WI: Theodore Roosevelt Runs for and Wins His Third Term

He'd make Taft Chief Justice, do a little more trust busting, but that's about it.
He might go for Root as his successor, but I thought he was looking more at grooming Charles Evans Hughes into his heir apparent? Hughes would easily win in 1912, then a Democrat in 1916 due to the war, and then possibly another Republican (or Hughes again) in 1920.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
OTL how much did TR shake up international politics? OK he did have an effect in Latin America, but I don't think European leaders paid that much attention to the United States.

It took a long chain reaction of events to get the Crown Prince assassinated in the first place. It then took a monumentally convoluted series of diplomatic blunders to get a world war started. An alteration at any given link in any of these chains will alter the outcome. The war may very well be quite different even if it still starts.

The butterfly effect is a powerful factor. Human thought changes with the wind and a grand procession of individual decisions, doubts, and uncertainties cause human behavior to be a hairpin trigger.
 
Yes, but incalculable butterflies mean that small things will be different. And if you've read any summary of the assassination you'll know that it took a ridiculously convoluted series of events for it to occur, making it extremely susceptible to butterflies.

Even if it went as IOTL there's no freaking excuse for OTL Presidents past 1920.
Things that could have changed:

Princip decides not to stop for a sandwich, thus he doesn't run into the Archduke

The Archduke's motorcade doesn't take the wrong route and instead heads for the hospital

The motorcade stops in a different area, so Princip isn't as close and the motorcade can back up before he does anything

And there's even more. All of these could easily have been effected by butterflies, unless we're saying that a person getting a sandwich is 1914 can't be effected by events in 1912.

As for beyond 1920, that is certainly butterflyicide. With a POD in 1908 every President after Eisenhower but maybe LBJ wouldn't even be born. Unless again we're proposing that every person who met IOTL was fated to meet and that every sperm will be the one that fertilizes the egg (and given the fact that it's a million to one or billion to one shot that seems unlikely). And that's not even getting into all the political and social changes.
 
I'm actually surprised Paul hasn't pulled out his BS excuse of keeping the Presidents OTL and this is in how own words folks from when I asked him about this in an earlier thread he said it. because since this is Alternate History I can have the good guys win. Something he threw at me when I called him out on having Obama as President in a "Reagan is assassinated" thread.
 

Stolengood

Banned
Princip decides not to stop for a sandwich, thus he doesn't run into the Archduke.
The sandwich is a myth. He was exactly where he was supposed to be on the original motorcade route; the driver's mistake was unthinkingly taking the turn for the original motorcade route, as had been planned, rather than the revised route to the hospital. Had the driver not had that brain fart, they would've bypassed Princip completely.

However, had the route not been changed, he still would have been there. 50-50 chance he makes it to the car if the driver doesn't stop like he did to correct his brain-fart IOTL.
 
Can someone give me specifics on how TR effected Europe? I don't see it.

Ok how about this. TR would try to push for a stronger navy which in turn could make the USN have a couple more BB's the it historically did OTL. This in turn could make Germany drop out of the naval race sooner then OTL which in turn could warm relations between the British and Germans enough that it could be a struggle to get Britain to join WW1.
 
As for beyond 1920, that is certainly butterflyicide. With a POD in 1908 every President after Eisenhower but maybe LBJ wouldn't even be born. Unless again we're proposing that every person who met IOTL was fated to meet and that every sperm will be the one that fertilizes the egg (and given the fact that it's a million to one or billion to one shot that seems unlikely). And that's not even getting into all the political and social changes.

Ah, more butterfly Nazism. It is one thing to say that these people might not be born. But to say unequivocally that they wouldn't be born if TR was elected to a second full term is just silly unless you provide the exact causal relationship between a TR presidency and George Bush's parents not exchanging the same precious bodily fluids. Yes things might have gone differently, but to say that they definitely would have almost defeats the point of alternate history speculation. As quantum physics says, probably 99.99% of the alternate universes probably make human life impossible, but we don't write about those because they are boring. We write about the .000001 in which TR does or does not run for the presidency and in which George Bush or Barak Obama might be born in another TL because they are more interesting.
 
Ah, more butterfly Nazism. It is one thing to say that these people might not be born. But to say unequivocally that they wouldn't be born if TR was elected to a second full term is just silly unless you provide the exact causal relationship between a TR presidency and George Bush's parents not exchanging the same precious bodily fluids. Yes things might have gone differently, but to say that they definitely would have almost defeats the point of alternate history speculation. As quantum physics says, probably 99.99% of the alternate universes probably make human life impossible, but we don't write about those because they are boring. We write about the .000001 in which TR does or does not run for the presidency and in which George Bush or Barak Obama might be born in another TL because they are more interesting.
Easy for an exact causal relationship. TR having an extra term means that his name is said by Bush Sr. instead of Tafts several times. As Roosevelt is longer than Taft that takes an extra .01 second or so. This throws off the rest of his life by .01 seconds, and the process of concieving their firstborn starts .01 seconds later, that delay means a different sperm reaches the egg with a different set of genes. Will still likely look like Bush, and have a very similar personality but will not be identical to OTL Bush
 
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