Still incredible to me that there is a Senator named Dud Doolittle, he must just be fantastic at his job because that name is a albatross.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Apocryphal Al Smith story - during the 1928 campaign, he took his campaign to the Deep South. The Klan - not fans of his - greeted his train crossing Mason-Dixon by lighting dozens of crosses in the hills around it. Smith looked out the window, saw all the burning crucifixes, laughed, turned to a Jewish campaign staffer who was in the car with him, and said "Look - that must be for you!"To be fair - conspiracy theory or not, that sounds badass and I suddenly want to wish Governor Al Smith the best in his efforts
In fairness, Michelsen being a Governor limits his impact on Dems in Philly being able to pursue an agenda.
Well putBut I'm impatient!!!!!
Nah, it was an idea that came to me. I figue they're both young scions of established political familes, both fought in the war (the only reason Phil didn't enlist in the marines in OTL was because his Father put as much pressure on him as he possibly could to dissuade him from joining in WWI; a scenerio that is not going to play out in the ATL where the US is fighting after having been sneak attacked. And even in OTL, Phil joined the army and served in MacArthur's staff during WW2), and are largely going to be the face of the next generation of Progressive Democrats. So, I just have this weird sense of the two of them actually getting along quite well and developing a strong friendship: which is all the more ironic because the two were also noted as being the most like their respective fathers of all their siblings (well, Alice was maybe even more like her Dad than Quinton was, come to think of it. So lets say: brothers)
I think this is a great explanation and another reason why I don't feel that going the route I am with Canada is that unrealistic. There were some very good reasons for Franco-Canadians to not like the Anglos, and there were also understandable reasons considering the nature of the Quebecois clergy for Anglos to be... more than a little worried about Franco intentions.
Excellent, excellent stuff you've written here.
Also this is one of the funniest things I've read in some time haha
With a name like that I had to pick him to serve some role, lol.
That's a great quip from Smith, haha
United States elections, 1918 (Multipart)
"...Root had lived through the infamously dire 1902 elections, which on paper were worse, but 1918 felt much more like a wholesale rejection. In 1902, at least, the explanations were more benign from his point of view - enormous demographic changes in the electorate over the last fifteen years, the end of the Democratic-Populist split which Liberals had come to lazily rely on, a party machinery that was atrophied and out of new ideas for appealing to the electorate, and a whole host of other small problems that had consolidated over twenty years before finally the dam burst all once.
The condition of the Republic in 1918 was very different. The frustration, the anger, the economic malaise, the spread of disease; it all felt different in a way that the realigning factors of 1902-04 did not. This was not a correction from Liberals winning in districts and states they had no business winning; this was Massachusetts, the rock-ribbed stronghold of yellow Brahmin Liberalism, flipping to usher in not just another Irish-American to the governor's mansion but two of them to the United States Senate, permanently changing assumptions about that state and badly kneecapping the Liberal patronage on which its party bosses had grown fat on being accustomed to. Democrats had expanded margins where they had majorities and flipped to new majorities where they lacked them; only California retained any Congressmen of the party West of the Mississippi, and in Idaho, Wyoming and Dakota, not a single Liberal would sit in either house of their state legislatures, while Colorado, Montana and New Mexico would have awfully lonely Liberal state house caucuses of one.
A few days after the smoke cleared from the carnage, a reporter asked Root for his thoughts as he prepared to return home to New York to celebrate Thanksgiving; Root quipped, "Well, we'll see if they let me off the train when I arrive." Newspapers announced the results as a "Revolution of 1918," and considering the constitutional reforms and policy changes just a few years away, they might not have been entirely wrong. Root would of course not appear on the ballot in 1920, so the 1918 results are the closest one gets to a referendum on the man himself; and it was an utter repudiation, one even he understood..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...some concerns that the massive wave of tenant strikes that had begun during the atypically cold winter would carry on to foretell a Socialist landslide in the city; this did not occur, and indeed Smith carried many of the same precincts that Hillquit had dominated just a year earlier, even as Socialist Assemblymen carried them for the first time. The margin was not even close - Smith dispatched Whitman with close to a twenty-point margin, carrying every county south of Albany by double-digit margins as well as Erie and coming close to flipping the Liberal stronghold of Monroe, home to Rochester. Democrats won a supermajority in both houses of the State Legislature, and Socialists won double-digit seats in the Assembly; it was going to be a very different Albany that awaited Smith as he transitioned into the Governor's mansion, and the ability to pursue an ambitious policy agenda that addressed many of the issues brought up by the rent-strikers would be possible.
