Who is Michael's wife? Simply not having Alexandra in a position of power would be a boon for Russia. Nicholas II deserves the brunt of the blame, but her level of influence certainly did not help things IOTL.
Cinco de Mayo
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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Definitely more competition from smaller, nimbler firms in the US automotive space, absolutely. USM and one other firm will be the biggest two but nowhere near the size of any of OTL's Big Three; think of the Detroit-Chicago-Ohio based auto industry as being more of a Large Six or Seven (I haven't actually planned out which surviving brands will be the Large Six/Seven but that's my general idea). You'll also see as a result of that and a more intact European industrial base considerably more auto firms in Europe, which gives the US industry less penetration in that market and elsewhere.
I'd say it'll arise a bit earlier than OTL, but not quite as early as this even with the prototypes that were out there. I'm no car guy, so definitely not an automotive history expert, but the reason ICE won out is that it was way cheaper and easier and provided real range. My thinking is that electric cars will get adopted earlier (like 1980s) as inner-city vehicles, particularly for deliveries in dense cities, and then as battery tech improves they become more of a commuter vehicle, and electric scooters take off bigtime in Asia (think Saigon). So maybe you'd have today's battery tech in, say, 2005-6ish. Certain technologies as the TL evolves will be behind OTL while some will be as much as 10-15 years ahead. I haven't decided which yet, lol.
One thing you'll see a faster adaptation/more intense development of though is electric rail technology, particularly in the US. I have reasons for why that'll be the case related to how GAW goes and then who is President in the 1930s.
It's not hard to be an upgrade on Nicky! Haha. But yeah Michael will have some positive impacts even though we def won't see Russia turn into even a German-style constitutional monarchy. I have some very distinct ideas for Russian constitutional development coming down the pike very shortly that'll be pretty consistent with Russian society and structure as well as Michael's own personality
Michael is married to Feodora of Prussia, the granddaughter of Frederick III of Germany. So he naturally takes a much more pro-German line than Nicky did, by virtue of his wife being much more decisively tied to Germany. That said, that line basically consists of him respecting Germany and continuing to maintain them as a bulwark against Austria on his western flank so Russia can keep its attention on Asia.
For what its worth, Feodora being infertile hasn't changed from OTL so Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, his children, and then his brothers are next in line to the throne
The Dodge brothers are likely still alive so it's likely that Dodge would be one of the Significant Six/Seven. At least half of the Significant Six/Seven would likely be completely original car companies that arose sometime after the current year and TTL's present day. But I think that Packard, Studebaker, and Oldsmobile could also be in the Significant Six/Seven. Especially Studebaker since it was founded in 1852. It all depends on what point at which OTL companies are butterflied away.
Fair enough. That's still a significant acceleration on electric car adoption. Maybe it could be a consequence of the more crowded field that someone would pursue electric cars as a way to have a gimmick to sell more cars to the buying public.
Good point. Also not having big influential car companies would likely result in American cities not ditching streetcars in favor of buses since I vaguely remember Big Three lobbying being responsible for that.
Since he may be important later what is the status of Victor Napoleon and his family?
Since a Dem is president after Charles Hughes have we met him yet in the story?
Since a Dem is president after Charles Hughes have we met him yet in the story?
Or being more stable, no one in their mind would want to challenge combined Russian and German industrial capabilities and man resource.
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The more interesting question is what happens after the GAW though. German power would probably be the most dominant power on the Continent. Despite longstanding Russo-German friendship, that could give cause for alarm in St. Petersburg. There's also the question of the newly independent states of Central Europe - I suspect Russia may see the chance to extend its influence into the Slavic states to it's west. Depending on whether the Germans see this as interfering in their sphere of influence, this could cause major strategic headaches. It is possible though that they come to some arrangement to divide Central Europe between them - the same way Hitler and Stalin did in 1939 so that they don't get in each other's way.
Bound for Bloodshed: The Road to the Great American War
"...between his efforts to both avoid war and prepare the US for it and then his reinvention of American diplomacy against the forces of isolationism in the 1920s during his second tenure, Garrison's status as one of America's finest - if not the finest - Secretaries of State with his near-eleven cumulative years in the office is generally seen as well deserved. Even then, no man, certainly not a chief diplomat, is entirely without mistakes, and in the wake of the war crisis of 1910 he made possibly his gravest one.
