It'd definitely be bad. My only question is, does the ratcheting up of the American Racism push people away from the middle and into choosing a side? Or does it just become an overwhelming tide that pushes even the most moderate of people into a corner? Perhaps, it doesn't even do much of either and things go along much as they did OTL?

I'm a pessimist, in OTL the Klan already showed how influential this part of the culture could be if it was organized. That only fell apart because of a scandal, if I remember correctly.
Why this timeline would be any better is beyond me? The only thing I could hope for is that things calm down and resume their OTL course, just so it doesn't get worse.
 
It'd definitely be bad. My only question is, does the ratcheting up of the American Racism push people away from the middle and into choosing a side? Or does it just become an overwhelming tide that pushes even the most moderate of people into a corner? Perhaps, it doesn't even do much of either and things go along much as they did OTL?

I'm a pessimist, in OTL the Klan already showed how influential this part of the culture could be if it was organized. That only fell apart because of a scandal, if I remember correctly.
Why this timeline would be any better is beyond me? The only thing I could hope for is that things calm down and resume their OTL course, just so it doesn't get worse.

The Klan practically ruled Indiana in the 1920s. Someone worse in the White House - a total racist demagogue, someone with racial views worse than Wilson but with the charisma of Huey Long and the corruption of Warren Harding taking over would be a major factor in a Klan coup. At best, it falls apart with the Depression; at worst it gets WORSE and turns into the Nazis minus the Final Solution. Imagine Axis-aligned America joining forces with the Nazis - I’m picturing Japan, Britain and the USSR fronting the other side, and nobody looks good. It’s a whole war of shit versus worse-smelling shit.
 
The Klan practically ruled Indiana in the 1920s. Someone worse in the White House - a total racist demagogue, someone with racial views worse than Wilson but with the charisma of Huey Long and the corruption of Warren Harding taking over would be a major factor in a Klan coup. At best, it falls apart with the Depression; at worst it gets WORSE and turns into the Nazis minus the Final Solution. Imagine Axis-aligned America joining forces with the Nazis - I’m picturing Japan, Britain and the USSR fronting the other side, and nobody looks good. It’s a whole war of shit versus worse-smelling shit.

What's the say it stops there?
If you keep escalating turn of the century American cultural thinking, I don't think it's too hard to get to a point where Black People are seen as a public blemish, something to be "cleaned". Forced sterilization was already a thing in OTL. That it would go further if given the right kind of gas, at least to me, seems almost a foregone conclusion.
 
What's the say it stops there?
If you keep escalating turn of the century American cultural thinking, I don't think it's too hard to get to a point where Black People are seen as a public blemish, something to be "cleaned". Forced sterilization was already a thing in OTL. That it would go further if given the right kind of gas, at least to me, seems almost a foregone conclusion.

I don’t see it as a systematic extermination campaign, although I definitely see the dominant power making life so shitty for black folks that far fewer of them survive the scourge of the Klan than did OTL. Same with a number of other minorities - if the Klan doesn’t like your face, you’re shit out of luck one way or another.
 
I don’t see it as a systematic extermination campaign, although I definitely see the dominant power making life so shitty for black folks that far fewer of them survive the scourge of the Klan than did OTL. Same with a number of other minorities - if the Klan doesn’t like your face, you’re shit out of luck one way or another.

I was imagining some perverse mixture of Progressive Era internal improvements with Eugenics and a public health scare. Maybe some weird myth gets spread around the time of a Spanish Flu that Black people spread the disease. So while the Klan is still powerful, some kind of "Whitening America" campaign takes; citing the presence of "negros" in the cities as a danger to the health of the country.

This kind of thing has my imagination wandering, truth be told. I really see the people of this time as superstitious, vicious and easily provoked. It's not healthy.
 
Exploiting African Americans serves important functions in the USA; extremists can talk about genocide but too many interests would be hurt if they were not there to serve as a last hired, first fired buffer and political-economy shock absorber, taking the brunt of economic cycles so that "white" people are somewhat cushioned. Get rid of that buffer and people who can more likely make themselves "matter" in the political process are taking the hits with every downturn instead, and the system might be called into question by people in a position to do something about it.

