Great to hear!
Yes, though we say Yusuf İzzeddin, but given that big İ does not exist in English, it does not matter.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Speaking of Belle Époque, I think that Moldau de Smetana is the one that best represents this period at the height of European Civilization.
Into the Cincoverse - The Cinco de Mayo EU Thread and Wikibox Repository
🤐🤐🤐 One doubts the Grits could have achieved what they did in 2015 without Justin during his peak honeymoon phase at the helm (especially considering how en vogue his brand of empty performative progressivism was during 2014-16). A 2015 with, say, Carolyn Bennett at the helm and a Mulcair...
www.alternatehistory.com
I'd like to know how the US Senate was expanded to 94 seats when they only seem to have 35 viable states in 1917 (32 existing ones plus Alaska, utah and Arizona)?
Regard as typo - based on an idea that was pointed out to me doesn’t work.
Soldiers of God: The Long Mormon War with the United States
"...the execution of Richard Whitehead Young by firing squad (at his request, rather than hanging) on November 11, 1917 coincided with the verdict handed down by military tribunal against Browning and several of his closest collaborators on November 14; of the "Browning Seven," only Browning was spared the gallows due to his company's considerable contributions to the American war cause, sentenced to life imprisonment in Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas, where he would die seven years later in 1924. The sensational case - of one of the Army's most important arms suppliers simultaneously skimming weapons, ammunition and money for Fundamentalist Mormon insurgents - and its conclusion marked the denouement of the Third Resistance even more so than the capture and killing of Young; a year to the day after the armistice with the Confederacy, the last conflict on American soil was over.
Fundamentalism was beaten in the field but victorious in the hearts of its adherents; the successfully sustained insurgency within American borders even as the Federals visited industrial death upon the Confederacy was taken even further as a show of godly force, and many of the conservative Mormons who had joined the insurgency skeptical of Fundamentalist theological doctrine exited it convinced, especially after Browning's group was tried not in civilian court but as traitors before a US Army magistrate judge, leading them to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the verdict was pre-determined. In their view William King and Heber Grant may have been, formally, political rivals in the temporal sense, but they represented a supine establishment Mormonism that had utterly surrendered to the United States, and the rejection of this settlement came to fuel the Fundamentalist exodus from formal church structures and, indeed, the United States wholesale.
The defeat of Young's Central Insurgency in Utah and western Colorado in 1917 left Cowley's ideologically zealous Northern Insurgency cut off in Idaho and Montana from the larger, concentrated group in the Arizona-Mexico frontier country, and it split in two not long thereafter. Cowley, Charles Zitting and Les Broadbent gathered together about three thousand of their remaining fighters, approximately four-fifths of the Northern Insurgency by late 1917, and chose "the Southern Exodus," as they termed it, electing to make their way to Mexico as quickly as possible; Musser, the more ideological deputy to Cowley, instead elected to remain, with six hundred or so men and their wives and children, marching north to a vast territory along the Alberta-Montana border and eventually formed, near the edge of what is today the Wateron Lakes-Glacier bi-national park area, what came to be known as the Alberta Stakes - the most zealous colonies of Fundamentalist Mormonism, broken off not only from the Mainline LDS Church authority but the Fundamentalist Church as well.
Cowley's Exodus, however, came to become hugely formative to Fundamentalist mythology. His three thousand insurgents and their families had to march through hostile, Army-controlled territory in Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and the Arizona Territory from late 1917 into early 1918, a grueling trek due to wintry conditions and meagre rations; as many as a third of the men, women and children who set off on the trek perished on route, even as they successfully avoided a direct confrontation with the Army and evaded patrols to the point that there was almost something divine about their passage. They were not just like Young's trekkers from the Midwest to the Great Salt Lake, or the Fundamentalists who had fled to Mexico after the 1890s - they were the Jews in the deserts of Sinai, and Cowley was their Moses. With the death of Taylor in Sonora in October 1916 of stomach cancer and Woolley's disinterest in political leadership, Cowley was now the undisputed master of a concentrated community of Fundamentalist colonias in Sonora and Chihuahua upon his arrival in early March 1918, and though Woolley was elected Prophet, Cowley was the one who held power in the "True Quorum."