It was broadly consensus in Washington both within the administration and, increasingly, on Capitol Hill and the ranks of the military that the status quo was no longer sustainable. Bliss-Blackburn had been the sighting of a warship on the horizon to the Kidnap Crisis's shot across the bow; even instinctively isolationist and pacifist Midwesterners had come around to there needing to be a firmer line taken with the Confederacy and Hearst's decision to militarize the Ohio was met with broad bipartisan approval, to the point that the biggest complaint amongst some Liberal hawks in New England was that he hadn't militarized the Chesapeake Bay and started a war. Part and parcel with the "Policy of Departure," as Garrison termed it in a famous memorandum disseminated throughout the State Department that September, was that the United States would readdress and redevelop a comprehensive foreign policy that did not view the Confederacy and the Latin Republics in isolation but as part of a whole; he deliberately compared and contrasted his initiative to that of John Hay's continentalist program in the 1880s, though now it was about defense and responsive counter-escalation rather than desired cooperation. [1] This was a complete departure from the past twenty years of the "European program" in the Americas, where starting under Bayard in 1889 and then continuing under Hoar, Allison and then Bliss the United States had treated its Hemispheric neighbors on an individual basis, as it would European states, and did not have a single policy in place for all continental affairs.
The crux of the Departure was placing a new ambassador in Richmond. The common view was that as the Confederate States were the key antagonist of the decade-long rise in Hemispheric tensions, it would be the US policy towards the Confederacy that would be "hardened" first and foremost. In the same Departure Memorandum, Garrison praised the President's decision to militarize the Ohio and outlined that "all decisions henceforth shall be built upon that critical foundation of international affairs." Biographers and historians have ascribed Garrison's strategy to Hearst's own view that dialogue with Richmond would only be possible if the Confederate government understood that every American statement of policy could and, in the end, would be backed up by force, but that said dialogue should be designed to buy the diplomatically isolated (save Argentina) United States. To that end, Garrison needed a "head-knocker," in the words of War Secretary Louis Haffen, and he found one in Robert Lansing.
Lansing was not a diplomat by trade but rather had served nearly five years as the State Department Counsel and before that had been part of a number of treaty negotiation committees and tribunals; he was a wealthy, conservative New York corporate attorney from the right wing of the Democratic Party who had nonetheless cultivated good relations with the "Tigers" who studded Hearst's second-term Cabinet and had been an able ally for Hearst despite his own wife being the daughter of a prominent longtime Liberal diplomat, which had served as his introduction to State. As Counsel, Lansing had been recently deeply involved in various treaty negotiations under both Bliss and Garrison and was thus considered to be among the most well-versed on the issues confronting the Hemispheric geostrategy of the United States from a diplomatic and legalistic angle, and Garrison particularly valued his aggressiveness and keen intellect.
Hearst was skeptical of Lansing's appointment, though not for ideological reasons; despite being a blustery man who oft shot from the hip when it came to public pronouncements, he took Garrison's outlining of a comprehensive strategy perhaps even more seriously than his own Secretary of State did and preferred appointing the decorated career diplomat Henry Perceval Dodge, who had served a variety of posts throughout his career including stings in increasingly important Centroamerica as well as Peru, and had earlier in the spring returned to Washington to form and run the State Department's new Latin American bureau, the first steps towards a broad and singular regional policy. Garrison, no stranger to backroom politicking, recruited a who's-who of Tigers and other key Democrats he trusted to lobby in favor of Lansing, arguing that Dodge was needed in that key role to essentially serve as chief coordinator for the entire Americas, and Hearst finally relented to that line of logic and offered the job to Lansing.
Garrison was under the impression that he was getting eyes and ears in Richmond that were entirely in alignment with his own views and would do as instructed out of a lack of initiative, but he was grievously wrong on that front. Lansing was a fiercely independent man and had already had quite a bit of experiment behind the scenes in Washington trying to bend policy in his preferred directions, often to little avail but with game attempts nonetheless. He stood out in the Hearst administration for the heterodoxy of his views, not just on domestic matters but on international ones, too. Not only was he possibly the Democratic Party's most ardent Anglophile, which set him strongly apart from the ferociously anti-British and pro-Irish baseline of the rest of the administration, but he was strongly Germanophobic to the point of conspiratorial thinking, viewing Germany's acquisition of the former Dutch West Indies, intervention in Venezuela and even amiable participation as a silent partner in the Nicaragua Canal project as part of a vast Teutonic plot to upend Anglo-American hegemony in the Americas. [2] Future Speaker of the House George Norris remarked some years later that he suspected that one reason why Garrison was so eager to get Lansing to Richmond was that Lansing's connections to the Tiger faction made him effectively unfireable and it was best to get him away from a President who diametrically disagreed with his worldview in a role where his "head-knocking" and stubbornness could actually do some good.