But there is no question general terrorism can reach levels rarely sustained in the past, though certain frenzied incidents were quite appalling enough.
 
I really see the people of this time as superstitious, vicious and easily provoked. It's not healthy.
I don't see them as any different, fundamentally, than today. We are just as capable of these same kinds of extremes today as anyone was in the 1900's.
 
What would have been the fallout if Alice married a Jew and converted?

I'm sure there would be some sort of (mild?) antisemitic backlash, but it would be nowhere near as bad as public reactions to the news of the President's daughter marrying a "negro". Skin color was still ultimately the deciding factor in American racism, even if intra-white racism was still common back then.

Anyways as others stated, this would be a disastrous scandal for both the Roosevelt family and the Republican Party. Theodore won't ever be re-elected for any political office, and I'm absolutely certain he would resent his daughter for making this decision, to the point of disowning her. Expect another wave of race riots and lynchings to erupt across the South over anti-miscegenation hysteria. It's going to be really ugly.

What about an African-American Jew?
 

SsgtC

Banned
What about an African-American Jew?
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Nation marks hundred years since the marriage that shocked the country.


As we reach June 30th 2005 historians, politicians, and activists all struggle to find meaning in the tumultuous events that day unleashed. It was on June 30th 1905 that first daughter Alice Roosevelt married Harvard football coach and assistant US attorney William H Lewis. The reaction was swift. The president publicly disowned his daughter and disavowed her actions but the scandal left Roosevelt politically dead for the rest of his administration. The 1908 election would see the Republican nominee Fairbanks defeated in a landslide by the Democratic ticket of Benjamin Tillman and George Grey.


And then there are the parts we don’t like to talk about. The number of men, women, and children killed between the announcement of the marriage and the end of the Tillman administration’s carte blanche policy on lynching cannot be accurately counted (low estimates are at the 10s of thousands) there are reasons why names like “Omaha, “Harlem”, and “Tulsa” conjure up horrible images of violence to this day.


The couple themselves would only escape this violence by fleeing overseas to France weeks after the ceremony. While they were by all accounts happy in Paris and more or less accepted in certain segments of French society neither would return to the United States until 1921 to visit the dying former President where the three managed a “sort of reconciliation” before the pair returned to France.

The Roosevelt-Lewis’s life in Paris is often romanticized for its pseudo-bohemian lifestyle and of course their actions (and William’s death) under the Nazi occupation did much to repair her reputation in America, none more so then the award of the Médaille de la Résistance to the entire family( Alice, William (posthumously), Paulina, and Thaddeus)

It wasn’t until 1952 and the anti-segregation policies of President Warren that the Roosevelt-Lewis family would return to the United States permanently.


While much progress has been made since 1905 and especially since the dark days of the 1910s there is still much to be done.

After all, it was only in 1992 that Mississippi began to comply with the Supreme Court’s strike-down of miscegenation laws nationally and even today there are sailors deployed on the USS Benjamin Tillman in the Persian Gulf. The Navy still refuses to change the name of the Halsey-class supercarrier, claiming that “whatever his faults in his treatment of certain segments of the population, President Tillman was always a supporter of a strong navy”. And just last year the appointment of Colin Powell as Secretary of Defense by President Gore as the first ever negro cabinet member was only confirmed by a single vote.

Gore gave opening remarks at the first ever family reunion of the Roosevelt’s and Lewis’s yesterday, introducing Alice and William’s grandson Theodore and bringing up the hope that “if a family can reconcile and come together then hopefully this nation can as well”.
 

manav95

Banned

What if the person was half-black, half-Jewish with his mother being a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe. I imagine sparks are gonna fly.

I think the best case scenario is that Roosevelt launches a race war against the Jim Crow bullshit in the South during his second term and liberates millions of black folks from bondage and oppression. And then he gives each family 40 acres and a mule, confiscated from the planters.

After a few years of violent backlash from the Klan and other white supremacist vigilantes, Roosevelt manages to rally the poor whites of the South against the real enemy, the planter elite. After some lynchings and shootings, the South is finally free and ready to begin integration. America gets a black President in the 1950s and OTL African Americans are roughly on par with whites, hindered only by being concentrated in the South as the Great Migration never happens.
 
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