Smith was now New York's first Catholic Governor, a sea change in how the state operated and made him, overnight, a national figure; almost as soon as ballots were done being counted across the four boroughs, newspapers were already asking if he would be the first Catholic to occupy the Presidency as well. That was a question for another day, of course, with celebrations to be had and a new dawn in Albany to break - but it was certainly a question that Smith was already asking himself, too..."
- The Happy Warrior
The condition of the Republic in 1918 was very different. The frustration, the anger, the economic malaise, the spread of disease; it all felt different in a way that the realigning factors of 1902-04 did not. This was not a correction from Liberals winning in districts and states they had no business winning; this was Massachusetts, the rock-ribbed stronghold of yellow Brahmin Liberalism, flipping to usher in not just another Irish-American to the governor's mansion but two of them to the United States Senate, permanently changing assumptions about that state and badly kneecapping the Liberal patronage on which its party bosses had grown fat on being accustomed to. Democrats had expanded margins where they had majorities and flipped to new majorities where they lacked them; only California retained any Congressmen of the party West of the Mississippi, and in Idaho, Wyoming and Dakota, not a single Liberal would sit in either house of their state legislatures, while Colorado, Montana and New Mexico would have awfully lonely Liberal state house caucuses of one.
A few days after the smoke cleared from the carnage, a reporter asked Root for his thoughts as he prepared to return home to New York to celebrate Thanksgiving; Root quipped, "Well, we'll see if they let me off the train when I arrive." Newspapers announced the results as a "Revolution of 1918," and considering the constitutional reforms and policy changes just a few years away, they might not have been entirely wrong. Root would of course not appear on the ballot in 1920, so the 1918 results are the closest one gets to a referendum on the man himself; and it was an utter repudiation, one even he understood..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...some concerns that the massive wave of tenant strikes that had begun during the atypically cold winter would carry on to foretell a Socialist landslide in the city; this did not occur, and indeed Smith carried many of the same precincts that Hillquit had dominated just a year earlier, even as Socialist Assemblymen carried them for the first time. The margin was not even close - Smith dispatched Whitman with close to a twenty-point margin, carrying every county south of Albany by double-digit margins as well as Erie and coming close to flipping the Liberal stronghold of Monroe, home to Rochester. Democrats won a supermajority in both houses of the State Legislature, and Socialists won double-digit seats in the Assembly; it was going to be a very different Albany that awaited Smith as he transitioned into the Governor's mansion, and the ability to pursue an ambitious policy agenda that addressed many of the issues brought up by the rent-strikers would be possible.
Smith was now New York's first Catholic Governor, a sea change in how the state operated and made him, overnight, a national figure; almost as soon as ballots were done being counted across the four boroughs, newspapers were already asking if he would be the first Catholic to occupy the Presidency as well. That was a question for another day, of course, with celebrations to be had and a new dawn in Albany to break - but it was certainly a question that Smith was already asking himself, too..."
- The Happy Warrior
I'll let @Fleurs de Merde answer that one, but I'll just say if you're ever quoting de Maistre, you're pretty freaking reactionary
Montreal was small-l liberal. But things were Weird.