In Richmond, of course, Lansing had little ability to direct Washington's relations with either London or Germany, but his independent streak and penchant for contradicting stances from up above he disagreed with found fertile soil to bloom. Even by the standards of a time in which ambassadors had remarkable leeway for setting policy, he still managed to well overstep the expected bounds; Lansing spent most of his time trying to ingratiate himself with the British embassy or undercut the German position in the Confederacy, apparently under the impression that doing so was the best way to bring the British around to the US point of view, even if it meant formulating his own foreign policy from whole cloth from his ambassadorial perch. Whatever the reasons, Lansing's improvisation and freewheeling approach served his administration poorly. Confederate policymakers, culturally attuned to hiding behind flowery words, bristled at his brusqueness, while Lansing consistently failed to properly deliver Washington's line while manipulating information he felt went against his preferred narratives in dispatches back to Foggy Bottom.
At a critical time where proper diplomatic channels with clear communication could have cooled tensions significantly, Lansing's incoherent approach left both sides confused and the picture muddled; Hearst and Garrison were on sound footing in pursuing a line of stern public rhetoric and policy while seeking off-ramps behind the scenes, only for Lansing to obfuscate..."
- Bound for Bloodshed: The Road to the Great American War [3]
[1] Think of this as "we're just taking the somewhat naive, optimistic view of the Americas as a whole from the Blaine years and dousing it with some much-needed hard-edged realism"
[2] This is all, for what its worth, true. Robert Lansing was the US version of guys like Poincare/Grey/Hartwig who manipulated foreign policy to their own ends from within the diplomatic service. He only wound up in his OTL position of Secretary of State because WJB had the temerity to disagree with Ol' Woodrow and tell him things he didn't want to hear, which is curiously enough how guys like Lindley Garrison and, eventually, Lansing himself wound up out of a job, too. Since Hearst is a bit of a pastiche of Teddy/Wilson with a lot of Wilson-era figures getting moved around to different jobs, Lansing made sense to me in this role, where he could be just as much of a backroom grenade
[3] My attempt at taking a stab at writing something Sleepwalkers-ish, since these kinds of shenanigans were commonplace in European diplomacy in the early 1910s and, well...
It was broadly consensus in Washington both within the administration and, increasingly, on Capitol Hill and the ranks of the military that the status quo was no longer sustainable. Bliss-Blackburn had been the sighting of a warship on the horizon to the Kidnap Crisis's shot across the bow; even instinctively isolationist and pacifist Midwesterners had come around to there needing to be a firmer line taken with the Confederacy and Hearst's decision to militarize the Ohio was met with broad bipartisan approval, to the point that the biggest complaint amongst some Liberal hawks in New England was that he hadn't militarized the Chesapeake Bay and started a war. Part and parcel with the "Policy of Departure," as Garrison termed it in a famous memorandum disseminated throughout the State Department that September, was that the United States would readdress and redevelop a comprehensive foreign policy that did not view the Confederacy and the Latin Republics in isolation but as part of a whole; he deliberately compared and contrasted his initiative to that of John Hay's continentalist program in the 1880s, though now it was about defense and responsive counter-escalation rather than desired cooperation. [1] This was a complete departure from the past twenty years of the "European program" in the Americas, where starting under Bayard in 1889 and then continuing under Hoar, Allison and then Bliss the United States had treated its Hemispheric neighbors on an individual basis, as it would European states, and did not have a single policy in place for all continental affairs.
The crux of the Departure was placing a new ambassador in Richmond. The common view was that as the Confederate States were the key antagonist of the decade-long rise in Hemispheric tensions, it would be the US policy towards the Confederacy that would be "hardened" first and foremost. In the same Departure Memorandum, Garrison praised the President's decision to militarize the Ohio and outlined that "all decisions henceforth shall be built upon that critical foundation of international affairs." Biographers and historians have ascribed Garrison's strategy to Hearst's own view that dialogue with Richmond would only be possible if the Confederate government understood that every American statement of policy could and, in the end, would be backed up by force, but that said dialogue should be designed to buy the diplomatically isolated (save Argentina) United States. To that end, Garrison needed a "head-knocker," in the words of War Secretary Louis Haffen, and he found one in Robert Lansing.