The arrival of Cowley's hardened fighters integrated them with a robust, experienced community of insurgents in Mexico who had already served some use to Mexican authorities, and the consolidation of FLDS control of the areas around Agua Prieta was rapid. The Prime Minister of Mexico since late 1915, Bernardo Reyes, was a former general who had come to prominence as a young officer fighting the Revolt of the Caudillos, a severe civil war in much of northern Mexico in the early 1880s that had threatened the Empire's foundation and persuaded Reyes that independent thinking across the poorer, more isolated north threatened Mexico City's authority; this line of thinking had become further entrenched as it was conservative landowners in the Rio Bravo Valley who had been most eager to go to war against the United States, and the most successful thorn in the Mexican Army's side during the war had not been John Pershing but rather Pancho Villa's bandits.
The use of Mormons as Mexican Army auxiliaries in the war had left Taylor's proteges with excellent relationships with Mexican authorities, and after Villa's defeat at Chihuahua and his flight to exile in California, Reyes had turned a blind eye to Mormons being used as his catspaws to mop up the remnants of his considerable list of enemies along what was now the border with the United States. As such, by early 1918, scattered bands of Fundamentalist Mormons controlled much of the border country, and Cowley's arrival helped organize and unite them into a more cohesive group. Colonias across Sonora sprung up as Fundamentalists and even just theologically conservative Mormons rejecting peace with the Federals flowed south, their exodus not discouraged by the government. Names like Smithsburg, Youngstown, New Nauvoo, New Jerusalem were given to large settlements, where polygamous families quickly flourished and, with the tacit support of Mexico, quickly cemented themselves as Reyismo's strongest ally in the North, to the great chagrin of the Catholic establishment that had already been defeated by the North's frequent wars.
The Third Resistance thus ended in the United States, but unlike the Second Resistance, it was almost certainly not a decisive defeat for political anti-Federal Mormonism. The Church in Utah and Idaho was badly riven between moderates seen as sellouts to Federal authority and conservatives viewed as cranks sympathetic to apostate Fundamentalists; Fundamentalism, meanwhile, had found its new heartland in the hills of Mexico, where their colonias were romanticized to impoverished Mormons in Utah chafing at Federal rule by the military or, upon achieving statehood in 1922, the machine of Boss King. Cowley's colonists became not just the hammer of Mexican national authority in the wild deserts of the North, either; they quickly established themselves as the backbone of the vast smuggling network that quickly penetrated Arizona and California and, out of reach of Federal authority, built a state-within-a-state within Mexico where they were unequivocally in ascendance..."
- Soldiers of God: The Long Mormon War with the United States
Fundamentalism was beaten in the field but victorious in the hearts of its adherents; the successfully sustained insurgency within American borders even as the Federals visited industrial death upon the Confederacy was taken even further as a show of godly force, and many of the conservative Mormons who had joined the insurgency skeptical of Fundamentalist theological doctrine exited it convinced, especially after Browning's group was tried not in civilian court but as traitors before a US Army magistrate judge, leading them to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the verdict was pre-determined. In their view William King and Heber Grant may have been, formally, political rivals in the temporal sense, but they represented a supine establishment Mormonism that had utterly surrendered to the United States, and the rejection of this settlement came to fuel the Fundamentalist exodus from formal church structures and, indeed, the United States wholesale.
The defeat of Young's Central Insurgency in Utah and western Colorado in 1917 left Cowley's ideologically zealous Northern Insurgency cut off in Idaho and Montana from the larger, concentrated group in the Arizona-Mexico frontier country, and it split in two not long thereafter. Cowley, Charles Zitting and Les Broadbent gathered together about three thousand of their remaining fighters, approximately four-fifths of the Northern Insurgency by late 1917, and chose "the Southern Exodus," as they termed it, electing to make their way to Mexico as quickly as possible; Musser, the more ideological deputy to Cowley, instead elected to remain, with six hundred or so men and their wives and children, marching north to a vast territory along the Alberta-Montana border and eventually formed, near the edge of what is today the Wateron Lakes-Glacier bi-national park area, what came to be known as the Alberta Stakes - the most zealous colonies of Fundamentalist Mormonism, broken off not only from the Mainline LDS Church authority but the Fundamentalist Church as well.
