That feeling when Napoleon turns out to be French (Corsican?) for "Wilhelm"
Cinco de Mayo
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Chamberlain's Britain
"...Amsterdam led once again to the feeling that the Chamberlain Cabinet was badly adrift, despite its triumphs at the polls the previous autumn. Had Dilke been the glue that held it all together? At the National Liberal Club in London, once the brainchild of Chamberlain himself, the spirit of "New Radicalism" had overtaken the young eminences of the party, with Lloyd George the ringleader seeming to bide his time. The most ambitious items of the People's Budget seemed to be on ice without a majority and with Chamberlain mulling what package could possibly mollify the IPP into supporting some of its tenets, and this strange stasis that fell over British politics throughout 1904 led many to wonder if perhaps, after 12 years in the catbird seat, Chamberlain was finally mulling to step down. The hotbed of the young radicals pondered what a Liberal Party without Chamberlainism would even look like; it had been thirty years since he entered Parliament and his stature in Birmingham had been dominant already. The final years of that seminal era of British politics lacked the verve and vigor of those that had come before, and Uganda and the necessities of the Royal Navy surged up the priority list once again as Trevelyan's inability to avoid being flummoxed once more by the French and Germans exposed him as a lightweight on the world stage..."
- Chamberlain's Britain
- Chamberlain's Britain
I feel bad for Japan, they won the war, yet they gain so little out of it. It's literally a worst version of the Treaty of Portsmouth. Hope when the Great War happens, they gain something out of it.
I certainly don't! The Philippines usually get dominated both OTL and in alternate history, seeing them getting a somewhat better deal than whatever they got, it's very refreshing and one of the reasons I enjoy this TL.
As good as they could get with the great powers carving up the country. Territorial division of the southern islands is certainly better than the elimination of any sort of native sovereignty (i.e. the sulu sultanate) . They have some if not complete autonomy despite the annexation of Luzon and parts of the south. At the same time great power political and economic domination would be easier to exert through the process of balkanization than it would be if the Philippines was even semi-independent even if that is unlikely.
I wonder who’s going to replace him? Dilke is gone. Maybe not Lloyd George given what u mentioned earlier. Whoever takes over is probably going to be a step down. Chamberlain is big a figure of the 1890s as Palmerston was in the 1850s-1860s. It’s also worth noting that this also tends to presage loss of power (eventually). Look for instance at the return of the Liberals in 1906 after a far shorter period of exile in the political wilderness than the 20 almost 30 years of Tory irrelevance. Balfour was unable to manage divisions over the tariff debate after all. There will be some wedge that destroys the unity of the Liberal Party
American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes
"...Hughes did not participate in the walkout of progressive delegates and activists from the floor of the Cincinnati convention, though he did not blame those who did for their deep frustration with the course of the week's proceedings and the "corrupt coronation" of Senator Charles Fairbanks of Indiana by a gang of party bosses as the Liberal Party's next nominee for President. For the first time in a decade, he debated abandoning his interest in politics entirely and going back to law lectures entirely, so pessimistic was he about the future of the country and of the Liberal Party he had generally supported in prior years. In letters to Antoinette and Charlie, he described his dour view on the convention as such:
Having been passed over for a Congressional nomination and attending the 1904 Liberal convention as a delegate instead as a consolation prize wound up working out swimmingly, however. Hughes abstained from the final ballot that thrust Fairbanks down the throat of the convention after what can best be described as a rigged proceeding but voted to try to secure a New Yorker to the ticket in anticipation of Hearst's potential nomination as the Democratic nominee, and managed to secure the slot for Benjamin Odell, a former Congressman acceptable to all factions of the New York Liberal Party. Having been a "team player" despite his reservations would pay dividends a few months later as the Fairbanks ticket was crushed in a historic landslide by William Hearst and the Liberals fell further into superminority status in both houses of Congress; having not been on the ballot at all in the 1904 disaster but also not having burnt bridges by walking out of the convention or publicly flipping his support to Hearst left Hughes in a position he could hardly have expected - a rare Liberal figure in New York who like Odell was acceptable to all and who could be trusted with the long and arduous task of rebuilding the state party out of its deep hole, a task Hughes had not asked for but dutifully agreed to undertake.
Little could he have known during that frustrating week in Cincinnati, when the future of his preferred but wayward and obtusely conservative party seemed utterly hopeless, that in eight short years, he would again be at the Liberal National Convention - only not as a delegate, but on stage, accepting the nomination for the candidacy of the party for the Presidency of the United States..."
- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes
[1] Of course, in a stroke of irony, Fairbanks was Hughes' running mate in 1916 in OTL, to give the ticket ideological balance (same reason he got stuck with Roosevelt in 1904, and those men HATED each other)
Having been passed over for a Congressional nomination and attending the 1904 Liberal convention as a delegate instead as a consolation prize wound up working out swimmingly, however. Hughes abstained from the final ballot that thrust Fairbanks down the throat of the convention after what can best be described as a rigged proceeding but voted to try to secure a New Yorker to the ticket in anticipation of Hearst's potential nomination as the Democratic nominee, and managed to secure the slot for Benjamin Odell, a former Congressman acceptable to all factions of the New York Liberal Party. Having been a "team player" despite his reservations would pay dividends a few months later as the Fairbanks ticket was crushed in a historic landslide by William Hearst and the Liberals fell further into superminority status in both houses of Congress; having not been on the ballot at all in the 1904 disaster but also not having burnt bridges by walking out of the convention or publicly flipping his support to Hearst left Hughes in a position he could hardly have expected - a rare Liberal figure in New York who like Odell was acceptable to all and who could be trusted with the long and arduous task of rebuilding the state party out of its deep hole, a task Hughes had not asked for but dutifully agreed to undertake.
Little could he have known during that frustrating week in Cincinnati, when the future of his preferred but wayward and obtusely conservative party seemed utterly hopeless, that in eight short years, he would again be at the Liberal National Convention - only not as a delegate, but on stage, accepting the nomination for the candidacy of the party for the Presidency of the United States..."
- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes
[1] Of course, in a stroke of irony, Fairbanks was Hughes' running mate in 1916 in OTL, to give the ticket ideological balance (same reason he got stuck with Roosevelt in 1904, and those men HATED each other)
It's a pastiche of Portsmouth and Shimonoseki, with a (different) Triple Intervention to check their gains, and Japan's reaction is about the same as those two humiliations.
Indeed, though the Philippines has a number of problems - including attempted economic vassalization by a number of Great Powers circling the islands like sharks...
Oh yeah Chamberlain's successor is going to be a massive downgrade, I can tell you that already. Chamberlain has his problems/faults (his authoritarian nature, his unrepetant racism) but he in this TL is one of the most important politicians in British history and can credibly claim to be the father of British popular democracy and an early version of its welfare state. Tough act to follow.
Programming Update:
The Democratic Convention that nominates Hearst will be next, and then I'll work to push through to wrap up 1904/1905 and with it Part VI before I go on vacation at the end of next week. Are there any requests anyone has for any content in the last two years of Part VI, before this TL goes on a brief hiatus?
The Democratic Convention that nominates Hearst will be next, and then I'll work to push through to wrap up 1904/1905 and with it Part VI before I go on vacation at the end of next week. Are there any requests anyone has for any content in the last two years of Part VI, before this TL goes on a brief hiatus?
Any naval updates on the C.S.A, Imperial Mexico, Chile, and Brazil and their reaction to the United States' Naval Program? If not that, then Japan's reaction to the treaty of Amsterdam. If I remember correctly, the treaty of Portsmouth set the stage for the Era of Popular Violence in Japan. Want to see how that's handle ITTL
I can absolutely do a Japan update on that!
The Bloc Sud’s naval response will get more coverage in Part VII as tensions start really rising, at least that was my plan
Still a better choice for the Liberals than Harding or Coolidge.
Undoubtedly, Harding was literally a warm body. Utterly worthless President, and Coolidge was way down there too.
Hughes OTL would have actually been pretty decent I think. Could bridge the rift created by TR and it’s not hard to be superior to Wilson
Depends on which Hughes you get - the progressive of his first Supreme Court stint or the ossified reactionary of his second one.
I'm very leery of Hughes as President given his history both OTL and ITTL but we can delve into that when we get there.
Some things I'm curious about:
- Anything interesting in Mexico? I don't think we've been there in a while.
- I wouldn't mine more of a look at Centroamerica. I can't recall if it was explained, but how is it run? Is it a more unitary or federal system? Is the country mostly stable or is there any regionalist/secessionist movement anywhere?
- How about Argentina? I know we're focusing a lot more on the anti-US powers in the upcoming war, but I wouldn't mind a look more at the ont country which seems to be firmly on the US side.
- Anything of note recently in South Africa, either the British colonies or that Boer state?
Is Wilson going to do anything of note TTL?
True, he did get a bit crankier with age, as did Taft, Coolidge, and the whole bunch (and OTL's Hearst, for that matter, who went from Bryanite to arch-reactionary, though that won't be the case for alt!Hearst)
Not too much exciting in Mexico right now though that'll change pretty quickly; Centroamerica I can expound on a bit, I need to do a Canal Wars update anyways.