A young Pierre Trudeau was the frontman for a dilletante pro-Vichy right-wing revolutionary cell aiming to spark a revolution and establish an integralist Laurentian Republic. He ran a campaign for an anti-war candidate in 1940, lost, blamed Jews, and then spent his time trying to get Adrien Arcand out of jail. He was pretty typical of his class and type. The Quebec bishops often self-consciously referred to themselves as "ultramontaine", and French-Canadian nationalist literature was pretty "european". As late as the 60s, rural Quebec was electing Réal Calouette, a creditiste who had a framed photo of Mussolini in his office. Really horrid shit.
It's just that the Church itself was, as part of the bargain with the Anglos, politically quietist- it didn't disturb Anglo economic dominance, and in return was allowed to maintain its privileged position as an instrument of Francophone cultural and linguistic survival. It's intense reactionism came with a deep fatalism about British power and a devotion to "la survivance" above all else. Duplessis was an ex-Tory who absorbed the agrarian provincial wing of the Liberals. He wasa right-populist, and a pretty bleak reactionist, but he was also deeply pragmatic and allied strongly with the federal Liberal machine.
It's not until the 50s and 60s that the Church suddenly absorbs a lot of Jacques Maritain and grows a social conscience, and the Francophone public grows an assertive, distinctly Quebecois, social-democratic "national" consciousness. ITTL, with the French Empire as a pole of attraction and anti-Catholic Tories trampling the grand bargain, you may get broad French "national" consciousness far sooner, and on that agrarian-corporatist illiberal line.
Some of the sting might be taken out by Crerar - a key driver was deep and abiding poverty among the farmers that worsened through neglect and the farm crisis, and the increasing need for interventionist government - but yeah at some point if Torydom isn't confronted and rooted out you might get some really "neat" stuff. Also depends heavily on broader Catholicism - the world Church didn't really reconcile its ambiguities on democracy and shift decisively towards personalism until after WW2.
That's the hardest phrase I have ever seen in this website, holy shit.
!!! The hell!
Though the idea of "Integralist Pierre Elliot Trudeau" later in the TL does amuse me, lol.
Honestly, it surprises me with all this going on, that the Quiet Revolution wasn't... louder (credit that one to @Rattigan haha). The circumstances for Canada to go Full Northern Ireland aren't quite there, I don't think, but close.
If the McCarthy line can prevail, Duplessis seems exactly the kind of man who could work well with, say, a Prime Minister George Drew, or maybe a Diefenbaker type who could give a shit about the Orange establishment back east.
Bingo. Jacques Parizeau may come to be a moderate amongst the men who eventually lead Quebec out of Canada, IOW.
Crerar will help, some, though he seems ill-equipped to do anything other than strike something of a grand bargain with the Duplessis school of nationalism to "leave be" their separate quarters of Canada.
We're definitely not seeing anything like Vatican II in the early 60s, if at all.
Thank you! I was quite proud of it.
Any sources?
I personally couldnt find any asserting this fact.
Drawn from vol. 1 of John English's magisterial Pierre Trudeau bio. A lot of it was that classic thing where everyone in their 20s slightly smarter than their friends becomes convinced they're a political visionary. It's sort of embarrassing, especially for his admirers, but he spent his whole young life fucking about. Plenty of brains as a young man, but little sense.
Our New Asia: Revolution and Retrenchment in the Early 20th Century Far East
"...a domestic moderate reformist and chief figure in the Opportunist camp who nonetheless held a number of views that made him not just acceptable to but popular amongst the Militarist clique, most importantly Yamagata Aritomo. Goto thus found himself in a unique position, of being the first Foreign Minister of Japan to personally visit another Asian state rather than accept dignitaries and envoys in Tokyo, and it was lost on few what the symbolism was when in September 1918, mere weeks before his tenure in that office concluded, he led a delegation to Bangkok to meet with Rama VI, whose personal name was Vajiravudh.