Cowley's Exodus, however, came to become hugely formative to Fundamentalist mythology. His three thousand insurgents and their families had to march through hostile, Army-controlled territory in Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and the Arizona Territory from late 1917 into early 1918, a grueling trek due to wintry conditions and meagre rations; as many as a third of the men, women and children who set off on the trek perished on route, even as they successfully avoided a direct confrontation with the Army and evaded patrols to the point that there was almost something divine about their passage. They were not just like Young's trekkers from the Midwest to the Great Salt Lake, or the Fundamentalists who had fled to Mexico after the 1890s - they were the Jews in the deserts of Sinai, and Cowley was their Moses. With the death of Taylor in Sonora in October 1916 of stomach cancer and Woolley's disinterest in political leadership, Cowley was now the undisputed master of a concentrated community of Fundamentalist colonias in Sonora and Chihuahua upon his arrival in early March 1918, and though Woolley was elected Prophet, Cowley was the one who held power in the "True Quorum."
The arrival of Cowley's hardened fighters integrated them with a robust, experienced community of insurgents in Mexico who had already served some use to Mexican authorities, and the consolidation of FLDS control of the areas around Agua Prieta was rapid. The Prime Minister of Mexico since late 1915, Bernardo Reyes, was a former general who had come to prominence as a young officer fighting the Revolt of the Caudillos, a severe civil war in much of northern Mexico in the early 1880s that had threatened the Empire's foundation and persuaded Reyes that independent thinking across the poorer, more isolated north threatened Mexico City's authority; this line of thinking had become further entrenched as it was conservative landowners in the Rio Bravo Valley who had been most eager to go to war against the United States, and the most successful thorn in the Mexican Army's side during the war had not been John Pershing but rather Pancho Villa's bandits.
The use of Mormons as Mexican Army auxiliaries in the war had left Taylor's proteges with excellent relationships with Mexican authorities, and after Villa's defeat at Chihuahua and his flight to exile in California, Reyes had turned a blind eye to Mormons being used as his catspaws to mop up the remnants of his considerable list of enemies along what was now the border with the United States. As such, by early 1918, scattered bands of Fundamentalist Mormons controlled much of the border country, and Cowley's arrival helped organize and unite them into a more cohesive group. Colonias across Sonora sprung up as Fundamentalists and even just theologically conservative Mormons rejecting peace with the Federals flowed south, their exodus not discouraged by the government. Names like Smithsburg, Youngstown, New Nauvoo, New Jerusalem were given to large settlements, where polygamous families quickly flourished and, with the tacit support of Mexico, quickly cemented themselves as Reyismo's strongest ally in the North, to the great chagrin of the Catholic establishment that had already been defeated by the North's frequent wars.
The Third Resistance thus ended in the United States, but unlike the Second Resistance, it was almost certainly not a decisive defeat for political anti-Federal Mormonism. The Church in Utah and Idaho was badly riven between moderates seen as sellouts to Federal authority and conservatives viewed as cranks sympathetic to apostate Fundamentalists; Fundamentalism, meanwhile, had found its new heartland in the hills of Mexico, where their colonias were romanticized to impoverished Mormons in Utah chafing at Federal rule by the military or, upon achieving statehood in 1922, the machine of Boss King. Cowley's colonists became not just the hammer of Mexican national authority in the wild deserts of the North, either; they quickly established themselves as the backbone of the vast smuggling network that quickly penetrated Arizona and California and, out of reach of Federal authority, built a state-within-a-state within Mexico where they were unequivocally in ascendance..."
- Soldiers of God: The Long Mormon War with the United States
Jorge Wilcken Romney Pratt, Bandito, Businessman, and former Governor of Chihuahua was indicted by American authorities as the head of a sprawling drug and arms smuggling ring which operated along the US-Mexican border...
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Love it, and yes that’s basically the idea.
George and Lenore ITTL are of course extremely unlikely to meet so Mitt is of course butterflied, not that the Romney family would have a high likelihood of achieving their OTL success anyway in this America that has a massive hate-boner for Mormons still and has tried to Boer War them twice now.
Now I've got this image of US border guards in OTL Arizona looking for LDS Garments as a sign of people that need extra attention. (When in reality they would probably cross into Texas and then double back into OTL New Mexico. Though the 1920s OTL change allowing Garments to only reach the knee and elbow (since then shortened again) would probably make it easier to tell FLDS (of one flavor or another) from LDS.
And I see the Alberta Stakes members doing the same sort of things on the US Canadian Border that OTL FLDS did with the Utah-Arizona border (move to whichever side is doing fewer raids), *but* this would be less effective since it would be entirely possible to put together law enforcement that isn't LDS in any form. (Part of the issue in the past with Utah cracking down on it is the law enforcement being LDS might literally be people whose Grandfather was a polygamist). Note the Texas authorities were the ones that most heavily cracked down on the FLDS post 1990.
