WI: Charles Evan Hughes wins the 1916 election. Effects on WW1?

Redcoat

Banned
Charles Evan Hughes may have won the election if he won California (which he lost by a pretty narrow margin imo) or if he had Fairbanks as his VP, winning him Ohio. Hughes loses the popular vote while still winning the electoral college. How would America be as it's going into WW1? (Which I see as inevitable).
 
I think the most important difference will not be in the US role in the war itself but in the postwar settlement. Hughes did favor an association of nations, but he would not insist on anything like Article X of the OTL League Covenant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_of_the_League_of_Nations#Article_X if it was clear that such open-ended commitments would make ratification by the Senate impossible. (BTW, unlike Wilson, Hughes may not go to Paris ro negotiate the treaty, but leave that to someone like Elihu Root, his most likely Secretary of State.) He would prefer to rely on an Anglo-American agreement to defend France against future German aggression--something which Wilson did propose (and Republicans like Lodge supported) but which became hopelessly tied up with the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Guarantee_(proposed)

Even though Hughes may be more successful than Wilson in getting a peace treaty ratified, I still expect him to be a one-term president. As I wrote here years ago, "*Any* conceivable peace treaty is going to be unpopular with many people (German-Americans who think it too harsh on Germany, Irish-Americans resentful that it doesn't guarantee Ireland's freedom, Italian-Americans who don't think it gives Italy enough, etc.) In addition, even with people who feel the US had no choice but to enter the war, there will be resentment of wartime regulations, wartime and postwar economic disruption, inflation, etc. These resentments which in OTL were directed against the Democrats will in this ATL be directed against Republicans." https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...dential-election-of-1916.311473/#post-8939913
 
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The biggest difference is that Leonard Wood not Pershing will lead the AEF. Some war related domestic differences:

Prohibition will be only against hard liquor not beer and wine.

Storyville may not get closed

Hughes is less likely to try to clamp down on dissent to the degree that Wilson did and as the Democrats still control both houses of Congress he will have a harder time doing it
 

Redcoat

Banned
The biggest difference is that Leonard Wood not Pershing will lead the AEF. Some war related domestic differences:
Ooooo. Maybe there might be amalgamation TTL?


I think the most important difference will not be in the US role in the war itself but in the postwar settlement. Hughes did favor an association of nations, but he would not insist on anything like Article X of the OTL League Covenant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_of_the_League_of_Nations#Article_X if it was clear that such open-ended commitments would make ratification by the Senate impossible. (BTW, unlike Wilson, Hughes may not go to Paris ro negotiate the treaty, but leave that to someone like Elihu Root, his most likely Secretary of State.) He would prefer to rely on an Anglo-American agreement to defend France against future German aggression--something which Wilson did propose (and Republicans like Lodge supported) but which became hopelessly tied up with the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Guarantee_(proposed)

Even though Hughes may be more successful than Wilson in getting a peace treaty rarified, I still expect him to be a one-term president. As I wrote here years ago, As I wrote here years ago, "*Any* conceivable peace treaty is going to be unpopular with many people (German-Americans who think it too harsh on Germany, Irish-Americans resentful that it doesn't guarantee Ireland's freedom, Italian-Americans who don't think it gives Italy enough, etc.) In addition, even with people who feel the US had no choice but to enter the war, there will be resentment of wartime regulations, wartime and postwar economic disruption, inflation, etc. These resentments which in OTL were directed against the Democrats will in this ATL be directed against Republicans." https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...dential-election-of-1916.311473/#post-8939913

I actually remember you said something like that in another thread. Maybe Wilson could get SecState as a consolation since they need a united America?
 
Something else, Wilson supposedly made a plan that if he lost to Hughes he would appoint to Secretary of State and that he and the vp would resign and under the current succession acts at the time Hughes would become president. This was so that there would be an avoidance of a lame duck presidency during a time of war.
 
. . . Hughes is less likely to try to clamp down on dissent to the degree that Wilson did and as the Democrats still control both houses of Congress he will have a harder time doing it
I agree.

Woodrow Wilson was a hardcorer and an outlier as far as how much he he tried to squelch down on domestic dissent. For example, using the war as an occasion to go after the IWW (‘Wobblies’).

Just as a roll of the dice, Hughes is likely to be less of an outlier in this particular regard.
 
Prohibition will be only against hard liquor not beer and wine.

Why? Hughes may not have been a Prohibition enthusiast, but neither was Wilson; indeed, the latter vetoed the Volstead Act, but his veto was overridden.

Incidentally, even in OTL wartime Prohibition did not go as far as the Volstead Act, as I noted at https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...dified-to-allow-light-wines-and-beers.304094/ Congress, however, decided that the 18th Amendment required a stricter standard, and I don't see why that would have been changed if Hughes had been elected. Again, neither Wilson nor Hughes was an enthusiastic Prohibitionist; both had ignored the issue in their 1916 campaigns (as had their parties' platforms).

