WI President Bryan in the summer of 1914

What impact would he have on events?

I could see him either sonehow getting the 1912 nomination, being VP and Wilson dying of stroke or somehow both Marshall and Wilson ceasing to hold office and his taking office as sec of state
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Random butterflies, but nothing predictable. No one saw the war coming, so Bryan will do nothing to prevent it. The USA will not enter this war in 1914 under any reasonable circumstances. So we then debate the ebb and flow of unrestricted submarine warfare, and when and if the USA enters the war.
 
All hangs on whether he's reelected in 1916 [1].

If his domestic policies are similar to Wilson's, then he probably will be. He's weaker than Wilson in the Northeast, but OTL, Hughes made a virtually clean sweep there anyway, losing only the 4 votes of New Hampshire. OTOH he may run slightly stronger than Wilson in the Midwest, so has a chance to take IN (15 Electoral Votes) and MN (12 EVs) which Wilson very narrowly lost [2]. If he wins either of those, he has an Electoral College majority even w/o the famous late returns form CA.

If he wins, the US almost certainly stays neutral. He said publicly that he thought it better to accept (even if under protest) the German "exclusion zone" around the British Isles, rather than insist on the right to trade with belligerents at the cost of losing American lives.

[1] I'm assuming here that there still is a 1916 election. Limiting the POTUS to a single term was one of Bryan's pet hobby-horses, so if elected in 1912 he won't kill the proposed Amendment giving Presidents a single 6-year term. If that goes through, the next election is probably moved back to 1918.

[2] Hughes also carried WV by barely one percentage point, but I don't know enough about its politics to say whether Bryan would be stronger or weaker than Wilson there. If even slightly stronger, that's another 7 EVs.
 
But- assuming of course WJB is re-elected in
1916- you'd than have to butterfly away The
Zimmerman Telegram. In this ATL, as IOTL,
its publication would have created a virtual hurricane of pro-allied, we MUST intervene
sentiment in the U.S. I rather doubt Bryan
could have resisted it any more than Wilson
did.
 
But- assuming of course WJB is re-elected in
1916- you'd than have to butterfly away The
Zimmerman Telegram. In this ATL, as IOTL,
its publication would have created a virtual hurricane of pro-allied, we MUST intervene
sentiment in the U.S. I rather doubt Bryan
could have resisted it any more than Wilson
did.


Actually he could still prevent or at least drastically postpone it simply by leaving Congress in recess. The old one expired at the beginning of March, only a couple of days after the publication of the ZT, and the new one couldn't meet until December unless Bryan called it. By that time the ZT might have seemed like ancient history, and the demand for war faded away.

But in any case there might well not have been a ZT. Iirc it was drafted in anticipation of the US entering the war over USW, and with Bryan as POTUS the Germans would not necessarily assume this.
 
Assuming that WWI still breaks out in August 1914 with all the butterflies caused by two years of an alternative POTUS.


I doubt if these would make much difference in Europe.

There might be bigger ones after the outbreak of war. Frex, if Bryan decides to treat armed merchantmen as warships and exclude them from US ports, will Germany still see a need to launch USW against unarmed ones?
 
Before WWI what interest would he have in Europe? Depending on this it could change enough to prevent or hasten the Great Wars Start. Imo it would be not enough to change it significantly, but I could be wrong...

After the Start of the War, how does Bryan stand on trade, diplomacy and credit towards belingerent nations. Esp. trade as I read on the Letterstimme site a interesting piece of diplomatic Ping-Pong regarding Britains stance on trade with belingerents. So maybe he will change things from 1914 on or not...
 

BlondieBC

Banned
I doubt if these would make much difference in Europe.

There might be bigger ones after the outbreak of war. Frex, if Bryan decides to treat armed merchantmen as warships and exclude them from US ports, will Germany still see a need to launch USW against unarmed ones?

Maybe actually. USW from the German perspective was much more about trying to intimidate neutrals than the stated reasons post war. It also about neutral powers not forcing the issue on the illegal UK blockade of the Netherlands.

So it really could go either way here.
 
I rather doubt that having a President Bryan would have butterflied away the ZT. It was drafted be-
cause Germany was resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. They did that because they had to
break the all-too effective British blockade of Germany, which by 1916 IOTL was slowly but surely
strangling Germany(it caused an estimated 750,000 German civilian deaths, a figure, historian
Robert Leckie pointed out, which even if cut in half is still "fifty times greater than the number of
people who lost their lives on Allied ships as a result of Germany's submarine warfare."*) Had the
German navy won Jutland than the surface fleet could have smashed said blockade; but of course
it didn't, leaving the submarine Germany's only option. Besides, they also gambled that the USW
would knock Britan out of the war before American aid could be of much help(which almost happened in 1917 IOTL). Finally, an alliance with Mexico, the Germans actually thought, would tie up America & keep it from intervening(& it was also the kind of plan which appealed to the rash,
impulsive Wilhelm II- in fact wasn't he the one who dreamed it up?)

A final point. While Wilson was certainly not, like WJB, a pacifist, neither was he(@ least until the
U.S. was actually in the war)a warmonger either. It took him, after all, two-and-a-half years to
actually enter the war on the Allied side. Before then he never did anything like Lend-lease. In-
stead he issued protests(leading Theodore Roosevelt to sneer he'd lost track of the latest note's
serial number: "I am inclined to think it is No. 11,765, Series B."**) In short WW moved to war
slowly & with great reluctance. One historian- Charles Tansill- would declare in 1938 that "In
the long list of American chief executives there is no one who was a more sincere pacifist than the
one who led us into war in April, 1917."#. While this is probably going too far, I think that in
some ways @ least, WJB & WW were quite similar- & that in an ATL with a President Bryan,
events would have unfolded similarly to how they did IOTL.

*- Robert Leckie, THE WARS OF AMERICA, Vol. II, Bantam Paperbacks, 1969, p. 92.
**- Quoted. in Henry F. Pringle, THEODORE ROOSEVELT, p. 409 of the 1956, Harvest Paperback edition.
#- Quoted in Richard Hofstader, THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION, p. 338 of the 1973 Vin-
tage, paperback edition.
 
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I rather doubt that having a President Bryan would have butterflied away the ZT. It was drafted be-
cause Germany was resuming unrestricted submarine warfare,

It was drafted because the Germans assumed that USW was likely to trigger a US declaration of war - an assumption which they wouldn't necessarily make with Bryan in the White House.

Finally, an alliance with Mexico, the Germans actually thought, would tie up America & keep it from intervening(& it was also the kind of plan which appealed to the rash,
impulsive Wilhelm II- in fact wasn't he the one who dreamed it up?)

You have a cite for that? Afaik it was Zimmermann's own idea.
 
It was drafted because the Germans assumed that USW was likely to trigger a US declaration of war - an assumption which they wouldn't necessarily make with Bryan in the White House.



You have a cite for that? Afaik it was Zimmermann's own idea.

No I don't & in fact I'll admit that here I'm mistaken(though 'm sure Wilhelm liked the plan!)
 
No I don't & in fact I'll admit that here I'm mistaken(though 'm sure Wilhelm liked the plan!)

That's likely enough, as he was by then thoroughly brassed of with President Wilson - viz that famous marginal note. But would he have felt that way about a more evenhanded President Bryan?
 
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