So instead of the Cristeros wars iTTL, we have a government "policies" that favor FLDS over Catholics in certain places...
And we'll see how the politically conservative FLDS fit into Canadian politics.
Short term, the benefits for Reyes and Mexico are certain. However, 'state-within-a-state' and Mexico in the same sentence... That sounds ominous.
In the TL. It's Implied the Louis would do a "Northern Reconciliation" and Lascuráin as a disasterous short prime minister. I guess RotC 2.0?
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Checking for garments is pretty bleak, lolNow I've got this image of US border guards in OTL Arizona looking for LDS Garments as a sign of people that need extra attention. (When in reality they would probably cross into Texas and then double back into OTL New Mexico. Though the 1920s OTL change allowing Garments to only reach the knee and elbow (since then shortened again) would probably make it easier to tell FLDS (of one flavor or another) from LDS.
And I see the Alberta Stakes members doing the same sort of things on the US Canadian Border that OTL FLDS did with the Utah-Arizona border (move to whichever side is doing fewer raids), *but* this would be less effective since it would be entirely possible to put together law enforcement that isn't LDS in any form. (Part of the issue in the past with Utah cracking down on it is the law enforcement being LDS might literally be people whose Grandfather was a polygamist). Note the Texas authorities were the ones that most heavily cracked down on the FLDS post 1990.
So instead of the Cristeros wars iTTL, we have a government "policies" that favor FLDS over Catholics in certain places...
And we'll see how the politically conservative FLDS fit into Canadian politics.
The Alberta Stakes are small enough, and in a concentrated geographic area, that they probably are fairly irrelevant at the national level outside of a riding or two
Nothing quite that extreme, but Reyes’ short-term thinking around power consolidation will have some long-term knock on effects
I can’t recall to what extent you said TTL Mexico is modeled on OTL Malaysia but there are definitely going to be some similarities there in terms of economic development and the size and role of gray/black markets.
I can't say I know much about Malaysia, to be honest, beyond its unique demographic profile/fault lines, but yes, Mexico is sort of meant ITTL to be a pastice of various East/Southeast Asian and Southern European economies for better or worse
protectorate-y. Probably slightly better developed than Vietnam, but not as well-developed as Siam, which has had a much more ambitious growth model than OTL here with German support. It's still a colony after all, not an independent state, though the Germans see its value more in having a regional toehold than as an extractive colony.
Do they keep troops and ships in Cambodia? Also I think by now Japan is going to start courting Siam over to its side.
The German Oriental Squadron (or Far East Squadron, I'm ambivalent on the name) is based out of Kampong Som, yes. Mindanao may make more sense long term as the premier Far Eastern port for the Germans, but at this time they find Cambodia more reliable and developed for their needs.
And, yes, absolutely. I should probably pen an update on that subject specifically...
The Happy Warrior
"...emblematic of the Smith-Hearst feud.
Smith would later remark that in the end it worked out for the best that he did not receive the Democratic line for the Mayoralty of New York in 1917; while it is likely he would have won that election, it would have thus also likely foreclosed upon his ever becoming Governor (certainly in 1918), and his rise to a figure of national prominence rather than toiling as yet another "municipal mick in Manhattan." Bitter as he may have been about being denied the nomination in favor of John Hylan, whom Smith otherwise liked, a Smith who beat Morris Hillquit to become Mayor of New York was a Smith that would never have risen to be America's first Catholic President just a decade later.
The 1917 elections were also, in another sense, an important event not just because Smith would wind up in the office that made him nationally prominent thereafter, but rather because it was something a deck-clearing event for a generation of Democratic politicians. Smith and Wagner were the rising stars of New York politics, associated with Tammany but less dependent on it than generations past, while not being overtly hostile to the organization in the way that the Roosevelt faction of the party was, which had already anointed young war hero Franklin, who would be honorably discharged from the Navy and return to civilian life in 1918, as its torch-bearer for the future as Teddy's eldest two sons had died in the war, his third son Archibald was severely wounded, and his youngest Quentin still far too wet behind the ears to even begin dreaming of a major campaign. In this way, they were largely aligned with Sulzer, who had become something of their political patron and had, by the end of the war, come almost entirely around to a position of opposition to Tammany and, by proxy, Hearst.