Siam had a number of similarities to Japan that were more than just cosmetic. It was an ancient monarchy, steeped in unique traditions that set it apart from other parts of Asia, with a vast and devout Buddhist population and a traditional authority structure embodied in the Emperor, much as was the case in Japan after the Meiji Reforms. Crucially, too, it had avoided colonization, being an independent and free royal state in Asia that had instead ingratiated itself to local European powers, playing them off of one another (Siam balancing Britain and France on either side, while using Germany as a guarantor). Siam under Chulalongkorn, the previous Emperor, had pursued an effort of vast modernization and reform, aided in great part by German investment and direction, though it was still well behind where Japan had arrived by the end of the 1910s, and Rama VI aimed to change that.
The visit itself was fairly perfunctory, with the usual diplomatic niceties, exchanges of gifts, introductions of new envoys, and a tour on the back of an elephant through a bustling, traditional Bangkok neighborhood followed by Rama VI proudly showing off a new district of factories on the Chao Phraya. But it represented a genuine step forward in the Japanese school of expansionist and opportunist pan-Asianism; Rama VI was a staunch Siamese nationalist growing increasingly worried about European ambitions in the region, and had been alarmed by the force of the Ghadar Mutiny in India and the May Rebellion in neighboring Vietnam in particular. An alliance was not struck in Bangkok in September 1918, far from it, but it marked a brief moment of Japanese outreach to a co-equal power, in which common interests were discussed, common fears allayed, and a common path could start to be vaguely charted on the horizon if one squinted closely enough...."
- Our New Asia: Revolution and Retrenchment in the Early 20th Century Far East
Siam had a number of similarities to Japan that were more than just cosmetic. It was an ancient monarchy, steeped in unique traditions that set it apart from other parts of Asia, with a vast and devout Buddhist population and a traditional authority structure embodied in the Emperor, much as was the case in Japan after the Meiji Reforms. Crucially, too, it had avoided colonization, being an independent and free royal state in Asia that had instead ingratiated itself to local European powers, playing them off of one another (Siam balancing Britain and France on either side, while using Germany as a guarantor). Siam under Chulalongkorn, the previous Emperor, had pursued an effort of vast modernization and reform, aided in great part by German investment and direction, though it was still well behind where Japan had arrived by the end of the 1910s, and Rama VI aimed to change that.
The visit itself was fairly perfunctory, with the usual diplomatic niceties, exchanges of gifts, introductions of new envoys, and a tour on the back of an elephant through a bustling, traditional Bangkok neighborhood followed by Rama VI proudly showing off a new district of factories on the Chao Phraya. But it represented a genuine step forward in the Japanese school of expansionist and opportunist pan-Asianism; Rama VI was a staunch Siamese nationalist growing increasingly worried about European ambitions in the region, and had been alarmed by the force of the Ghadar Mutiny in India and the May Rebellion in neighboring Vietnam in particular. An alliance was not struck in Bangkok in September 1918, far from it, but it marked a brief moment of Japanese outreach to a co-equal power, in which common interests were discussed, common fears allayed, and a common path could start to be vaguely charted on the horizon if one squinted closely enough...."
- Our New Asia: Revolution and Retrenchment in the Early 20th Century Far East
Well, yea,...
But my point really is that he would literally think he has a chance somewhere. that he can somehow manipulate his way into the Presidency, or that he can somehow play kingmaker...
That said, I'm wondering now. What is Strom Thurmond up to at the moment, because South Carolina will need another villain soon, and clearly we need another Senate pro-temp who will hold the seat for 50000 years...lol (granted hes only like, 17 at the moment, but still.)
The Statesman: The Spain of Jose Canalejas
"...arguably the most important development on the Spanish right since the fall of the Maura government in 1910. For without Nocedal's dogged leadership, the Integrists had been waylaid and rudderless since his 1907 death, struggling to return their neo-Carlist, reactionary to the forefront of Spanish politics. And with Maura's defeat and the triumph of Canalejismo, the conservative movement in Spain was increasingly looking creakier than ever, struggling to find a purpose. Was it a modernizing but softly authoritarian and paternalist, mass movement, "street politics" force of traditionalism and anticorruption, as argued by Maura's son Gabriel or Antonio Goicoechea, or should it look to the ideals of the emerging Christian democratic movement as led by Angel Ossorio, seeking to look to a moderating Catholicism as preached by the Rerum novarum and root its principles in popular democracy that sought to act as a vanguard of faith?