I just don't see why the election of Hughes would make any difference concerning Prohibition. This is not the sort of issue in which having a few more members of congress from one party or the other will matter, because both parties were split by the issue. "Remarkably enough, the major parties split in nearly identical ratios on this issue, with 140 Democrats and 138 Republicans supporting Prohibition, and 64 Democrats and 62 Republicans in opposition. Even the 3 Progressives followed the pattern and split 2-1."
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...Historical-Votes-Prohibition-Passes-The-House
 
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I agree.

Woodrow Wilson was a hardcorer and an outlier as far as how much he he tried to squelch down on domestic dissent. For example, using the war as an occasion to go after the IWW (‘Wobblies’).

Just as a roll of the dice, Hughes is likely to be less of an outlier in this particular regard.


Maybe he would have been different as POTUS but when the NY State Legislature
arbitrarily & capriciously denied 5 members
of the Socalist Party(a party as legal as the
Democrats & Republicans)their seats(without
even alleging they'd committed a crime)in 1920 IOTL Hughes protested. Meanwhile
Wilson was tossing the Socalist Eugene Debs
in jail for 10 years for daring to exercise his
1st Amendment rights & make speeches
criticizing U.S. involvement in WWI.
 
The postwar WWI settlement is one of those interesting areas where a great many things are in flux and even small changes can lead to big results further down the line.

If nothing else, America giving a joint guarantee to France is huge.
 
There might have been an impact on the course of WWI if Hughes had brought the
U.S. into the war anytime from October-to-
December 1917, instead of in April 1917 as
Wilson did IOTL. Then the Allies don't get
the American troops they so desperately
needed until later. This could have made all
the difference when Germany launched its
"win the war" offensives in early 1918.
 
Maybe he would have been different as POTUS but when the NY State Legislature
arbitrarily & capriciously denied 5 members
of the Socalist Party(a party as legal as the
Democrats & Republicans)their seats(without
even alleging they'd committed a crime)in 1920 IOTL Hughes protested. . .
World War I was not a time Americans were opened-minded toward political dissent. All the same, hopefully Hughes could have acted as a dampener regarding these strong feelings, and done so in a constructive, middle-of-the-road way.
 
29036._UY475_SS475_.jpg

And once again, we give short shift to the Influenza pandemics of 1918 and 1919, which almost certainly killed more persons than WWI.

We in the U.S. did not stop troop shipments for measles, and that made it difficult to stop for “just” the flu. But maybe with the re-do provided by Hughes, we find a way.
 

Redcoat

Banned
The postwar WWI settlement is one of those interesting areas where a great many things are in flux and even small changes can lead to big results further down the line.

If nothing else, America giving a joint guarantee to France is huge.
Interesting, how might it be different specifically?
 
There are many different possibilities:

Assuming the whole dynamic that led up to the rise of Hitler still happens, it makes the dance between Hitler and the western democracies different. France wanted to respond a little more aggressively at times to Hitler but was completely unwilling to do anything without British approval. In TTL, there is now a third party, the US, that France can look to for some kind of signal of support. The US is probably still pretty isolationist and not real inclined to go on crazy adventures, but with three parties instead of two, and with the US still being at a bit of distance, there is more room for communication errors, ambiguities, personalities, and the ins and outs of diplomatic maneuvering to lead France to, perhaps mistakenly, think it has the go ahead from its allies at some point. If nothing else, France may be a bit more confident with the expectation, perhaps not wholly accurate, that the US has her back.

That was the era when diplomatic agreements were taken quite seriously. So even though the US will still be quite isolationist, I expect not quite as total of a draw down of the military long term and not quite as much disinterest in the increasingly dangerous European situation in the 1930s. Pacta sunt servanda. It will provide Presidents and Secretaries of State more room for maneuver. If nothing else, they can always explain that their attempts to meddle in European affairs are efforts to stave off a war "into which our commitments could draw us in." Membership in the League, even without Article X, will also give the US more involvement in what is going on in Europe.

The presidential dynamic is different. As pointed out upstream, swapping a Republican for a Dem at this point probably shakes up future presidential elections. President FDR probably doesn't happen OTL. The President is probably still an internationalist of some kind, but perhaps in a different way with different prejudices and different political necessities than FDR had.

Anti-appeasers like Churchill may have a stronger hand if they can draw on a broader confidence than OTL that the US will come in on the British side.

The US never quite embraced the post-war guilt thing that the British and the French did. They may be less willing to whitewash over Nazi nastiness from a feeling that they deserve it.

An interesting possibility where greater US involvement might actually make some: if history develops somewhat similarly to OTL up through Czechoslovakia, France and Britain may be less willing to give a guarantee to Poland without US involvement. They won't want to commit themselves to a war without the US, because in TTL they are relying on the US, so any action that might give the US an excuse to say that they have brought a war on themselves that relieves the US of its treaty obligations would be something to avoid. OTL, the guarantee to Poland specifically was a bit random. TTL, I'm not sure the Americans care much about Poland per se or have quite reached the level of outrage yet that the British public reached after Czechoslovakia. Maybe there is no guarantee or tripline set up until after Germany has knocked off Poland in cahoots with the Russians.

Lots of possibilities to play with.
 
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