The election of Hillquit as Mayor of New York was thus a massive blow to the Hearst-Murphy faction, much more so than the revelation of Hearst's affair with actress Marion Davies the following year would be. The horse-trading and maneuvering at the 1914 Democratic state convention to pick a statewide slate as well as their federal statewide candidate had, quite arguably, cost the Democrats a Senate seat, but Hearst's intervention to block Smith's placement as candidate for Mayor - and thus placing him in charge of Tammany's votes, and threatening Hearst's ambitions to return as Governor in 1918 - was a considerably more antagonistic and provocative move than the jockeying of three years before that had simply produced a weaker candidate than Democrats would have liked. It was thus also much easier to draw a direct line from Hearst and Murphy to the defeat of Hylan by the narrowest of margins by Hillquit and the ascension of a non-Democrat to the Gracie Mansion for the first time since Henry George and the first time a Socialist had won a major municipal election east of the Appalachians. Smith had maybe helped James Wadsworth get elected; to Democratic operatives left fuming the morning after election day, Hearst had definitely helped Hillquit take the mayoralty.
Was this entirely true? Perhaps, perhaps not. Hylan was no gruff old conservative but the Sulzers and Roosevelts of the world nonetheless did little to actively help him; he was a reformer at heart, but his more reformist ideas were easily outflanked by Hillquit who also ran on municipal ownership of the city's subways. Ironically, considering the reputation Socialists had at the time in Western states, it was a Liberal candidate who played spoiler in William M. Bennett, a dull and uninspiring attorney picked under dubious circumstances by Liberal bosses when other candidates were unwilling to humiliate themselves publicly in what was regarded as a suicidal campaign; Bennett drew about eight percent of the vote, probably a fair indication of President Root's popularity in his home city of New York (or at least a fair representation of how many voters were tied to Wall Street banks). A firm anti-syndicalist and thus a moderate by Socialist standards, Hillquit was able to position himself as a candidate of the tens of thousands of new New Yorkers of the past twenty years, easily winning precincts heavily-occupied by recent immigrants in addition to dominating South Bronx's Jewish neighborhoods (and some middle-class Jewish areas keen to elect the first Jew to the Mansion); he also performed well in the areas most beset by unemployment and disease outbreaks thanks to his pledge to build a dozen new public hospitals in his first term. It was noteworthy, that though Smith was in many ways just as much "the Irish candidate" as Hylan was, he would win landslides in the same wards as Hillquit just a year later, as well as in his return to Albany in 1926.
Hearst's intervention against Smith may not have been particularly noteworthy to the electorate, but it permanently damaged him with Tammany Hall, which for the first time in two decades would now be locked entirely out of patronage by City Hall with a Mayor even less friendly to them than Roosevelt had been; the gamble by Hearst and Murphy to get a loyal footsoldier into the Mansion had failed, even if narrowly. Murphy's political instincts, once sacrosanct, were called into question; Hearst's insistence on having a direct say in New York Democratic politics from the periphery until he could maneuver his way back into its center was now not a boon but rather baggage. Murphy would be dead in 1921 but his influence faded fast and he avoided unilateral moves in the last years of his life, and now it was Smith - with a foot inside Tammany's doors but also a favorite of the Sulzerites for his work after the Triangle Fire - who stood with clean hands and the ascendant position in New York Democratic circles.
1917, for a brief moment, suggested as a sea change in New York and potentially national politics - a Jewish, Socialist former Congressman had won the Mayoralty of the biggest city in the country as unemployment and ethnic anxiety fueled an increasingly radical politics, just a year after the war had been won and it was thought the country was to "return to normalcy." But while Hillquit did bring a whole host of Socialist aldermen in on his coattails and governed on a remarkably left-wing "sewer socialist" platform, he would be defeated decisively by "Beau James" Walker in 1921 and left politics for good thereafter; the Socialist Party would elect Fiorello LaGuardia [1] to three terms as Mayor in the 1930s and 1940s, but he governed effectively as an independent with cross-partisan support and the Board of Aldermen's Socialist contingent dwindled to near-nothing by the end of his Mayoralty. The great red tide in New York may have washed up in 1917, but it washed out just as quickly, and when the anti-Liberal tide washed in even greater the next year, it was Smith who surfed that wave into the State House and his first chance at a national platform..." [2]
- The Happy Warrior
[1] He was, originally, a Socialist IOTL!