Complicating this "breach of the right" was Mellismo. Juan Vazquez de Mella was many things - a firm Carlist, a devoted opponent of democracy, and also deeply pragmatic and willing to play a long game in pursuit of the restoration of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne. He was also, much like Nocedal, an important thinker on the role of Catholicism in public life, sharing the view that all things should flow out from a foundation in the Church and her teachings, but taking a much more sophisticated view of organic corporatism as a way to organize society in a way that ideologues such as France's Charles Maurras would not for many years. He did not advocate openly for the overthrow of the Hohenzollern dynasty, instead maintaining a position that the Restauracion should be peaceful if possible, but did advocate, unequivocally, for the undoing of the Gloriosa as the clear and obvious endgame of his ideology. In foreign policy, he was pronouncedly opposed to the Canalejas' government clear Germanophilic sympathies and dismissed the ideas of Ossorio as naive and supine to "secularism." Catholics, Mella huffed, should never bow to temporal laws; temporal laws should instead bend to the laws of the Church. Rather, Mella viewed a future government headed by him and Olazabal and, ideally, a Bourbon King to be a crucial leg in a new reactionary alliance of Spain, France and Austria that would restore the Papal State as its first order of business and reinforce Catholic monarchies and governments under siege in places like Belgium, Brazil, and Mexico.
The merger of the Integrists into the Partido Catolico Tradicionalista, Mella's outfit, in October of 1918 marked the first union of rightist parties in Spain since the Gloriosa, but ironically it would spur further disintegration of the traditional Conservative Party of Canovas, Maura, and now Dato. For the right wing of a "party of the system" that had sat in government once since 1868, they were unsure why exactly they were staying on their back heels forever and playing nice within the confines of a constitutional system they had been convinced since the Carlist Wars hated them; they had watched the National Liberals embody a mix of corruption, oligarchy, and secular arrogance while pissing away the empire in the Orient to Japan. For traditionalist Catholic voters in northern Spain, particularly the Basque country, the emergence of a party that was unapologetic about its traditionalism and hostility to the secular kingdom of the 1870 Constitution was of comfort to people wholly put off by what they perceived to be as a ruling class in Madrid that largely hailed from cities where few people attended church and that had imposed upon them the hated "schools compromise" that allegedly took God out of Spain's classrooms, even if the regionalist compromises had finally quieted their calls for autonomy.
This was, at least not immediately, not a threat to Canalejas' grip on the Cortes, indeed it arguably enhanced it. Dato was a fine man, honest and brilliant, but he was very much not a man of the people, and had even less of a popular touch than Maura, who at least made attempts to embracing a populist streak such as on questions of caciquismo. Dato sat on the board of one of Spain's largest banks, the Hipotecario, and he had briefly been a justice in the Hague; little of what he stood for, conservative and quietly devout as he may have been, held much appeal to the types of people increasingly alarmed by Spain's march into industrial, democratic modernity. [1] The Conservative Party had not realized it yet, but it was already shedding voters to the PCT; for those whom the ultra-right politics of Mella and Olazabal was too much, the Social People's Party would be founded in late 1919 by Ossorio to provide a middle-path, Christian democratic alternative that nonetheless foregrounded its Catholicism and agrarianism. As the 1920s loomed on the horizon, Spain's politics were about to get their biggest paradigm shift since the shock win and sudden decline of the Radicals nearly thirty years earlier..."
- The Statesman: The Spain of Jose Canalejas
[1] What I'd say to these people is if they think Canalejas is bad, they could cross over into OTL and see how the Second Republic was for their brand of politics.