Lansing was not a diplomat by trade but rather had served nearly five years as the State Department Counsel and before that had been part of a number of treaty negotiation committees and tribunals; he was a wealthy, conservative New York corporate attorney from the right wing of the Democratic Party who had nonetheless cultivated good relations with the "Tigers" who studded Hearst's second-term Cabinet and had been an able ally for Hearst despite his own wife being the daughter of a prominent longtime Liberal diplomat, which had served as his introduction to State. As Counsel, Lansing had been recently deeply involved in various treaty negotiations under both Bliss and Garrison and was thus considered to be among the most well-versed on the issues confronting the Hemispheric geostrategy of the United States from a diplomatic and legalistic angle, and Garrison particularly valued his aggressiveness and keen intellect.
Hearst was skeptical of Lansing's appointment, though not for ideological reasons; despite being a blustery man who oft shot from the hip when it came to public pronouncements, he took Garrison's outlining of a comprehensive strategy perhaps even more seriously than his own Secretary of State did and preferred appointing the decorated career diplomat Henry Perceval Dodge, who had served a variety of posts throughout his career including stings in increasingly important Centroamerica as well as Peru, and had earlier in the spring returned to Washington to form and run the State Department's new Latin American bureau, the first steps towards a broad and singular regional policy. Garrison, no stranger to backroom politicking, recruited a who's-who of Tigers and other key Democrats he trusted to lobby in favor of Lansing, arguing that Dodge was needed in that key role to essentially serve as chief coordinator for the entire Americas, and Hearst finally relented to that line of logic and offered the job to Lansing.
Garrison was under the impression that he was getting eyes and ears in Richmond that were entirely in alignment with his own views and would do as instructed out of a lack of initiative, but he was grievously wrong on that front. Lansing was a fiercely independent man and had already had quite a bit of experiment behind the scenes in Washington trying to bend policy in his preferred directions, often to little avail but with game attempts nonetheless. He stood out in the Hearst administration for the heterodoxy of his views, not just on domestic matters but on international ones, too. Not only was he possibly the Democratic Party's most ardent Anglophile, which set him strongly apart from the ferociously anti-British and pro-Irish baseline of the rest of the administration, but he was strongly Germanophobic to the point of conspiratorial thinking, viewing Germany's acquisition of the former Dutch West Indies, intervention in Venezuela and even amiable participation as a silent partner in the Nicaragua Canal project as part of a vast Teutonic plot to upend Anglo-American hegemony in the Americas. [2] Future Speaker of the House George Norris remarked some years later that he suspected that one reason why Garrison was so eager to get Lansing to Richmond was that Lansing's connections to the Tiger faction made him effectively unfireable and it was best to get him away from a President who diametrically disagreed with his worldview in a role where his "head-knocking" and stubbornness could actually do some good.
In Richmond, of course, Lansing had little ability to direct Washington's relations with either London or Germany, but his independent streak and penchant for contradicting stances from up above he disagreed with found fertile soil to bloom. Even by the standards of a time in which ambassadors had remarkable leeway for setting policy, he still managed to well overstep the expected bounds; Lansing spent most of his time trying to ingratiate himself with the British embassy or undercut the German position in the Confederacy, apparently under the impression that doing so was the best way to bring the British around to the US point of view, even if it meant formulating his own foreign policy from whole cloth from his ambassadorial perch. Whatever the reasons, Lansing's improvisation and freewheeling approach served his administration poorly. Confederate policymakers, culturally attuned to hiding behind flowery words, bristled at his brusqueness, while Lansing consistently failed to properly deliver Washington's line while manipulating information he felt went against his preferred narratives in dispatches back to Foggy Bottom.
At a critical time where proper diplomatic channels with clear communication could have cooled tensions significantly, Lansing's incoherent approach left both sides confused and the picture muddled; Hearst and Garrison were on sound footing in pursuing a line of stern public rhetoric and policy while seeking off-ramps behind the scenes, only for Lansing to obfuscate..."
- Bound for Bloodshed: The Road to the Great American War [3]
[1] Think of this as "we're just taking the somewhat naive, optimistic view of the Americas as a whole from the Blaine years and dousing it with some much-needed hard-edged realism"
[2] This is all, for what its worth, true. Robert Lansing was the US version of guys like Poincare/Grey/Hartwig who manipulated foreign policy to their own ends from within the diplomatic service. He only wound up in his OTL position of Secretary of State because WJB had the temerity to disagree with Ol' Woodrow and tell him things he didn't want to hear, which is curiously enough how guys like Lindley Garrison and, eventually, Lansing himself wound up out of a job, too. Since Hearst is a bit of a pastiche of Teddy/Wilson with a lot of Wilson-era figures getting moved around to different jobs, Lansing made sense to me in this role, where he could be just as much of a backroom grenade
[3] My attempt at taking a stab at writing something Sleepwalkers-ish, since these kinds of shenanigans were commonplace in European diplomacy in the early 1910s and, well...