[2] This was originally going to be a The American Socialists entry, but I found the angle of generational transition from the Hearst/Murphy/Sulzer/Roosevelt crowd to Smith a more interesting hook, especially as we set up Hearst's further attempts to finagle his way back into national prominence with another desired comeback and Smith's emergence as a major Irish Catholic figure of national import
Smith would later remark that in the end it worked out for the best that he did not receive the Democratic line for the Mayoralty of New York in 1917; while it is likely he would have won that election, it would have thus also likely foreclosed upon his ever becoming Governor (certainly in 1918), and his rise to a figure of national prominence rather than toiling as yet another "municipal mick in Manhattan." Bitter as he may have been about being denied the nomination in favor of John Hylan, whom Smith otherwise liked, a Smith who beat Morris Hillquit to become Mayor of New York was a Smith that would never have risen to be America's first Catholic President just a decade later.
The 1917 elections were also, in another sense, an important event not just because Smith would wind up in the office that made him nationally prominent thereafter, but rather because it was something a deck-clearing event for a generation of Democratic politicians. Smith and Wagner were the rising stars of New York politics, associated with Tammany but less dependent on it than generations past, while not being overtly hostile to the organization in the way that the Roosevelt faction of the party was, which had already anointed young war hero Franklin, who would be honorably discharged from the Navy and return to civilian life in 1918, as its torch-bearer for the future as Teddy's eldest two sons had died in the war, his third son Archibald was severely wounded, and his youngest Quentin still far too wet behind the ears to even begin dreaming of a major campaign. In this way, they were largely aligned with Sulzer, who had become something of their political patron and had, by the end of the war, come almost entirely around to a position of opposition to Tammany and, by proxy, Hearst.
The election of Hillquit as Mayor of New York was thus a massive blow to the Hearst-Murphy faction, much more so than the revelation of Hearst's affair with actress Marion Davies the following year would be. The horse-trading and maneuvering at the 1914 Democratic state convention to pick a statewide slate as well as their federal statewide candidate had, quite arguably, cost the Democrats a Senate seat, but Hearst's intervention to block Smith's placement as candidate for Mayor - and thus placing him in charge of Tammany's votes, and threatening Hearst's ambitions to return as Governor in 1918 - was a considerably more antagonistic and provocative move than the jockeying of three years before that had simply produced a weaker candidate than Democrats would have liked. It was thus also much easier to draw a direct line from Hearst and Murphy to the defeat of Hylan by the narrowest of margins by Hillquit and the ascension of a non-Democrat to the Gracie Mansion for the first time since Henry George and the first time a Socialist had won a major municipal election east of the Appalachians. Smith had maybe helped James Wadsworth get elected; to Democratic operatives left fuming the morning after election day, Hearst had definitely helped Hillquit take the mayoralty.
Was this entirely true? Perhaps, perhaps not. Hylan was no gruff old conservative but the Sulzers and Roosevelts of the world nonetheless did little to actively help him; he was a reformer at heart, but his more reformist ideas were easily outflanked by Hillquit who also ran on municipal ownership of the city's subways. Ironically, considering the reputation Socialists had at the time in Western states, it was a Liberal candidate who played spoiler in William M. Bennett, a dull and uninspiring attorney picked under dubious circumstances by Liberal bosses when other candidates were unwilling to humiliate themselves publicly in what was regarded as a suicidal campaign; Bennett drew about eight percent of the vote, probably a fair indication of President Root's popularity in his home city of New York (or at least a fair representation of how many voters were tied to Wall Street banks). A firm anti-syndicalist and thus a moderate by Socialist standards, Hillquit was able to position himself as a candidate of the tens of thousands of new New Yorkers of the past twenty years, easily winning precincts heavily-occupied by recent immigrants in addition to dominating South Bronx's Jewish neighborhoods (and some middle-class Jewish areas keen to elect the first Jew to the Mansion); he also performed well in the areas most beset by unemployment and disease outbreaks thanks to his pledge to build a dozen new public hospitals in his first term. It was noteworthy, that though Smith was in many ways just as much "the Irish candidate" as Hylan was, he would win landslides in the same wards as Hillquit just a year later, as well as in his return to Albany in 1926.