Argentina is earmarked for one of the next updates in fact! I have a whole page in iNotes dedicated to what I want to cover there haha
We'll be getting back to South Africa in time, the tensions between Boer and Brit have not gone away but have also not boiled over yet without Rhodes' diamond interests to push for war and the way the war turned into a debacle years earlier
Woodrow is a university professor, the job most attuned to his interests/holier-and-smarter-than-thou personality. I've been tempted to have it be Wilson who wrote one of the textbooks charting the South's path to war, might be worth retconning...
Citizen Hearst
"...the historic collapse of the Liberal Congressional majorities - most stunningly in the Senate, hypothetically more immunized from public opinion - had created a wrinkle in the 1904 contest for the Presidency on the Democratic side that had not existed in previous cycles: genuine aggressive competition for the top job, with a Democratic victory and supermajorities in Congress seeming inevitable, especially after the Wall Street meltdown mere weeks before the conventions. Anywhere upwards of a dozen viable candidates arrived in St. Louis and another dozen who stood no chance threatened to sully up the early ballots and potentially, by accident, eliminate contenders.
Hearst and his chief confidant, former New York state party chairman Edward Murphy (who was the runner-up to serve as Vice Presidential nominee four years earlier but nearly seventy years of age had forsworn any Presidential ambitions of his own), intended to leave nothing to chance. They had spent much of late 1903 and the entire spring of 1904 leading up to the unusually early June conventions securing commitments from the various state delegations, partially through persuasion and partially through pledging financial support and "joint financing," a modern innovation uncommon at that time. Despite the severe effect the financial panic the previous month had on Hearst's net worth, he intended to follow through on his promises and thus was not going to be beaten at the convention again because he hadn't lined up a heft delegate haul in advance. In particular, Hearst had focused his energies on the Western states, especially those beyond the Rockies, positioning himself as a native Californian who had become a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker and thus was one of the rare figures in American politics who could cleanly appeal to two crucial regions. The gambit worked; entering the convention, Murphy had secured for him not just his home state delegation after cutting a deal with Tammany Boss "Silent Charlie" Murphy [1] who was primarily focused on embarrassing the vanity nomination attempt of Roosevelt but also those of the three West Coast states, Montana, Colorado and Nevada as well as Idaho and Utah territories, and had gotten to work on whipping up support from skeptical Midwestern attendees. [2]
Hearst was profoundly frustrated that Roosevelt had decided to leverage his few months as New York Mayor into a nomination he was almost certain not to get but kept his anger to himself; the episode was the start of a slow rift between the two men both personally and politically, for 1904 had obviously been Hearst's turn and Roosevelt had shown little ability to measure his words and keep a level head in a number of important occasions already in city politics and threatened the crucial relationship with Tammany as the state and city's major political organ. [3] Thankfully, most delegates saw it the same way, and Roosevelt's stature as Mayor and newspaperman failed to get him past the third ballot.
No, the real threats to Hearst were Nebraska Senator William Jennings Bryan, who by now spoke for the former Populists absorbed into the party and stood as the Senate's utmost radical [4], and General Nelson Miles, who had successfully brought the Utah Uprising to a close and then successfully commanded the American Expeditionary Force in China and had emerged as "the next General Jackson or Custer" to a party that had indulged campaigns by former military officers with glee in the past. Bryan placed first on four consecutive ballots and Hearst and Miles were close behind in a tight one-two-three; on the twelfth ballot, finally, Hearst broke ahead as the candidacy of Iowa's Horace Boies collapsed as it had in 1892 and 1896 and on the fourteenth ballot he had put enough distance between himself and Miles, with Bryan now falling into third, that it was obvious what would happen eventually on the eighteenth set. Ed Murphy had been invaluable, working not just the floor but the hotel rooms, saloons, parlors and even brothels of St. Louis tirelessly all week to sway every last delegate. With his triumph on the eighteenth ballot, William Randolph Hearst had been nominated to be the next President of the United States on behalf of his beloved Democratic Party, aged 41. Somewhere above the convention hall in St. Louis, his father the old Senator was surely smiling. The family's moment of triumph was at hand..."
- Citizen Hearst
[1] Lots of Murphys! (That was my golden retriever's name incidentally)
[2] This is meant to evoke the successful strategy Mark Hanna used in OTL 1896 to secure William McKinley the nomination; by the time that convention had rolled around, McKinley was effectively unstoppable after having diligently lined up delegations, especially in the South, for close to a year.