Does he end up having an equitable relationship with revisionist Confederate Historian Woodrow Wilson?
Can't say I'm familiar with that event.
And yeah I'd say they're broadly the same, IOW not great. Russia, weirdly enough, was possibly one of the most laissez-faire places in Europe at this time regarding gay lifestyles, believe it or not
Yup, I think all those names would be big as independent companies or partners in a concern. Maybe not Oldsmobile but that's just because I think its a silly name (arbitrary I know but whatevs).
That's sort of my thinking. There'll also be some energy shocks down the line, not quite 1973 big but think 1990 on steroids, and bear in mind too that in the US ITTL there's no oilfields of Oklahoma, Texas or Louisiana to provide domestic production... so energy security becomes a much more live concern. That influences rail development, too. (The Big Three had a role in the streetcar decline, yes, though a lot of those private streetcar lines were very unprofitable and would probably have gone kaput within a few years anyways. Really what should have happened was public transit agencies snapping them up rather than letting them die off)
It's not really an alliance so much as they each have benefits from being on good terms. Russia post-1878 has eschewed European adventurism to instead focus on Central and East Asia, which suits Germany just fine since they can be A) an economic partner and B) that friendliness makes it less likely for Russia to have a need for political or economic rapprochement with France, since France is Austria's main patron and Russia doesn't particularly care for Austria or Turkey. All those investments that OTL flowed to Russia have gone to the Dual Monarchy instead.
Victor Napoleon is still France's informal ambassador to Belgium, flitting between Brussels and Paris with Clementine. I haven't mapped out their kids yet, but they will be important...
We haven't met PresiDem 1921 yet. Hearst and Hughes were so telegraphed so early (so was Custer, for that matter) that I wanted to play my cards a little closer to the chest.
You could simply have Oldsmobile going under its original name of "Olds Motor Company". Like how Chevrolet is still going by US Motors.
This discussion is, of course, not factoring in how much market share in America is taken by foreign car companies. Hopefully not enough to be detrimental to Detroit's well-being ITTL, but presumably there'd be some foreign companies that can penetrate the US market.
How many car companies are there in the Confederacy?
Not having a massive domestic petroleum industry would help persuade people to pursue electrification. Though with America having oil in Pennsylvania, California, and Wyoming it's hard to say that they wouldn't have any domestic oil production. Just a lot less without the oilfields down south.
Having state-owned companies running the streetcars and subway lines is a lot better solution than simply depending on buses for mass transit. If all goes well we could see a world where city-dwellers in TTL's 2022 either use mass transit or electric cars to get from A to B.
I wonder if Nash Motors will do better in this ATL - gotta give a shoutout to my home state's auto manufacturer
You know, that's actually a really good question. Although the Confederacy is far less industrialized than the Union, I could see them having at least a few. First, this is an era when automobiles were still the playthings of the rich - and it wouldn't really be beyond reason to see them become a fad and hobby for the planter elite of the CSA. Secondly, this is also the era when, in OTL, we started to see the first stirrings of the Good Roads movement. Now, much of this was in the OTL North, though not confined to it entirely. And I could see a set of situations where the South in this ATL would actually develop a superior road system to the North. 1) it would be immensly helpful to the war effort, and if the Confederacy wants to spend money on anything, it's usually things to help out its military. 2) such a project would be effectve in getting people to work (either free labor, or NOT free labor) and 3) it's just the sort of porkbarrel spending that someone like Tillman would LOVE to shepard through the Senate in order to rewards his followers and punish his enemies. Should the army brass be a little farsighted (and from the post about the navy and proposed ships, it seems that they can be - even if only in planning) they might be able to see that using automobiles could potentially have a place in modern warfare and push for the beginnings of a good road system and close alliance with whatever automobile manufacturers there are in the CSA, this gets picked up by Tillman who has a 'good idea' and uses it as a major spending program to help build up his support. The result being that the Confederacy, somehow, ends up with a better road system and a more mechanized army that the Union during the early days. Now this is WAY too early for a blitzkreig style of warfare (I mean, early autos were awesome and fun, but not so great that they're going to let the CSA suddenly end up in Pittsburg after a week of fighting), but it could still give them an advantage early on - and could conceivably help offset the fact that the Union has the superior rail network, even just a bit.