Hearst's intervention against Smith may not have been particularly noteworthy to the electorate, but it permanently damaged him with Tammany Hall, which for the first time in two decades would now be locked entirely out of patronage by City Hall with a Mayor even less friendly to them than Roosevelt had been; the gamble by Hearst and Murphy to get a loyal footsoldier into the Mansion had failed, even if narrowly. Murphy's political instincts, once sacrosanct, were called into question; Hearst's insistence on having a direct say in New York Democratic politics from the periphery until he could maneuver his way back into its center was now not a boon but rather baggage. Murphy would be dead in 1921 but his influence faded fast and he avoided unilateral moves in the last years of his life, and now it was Smith - with a foot inside Tammany's doors but also a favorite of the Sulzerites for his work after the Triangle Fire - who stood with clean hands and the ascendant position in New York Democratic circles.
1917, for a brief moment, suggested as a sea change in New York and potentially national politics - a Jewish, Socialist former Congressman had won the Mayoralty of the biggest city in the country as unemployment and ethnic anxiety fueled an increasingly radical politics, just a year after the war had been won and it was thought the country was to "return to normalcy." But while Hillquit did bring a whole host of Socialist aldermen in on his coattails and governed on a remarkably left-wing "sewer socialist" platform, he would be defeated decisively by "Beau James" Walker in 1921 and left politics for good thereafter; the Socialist Party would elect Fiorello LaGuardia [1] to three terms as Mayor in the 1930s and 1940s, but he governed effectively as an independent with cross-partisan support and the Board of Aldermen's Socialist contingent dwindled to near-nothing by the end of his Mayoralty. The great red tide in New York may have washed up in 1917, but it washed out just as quickly, and when the anti-Liberal tide washed in even greater the next year, it was Smith who surfed that wave into the State House and his first chance at a national platform..." [2]
- The Happy Warrior
[1] He was, originally, a Socialist IOTL!
[2] This was originally going to be a The American Socialists entry, but I found the angle of generational transition from the Hearst/Murphy/Sulzer/Roosevelt crowd to Smith a more interesting hook, especially as we set up Hearst's further attempts to finagle his way back into national prominence with another desired comeback and Smith's emergence as a major Irish Catholic figure of national import
Our New Asia: Revolution and Retrenchment in the Early 20th Century Far East
"...propped up by his notoriety as one of the last major figures of the Revolutionary era who was not only a talented guerilla but also one of Bonifacio's closest confidants; [Ladislao] Diwa's re-election by the Supremo was more a reflection of Bonifacio's titanic prestige with the Katipunan than the President's own accomplishments, popularity or credibility.
This was damaging, both in the short and long term, not only to Diwa the man but to the Katipunan institutionally. Like Bonifacio, Diwa had started off his career as an enthusiastic Japanophile, viewing the Meiji Restoration as a model for a post-independence Philippines and Japan's support for the KKK that ended with outright force against Spain as the foundation of a new relationship in insular East Asia in which the Tokyo-Manila axis would form a backbone of Pan-Asian, anti-colonial sentiment. Times had changed dramatically, however; it was British and, to a lesser extent, French banks which lined Manila's streets, the Royal Navy ensuring no Japanese domination of the Philippines for their benefit rather than Manila's. As the years went on, Diwa had pivoted from one of the most Japanophile figures in Manila to perhaps the most staunchly Anglophile, and he looked less to Japan's transformation of the prior fifty years and instead drew inspiration from the Kuomintang of China, looking positively to its republican nature (in sharp contrast to monarchic Japan), its ideological and financial support of revolutionary organizations across Asia, and the fact that many of its chief leaders were Christian, including many Catholics. Diwa explicitly went so far as to argue that the Katipunan and Kuomintang were kindred spirits, "two sides of one coin," and approvingly acknowledged that Sun Yat-sen had been in part inspired by Andres Bonifacio and Jose Rizal, the two intellectual titans of the Philippine Revolution and in whose shadow Diwa comfortably lived.
There is a line of thinking in modern Filipino scholarship that suggests that Diwa was, as President, a corrupt old buffoon on the take from British interests, and that he was also more interested in bureaucratic wrangling than the concerns of the people. This is unfair - Diwa's admiration of Britain and China was genuinely felt, and he was often regarded as the best pure politician of his generation who was committed to making the Katipunan a legitimate political party rather than a post-revolutionary oligarchy. That being said, while a famed revolutionary and an incredibly talented backroom operator who would have made an outstanding President for the Philippines of a decade earlier, Diwa was poorly-equipped to handle the emerging ideological and regional splits emerging in the country. Modernizing a bureaucracy with Western help was one thing, but it was not an ideology; defeating warlordism in much of southern Luzon was a major achievement, but it also removed patronage structures locals had relied upon.