Complicating this "breach of the right" was Mellismo. Juan Vazquez de Mella was many things - a firm Carlist, a devoted opponent of democracy, and also deeply pragmatic and willing to play a long game in pursuit of the restoration of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne. He was also, much like Nocedal, an important thinker on the role of Catholicism in public life, sharing the view that all things should flow out from a foundation in the Church and her teachings, but taking a much more sophisticated view of organic corporatism as a way to organize society in a way that ideologues such as France's Charles Maurras would not for many years. He did not advocate openly for the overthrow of the Hohenzollern dynasty, instead maintaining a position that the Restauracion should be peaceful if possible, but did advocate, unequivocally, for the undoing of the Gloriosa as the clear and obvious endgame of his ideology. In foreign policy, he was pronouncedly opposed to the Canalejas' government clear Germanophilic sympathies and dismissed the ideas of Ossorio as naive and supine to "secularism." Catholics, Mella huffed, should never bow to temporal laws; temporal laws should instead bend to the laws of the Church. Rather, Mella viewed a future government headed by him and Olazabal and, ideally, a Bourbon King to be a crucial leg in a new reactionary alliance of Spain, France and Austria that would restore the Papal State as its first order of business and reinforce Catholic monarchies and governments under siege in places like Belgium, Brazil, and Mexico.
The merger of the Integrists into the Partido Catolico Tradicionalista, Mella's outfit, in October of 1918 marked the first union of rightist parties in Spain since the Gloriosa, but ironically it would spur further disintegration of the traditional Conservative Party of Canovas, Maura, and now Dato. For the right wing of a "party of the system" that had sat in government once since 1868, they were unsure why exactly they were staying on their back heels forever and playing nice within the confines of a constitutional system they had been convinced since the Carlist Wars hated them; they had watched the National Liberals embody a mix of corruption, oligarchy, and secular arrogance while pissing away the empire in the Orient to Japan. For traditionalist Catholic voters in northern Spain, particularly the Basque country, the emergence of a party that was unapologetic about its traditionalism and hostility to the secular kingdom of the 1870 Constitution was of comfort to people wholly put off by what they perceived to be as a ruling class in Madrid that largely hailed from cities where few people attended church and that had imposed upon them the hated "schools compromise" that allegedly took God out of Spain's classrooms, even if the regionalist compromises had finally quieted their calls for autonomy.
This was, at least not immediately, not a threat to Canalejas' grip on the Cortes, indeed it arguably enhanced it. Dato was a fine man, honest and brilliant, but he was very much not a man of the people, and had even less of a popular touch than Maura, who at least made attempts to embracing a populist streak such as on questions of caciquismo. Dato sat on the board of one of Spain's largest banks, the Hipotecario, and he had briefly been a justice in the Hague; little of what he stood for, conservative and quietly devout as he may have been, held much appeal to the types of people increasingly alarmed by Spain's march into industrial, democratic modernity. [1] The Conservative Party had not realized it yet, but it was already shedding voters to the PCT; for those whom the ultra-right politics of Mella and Olazabal was too much, the Social People's Party would be founded in late 1919 by Ossorio to provide a middle-path, Christian democratic alternative that nonetheless foregrounded its Catholicism and agrarianism. As the 1920s loomed on the horizon, Spain's politics were about to get their biggest paradigm shift since the shock win and sudden decline of the Radicals nearly thirty years earlier..."
- The Statesman: The Spain of Jose Canalejas
[1] What I'd say to these people is if they think Canalejas is bad, they could cross over into OTL and see how the Second Republic was for their brand of politics.
I am digging the hell out of WFH KingSweden. Something like twenty good updates this week! You gotta get your folks to go out of town more often.
Interesting Japanese move here - assuming that since they've been shut out of simply grabbing Korea, they haven't gotten that confidence-boosting win aginst Russia, some of the revolutionaries they've armed uave actually played out, and since there are no Europeans willing to let them into the big boy club, hopefully their pan-Asianism can end up being - if not less self-interested - at least a bit less shit