And, well, we know in OTL that the South developed a very strong car culture of their own, so seeing that rear it's head in the ATL would be interesting (perhaps, in the ATL, racing gets its boom less from rum running, and more from Confederate Vets picking up a love of driving during the war and then getting into racing afterwards. I could conceivably become a point of national pride and help lift spirits after the inevitable, yet costly, Union victory)
I can see the North enacting Prohibition (they got lots of goo-goos who are about to be in power) and the South being the ones who smuggle booze across the Potomac/Ohio and across the large land border in the west. In the latter's case I can certainly see smugglers using souped-up cars to escape from Northern agents being the impetus for ITTL's stock car and racing culture in the south.
Oh, Prohibition is still a pretty good bet, as much as I hate to admit it. You're right, that many in the Liberal camp are going to be for it, and it is going to be an issue that bisects the Democratic Party as well - likely with ethnic, urban Dems being against and Populist Western Dems being in favor. Even in OTL, many of the Western states entered the Union as dry states or enacted Prohibition soon thereafter - and there was a growing sense during the early 20th century, that drunkeness was an 'urban' issue. (The poor Dems, no matter the timeline, they always have to fall in line with Will Roger's famous quip "I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat"
)So, there's every real possibility that the CSA becomes a Southern 'Canada' in this stuation - and I'm suddenly imagining Jack Daniels opening up Boozoriums (the name given to Seagram distribution sites which were right on the Canadaian-US border during Prohibition) along the Ohio River.
Though I do wonder on how the Prohibition movement looks in the South. In OTL, it quickly took on racial overtones (really, "We need Prohibition to keep the Blacks from getting drunk all the time" which wasn't all THAT far removed from some of the Northern propaganda of "We need Prohibiton to keep the Italians and Poles fro getting drunk all the time") and so, I could see it becoming rather popular there in the wake of the Union's forced emancipation at War's end. Add to this the fact that you're probably going to have drinking and drug problems amongst returning poor Confederate vets and I could see many Confederate states falling in hard withthe Prohibition band wagon after the war as well
Speaking of which @KingSweden24 : have you read Silkenat's book, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina. It may give you some ideas for some of the cultural implications and developments in the post-war Confederacy in this TL.
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I was doing a wiki-walk and stumbled on the Prohibition artcle a few weeks back and came upon this gem. There was no footnote citation so I'm curious as to how true it actually is.Oh, Prohibition is still a pretty good bet, as much as I hate to admit it. You're right, that many in the Liberal camp are going to be for it, and it is going to be an issue that bisects the Democratic Party as well - likely with ethnic, urban Dems being against and Populist Western Dems being in favor. Even in OTL, many of the Western states entered the Union as dry states or enacted Prohibition soon thereafter - and there was a growing sense during the early 20th century, that drunkeness was an 'urban' issue. (The poor Dems, no matter the timeline, they always have to fall in line with Will Roger's famous quip "I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat"
Assuming this is true (again, no footnote, so 🤷♂️ ) I'm curious if ITTL where Germany isn't the enemy do the "wets" have more power since they aren't associated with the wartime enemy?
I remember some people discussing the energy question in U/CSA a few pages back and I've been wondering if this changes much more about the economy of TTL's USA than we might think. To simplify things slightly, in OTL the US had three key advantages over British and German industries: enormous domestic market; limitless labour supply (in the form of fresh migrants); and limitless energy supply (in the form of oil). The end result was the classic American steel and car factories (among others) that we know and love, which did not have particularly skilled workers (relative to the workers in British/German/French etc factories) and were extremely energy inefficient but were simply enormous and had massive economies of scale.
Obviously, TTL the USA still has the first two of those advantages and with the Pennsylvania oil fields it's not as if TTL USA is resource-poor, as such. But it's clearly not going to have the endless supplies of OTL and I think that probably changes a lot about the size and structure of TTL's US industry. American business management techniques would probably more closely follow their European competitors, for example. Anyway, food for thought
Obviously, TTL the USA still has the first two of those advantages and with the Pennsylvania oil fields it's not as if TTL USA is resource-poor, as such. But it's clearly not going to have the endless supplies of OTL and I think that probably changes a lot about the size and structure of TTL's US industry. American business management techniques would probably more closely follow their European competitors, for example. Anyway, food for thought
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