The real problem for Diwa was that it was Japan that had driven off Spain, not Great Britain, and a whole generation of Filipino revolutionaries had come of age, now often with children old enough to hear stories of the war years, gazing longingly at Tokyo. British investors often gobbled up Filipino farmland that had been held in communal property or by the Church as the Western-style financial system allowed liens and foreclosures on surveyed parcels; American mercenaries who had been fighting alongside Filipinos just years before were now overseers, taking British coin on the growing and brutal plantations. Nothing the Anglo-American consortiums emerging in Manila ever did were even close to as bad as the misrule of the friars under Spain, but there was very much a feeling that Diwa's explicit pivot away from Japan had led to a very noticeable regression in the Philippines, from the ugly colonialism of Spain to the soft imperialism of new, smiling, ostensibly liberal foreign powers.
This was a situation that was untenable and unsustainable to a great many Katipuneros, many of whom wondered what exactly the party they had literally bled for even stood for anymore, or if it stood for anything other than itself. And it was into a crack such as this that a man like Artemio Ricarte could wedge his way in..."
- Our New Asia: Revolution and Retrenchment in the Early 20th Century Far East
This was damaging, both in the short and long term, not only to Diwa the man but to the Katipunan institutionally. Like Bonifacio, Diwa had started off his career as an enthusiastic Japanophile, viewing the Meiji Restoration as a model for a post-independence Philippines and Japan's support for the KKK that ended with outright force against Spain as the foundation of a new relationship in insular East Asia in which the Tokyo-Manila axis would form a backbone of Pan-Asian, anti-colonial sentiment. Times had changed dramatically, however; it was British and, to a lesser extent, French banks which lined Manila's streets, the Royal Navy ensuring no Japanese domination of the Philippines for their benefit rather than Manila's. As the years went on, Diwa had pivoted from one of the most Japanophile figures in Manila to perhaps the most staunchly Anglophile, and he looked less to Japan's transformation of the prior fifty years and instead drew inspiration from the Kuomintang of China, looking positively to its republican nature (in sharp contrast to monarchic Japan), its ideological and financial support of revolutionary organizations across Asia, and the fact that many of its chief leaders were Christian, including many Catholics. Diwa explicitly went so far as to argue that the Katipunan and Kuomintang were kindred spirits, "two sides of one coin," and approvingly acknowledged that Sun Yat-sen had been in part inspired by Andres Bonifacio and Jose Rizal, the two intellectual titans of the Philippine Revolution and in whose shadow Diwa comfortably lived.
There is a line of thinking in modern Filipino scholarship that suggests that Diwa was, as President, a corrupt old buffoon on the take from British interests, and that he was also more interested in bureaucratic wrangling than the concerns of the people. This is unfair - Diwa's admiration of Britain and China was genuinely felt, and he was often regarded as the best pure politician of his generation who was committed to making the Katipunan a legitimate political party rather than a post-revolutionary oligarchy. That being said, while a famed revolutionary and an incredibly talented backroom operator who would have made an outstanding President for the Philippines of a decade earlier, Diwa was poorly-equipped to handle the emerging ideological and regional splits emerging in the country. Modernizing a bureaucracy with Western help was one thing, but it was not an ideology; defeating warlordism in much of southern Luzon was a major achievement, but it also removed patronage structures locals had relied upon.
The real problem for Diwa was that it was Japan that had driven off Spain, not Great Britain, and a whole generation of Filipino revolutionaries had come of age, now often with children old enough to hear stories of the war years, gazing longingly at Tokyo. British investors often gobbled up Filipino farmland that had been held in communal property or by the Church as the Western-style financial system allowed liens and foreclosures on surveyed parcels; American mercenaries who had been fighting alongside Filipinos just years before were now overseers, taking British coin on the growing and brutal plantations. Nothing the Anglo-American consortiums emerging in Manila ever did were even close to as bad as the misrule of the friars under Spain, but there was very much a feeling that Diwa's explicit pivot away from Japan had led to a very noticeable regression in the Philippines, from the ugly colonialism of Spain to the soft imperialism of new, smiling, ostensibly liberal foreign powers.
This was a situation that was untenable and unsustainable to a great many Katipuneros, many of whom wondered what exactly the party they had literally bled for even stood for anymore, or if it stood for anything other than itself. And it was into a crack such as this that a man like Artemio Ricarte could wedge his way in..."
- Our New Asia: Revolution and Retrenchment in the Early 20th Century Far East