[3] The Cult of Bully both on this site and elsewhere has done much to paper over that Roosevelt was a temperamental hothead, a legendary egomaniac and a more than a bit of an asshole
[4] Ignatius Donnelly being dead and all; now THAT was a character. Wikipedia him for a wild ride
Hearst and his chief confidant, former New York state party chairman Edward Murphy (who was the runner-up to serve as Vice Presidential nominee four years earlier but nearly seventy years of age had forsworn any Presidential ambitions of his own), intended to leave nothing to chance. They had spent much of late 1903 and the entire spring of 1904 leading up to the unusually early June conventions securing commitments from the various state delegations, partially through persuasion and partially through pledging financial support and "joint financing," a modern innovation uncommon at that time. Despite the severe effect the financial panic the previous month had on Hearst's net worth, he intended to follow through on his promises and thus was not going to be beaten at the convention again because he hadn't lined up a heft delegate haul in advance. In particular, Hearst had focused his energies on the Western states, especially those beyond the Rockies, positioning himself as a native Californian who had become a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker and thus was one of the rare figures in American politics who could cleanly appeal to two crucial regions. The gambit worked; entering the convention, Murphy had secured for him not just his home state delegation after cutting a deal with Tammany Boss "Silent Charlie" Murphy [1] who was primarily focused on embarrassing the vanity nomination attempt of Roosevelt but also those of the three West Coast states, Montana, Colorado and Nevada as well as Idaho and Utah territories, and had gotten to work on whipping up support from skeptical Midwestern attendees. [2]
Hearst was profoundly frustrated that Roosevelt had decided to leverage his few months as New York Mayor into a nomination he was almost certain not to get but kept his anger to himself; the episode was the start of a slow rift between the two men both personally and politically, for 1904 had obviously been Hearst's turn and Roosevelt had shown little ability to measure his words and keep a level head in a number of important occasions already in city politics and threatened the crucial relationship with Tammany as the state and city's major political organ. [3] Thankfully, most delegates saw it the same way, and Roosevelt's stature as Mayor and newspaperman failed to get him past the third ballot.
No, the real threats to Hearst were Nebraska Senator William Jennings Bryan, who by now spoke for the former Populists absorbed into the party and stood as the Senate's utmost radical [4], and General Nelson Miles, who had successfully brought the Utah Uprising to a close and then successfully commanded the American Expeditionary Force in China and had emerged as "the next General Jackson or Custer" to a party that had indulged campaigns by former military officers with glee in the past. Bryan placed first on four consecutive ballots and Hearst and Miles were close behind in a tight one-two-three; on the twelfth ballot, finally, Hearst broke ahead as the candidacy of Iowa's Horace Boies collapsed as it had in 1892 and 1896 and on the fourteenth ballot he had put enough distance between himself and Miles, with Bryan now falling into third, that it was obvious what would happen eventually on the eighteenth set. Ed Murphy had been invaluable, working not just the floor but the hotel rooms, saloons, parlors and even brothels of St. Louis tirelessly all week to sway every last delegate. With his triumph on the eighteenth ballot, William Randolph Hearst had been nominated to be the next President of the United States on behalf of his beloved Democratic Party, aged 41. Somewhere above the convention hall in St. Louis, his father the old Senator was surely smiling. The family's moment of triumph was at hand..."
- Citizen Hearst
[1] Lots of Murphys! (That was my golden retriever's name incidentally)
[2] This is meant to evoke the successful strategy Mark Hanna used in OTL 1896 to secure William McKinley the nomination; by the time that convention had rolled around, McKinley was effectively unstoppable after having diligently lined up delegations, especially in the South, for close to a year.
[3] The Cult of Bully both on this site and elsewhere has done much to paper over that Roosevelt was a temperamental hothead, a legendary egomaniac and a more than a bit of an asshole
[4] Ignatius Donnelly being dead and all; now THAT was a character. Wikipedia him for a wild ride
Never forget that Roosevelt presided over a treaty that basically bullied the newly-independent nation of Panama into giving up the Canal Zone.
Wilson is a bit young to write such a textbook, though I could imagine him writing one of the first textbooks to be openly critical of Forrest and the Democratic machine, preferring instead a strong parliamentary system. He could even be seen as the ideological precursor to those in a modern Confederacy who would like to reduce the powers of the Presidency (though like all figures at that time, supporters would need to overlook his racial opinions, depending how awful the modern CSA is for Black people).
Somewhat funny that Hanna/McKinley relied heavily on Southern delegates to win the nomination as at the time Republicans were well in the minority in the South yet during the nominating process a delegate counts the same no matter where they are from. Shades of nowadays, when Democratic delegates from, say, Idaho or Wyoming are disproportionally important despite there being only a handful of Democrats in those states.
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