Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
dcharles
Banned
But at the same time, it is an apocalyptic event. It's hard to see a situation where the people don't invent that narrative even if it isn't foisted on them.
And an organic war-to-end war myth would be a very interesting to see on both sides of (or either side of) the Potomac.
I'm not sure the situation really warrants a "War to End All Wars" narritive from emerging, either imposed or organically. Primarily, because it's difficult to believe that the current conflict will potentially end ALL war, due to it's limited sphere - it has no bearing on Europe, Asia, Africa or the Pacific (by and large). Secondly, I think there are other narratives which will be fighting for primacy which are more compelling to the current conflict:
1) Vengeance for our Grandfathers: The Civil War was interrupted when France, and later Britain, recognized the Confederacy, meaning that the Union never got a chance to really show the Confederates who had the superior political and moral system. Now, two generations later, the Confederates are back at it again, and we get to give them one for the humiliation and sacrifices of our grandfathers.
2) Geopolitics: This is the war that needs to happen to finally make the United States safe from foreign intervention and secure our place as the dominant power in the Americas! Plus, those bastards stabbed us in the back and snuck attacked us!
3) Remember Maryland: This is a war of vengeancen not only for our grandfathers, but also for the good men and women who suffered under the Confederate yolk during the occupation. No civilized nation should act as they did, and we will get vengeance for those who died and, even more importantly, those who live with the scars of that dark time!
and, of course:
4) Abolition/War of Civilizations: The Union is marching to set the slave free and bring progressivism and enlightenment to the poor benighted Confederacy. We'll restucture their society so that they can finally take their place in the brotherhood of nations as a truly civilized country. Yes, it will be hard fighting, but their children will thank us for our sacrifice.
Likely, if you asked the common soldier, their reasons for fighting would be a mixture of all four of these; though I suspect as the war goes on the US relies more and more on 4 as their chief propaganda narrative (it plays really well to a domestic and international audience and makes it difficult for foreign powers to give much support to the Bloc Sud). But, because of this, I can't really see a "war to end all wars" thread ever developing - even when leaving out the limited geographic scope of this conflict, it would be competing with a number of other narratives which are simply far more compelling for the conflict in question.
dcharles
Banned
I'm not saying that soldiers at the time are saying that they're shooting people to end war. I'm saying that the damage to the Western Hemisphere is in many places catastrophic, and I can easily imagine a *popular* postwar quasi-pacifist movement arising in many of the nations.
In other words, I don't think that the OTL Lost Generation was fairly pacifist because of wartime propaganda. They were pacifist, instead, because they had all been through a horrible war.
Oh, I'd agree with that - there's likely an entire generation who is going to e very hesitant to start another war any time soon. I was referrign to the official "War to End Wars" propaganda which was used by the US during the time and the disillusionment it helped spawn when it was over (not the sole reasonfor disillusionment, mind you, but a pretty nasty one all the same)
dcharles
Banned
Yeah, lol. After your very well done four point response, I realized we were talking about different things.
Most definitely
I agree with this in full. There’s no real utopian liberal internationalist impulse behind the US here, either, as that energy is channeled instead into abolitionism (via the personage of Cabot Lodge, irony fully intentional). So these narratives would certainly dominate and speak to the sense that the US here is more out for blood and revanchism post-9/9 than any egalitarian ideas about the postwar world
I'm *really* curious as to how Lejeune is viewed in the CSA 30 or more years after the war. And if I've kept things straight in terms of war crimes, Lejeune is going to be the equivalent of Lee or how Rommel is viewed in TLs where Rommel survives the war, captured and perhaps put into some sort of house arrest, but with the expectation that he will walk completely free within a year or two.
Which reminds me, did the US keep *any* Mexican Soldiers imprisoned for war crimes after the peace treaty?
I also just realized, it is *entirely* possible that a European power could offer Lejeune a significant command either before or during the CEW), and I'm not sure the USA would object that much (unless Lejeune is keeping the Confederate Political leadership from coming apart which isn't too unbelievable)
Which reminds me, did the US keep *any* Mexican Soldiers imprisoned for war crimes after the peace treaty?
I also just realized, it is *entirely* possible that a European power could offer Lejeune a significant command either before or during the CEW), and I'm not sure the USA would object that much (unless Lejeune is keeping the Confederate Political leadership from coming apart which isn't too unbelievable)
Last edited:
The Confederacy has no friends at this point* and I'm not honestly sure what (short of making Whites slaves to Negros) that the US putting into the peace treaty that would be too much for a Foreign Power that matters (And I'm only putting the UK, France and *maybe* Mexico and Germany in that Category). The treaty between the USA and CSA will have aspects of the Chilean Peace Treaty (the Confederates are right about that one), the treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo (negotiated by someone *other* than Trist) and the OTL Japanese peace treaty.
*Maybe Brazil...
With the shortages of food and medical supplies, the loss of trained personnel, destruction of medical and sanitation facilities across the South and population disruptions, the Confederacy is in the perfect condition for disease outbreaks.
Lejeune being able to hold Hall at the VA/NC border for six weeks even as the Confederacy collapses around him in Red/Black/whatever October will be to his credit and do much to burnish his reputation, that is for sure
*Looks nervously at calendar showing the year 1918*
Fort Riley (the place where the first recognized case occured) will almost certainly have that name, Riley lived and died before the POD. As to which groups are training there and for what, I'm not sure. It would be even darker if that was the place for training Negros to be Hellfighters and part of the occupation force.
By 1918, there’ll be way less soldiers going through training, even despite the major occupation forces. So the 1918 flu will be much more minor than OTL’s.Fort Riley (the place where the first recognized case occured) will almost certainly have that name, Riley lived and died before the POD. As to which groups are training there and for what, I'm not sure. It would be even darker if that was the place for training Negros to be Hellfighters and part of the occupation force.
That said, especially in the CSA, it’ll be pretty bad.
Feel free to not answer this yet as I don't necessarily want you to spoil anything ahead of time, but in a world where the CSA surrenders either July 4, 1916 (when Atlanta falls) or even June 16, 1916 (when Richmond falls) I wonder A - how many fewer people are dead and B - if/how the final peace treaty is less punitive towards the CSA as a result of ~5 fewer months of fighting in such a scenario.
Also, in a world where Tillman and his Democrats are still in charge, does the CSA throw in the towel in the summer of 1916 if, say, Oscar Underwood is POTCS instead of Vardaman?
Also, in a world where Tillman and his Democrats are still in charge, does the CSA throw in the towel in the summer of 1916 if, say, Oscar Underwood is POTCS instead of Vardaman?
Fair questions. Not sure what the delta on casualty rates would be (maybe disproportionately more surviving civilians without Pershing turning Georgia into the new Carthage?), but I also don’t know that an administration where Root is SoS rather than President is any more lenient (especially since Lodge’s voice will be loud in either the Senate or at State). Hughes’ penchant to be hands-off with Root and their working partnership means that the treaty is driven by Root’s desires regardless of it being in July/August or anytime after 11/11.
As for the Tillmanites… maybe. Underwood at least would probably listen to his advisors who make it clear that without Richmond and Atlanta there essentially is no Confederacy
Great point re: Root and Lodge being in charge no matter when the CSA throws in the towel. I guess the real interesting question is what happens if Lindley Garrison and George Turner are the two pointmen in charge instead of Root and Lodge.
Turner and Lodge have pretty similar worldviews when it comes to the Confederate threat, even if Turner is not as tight with abolitionist groups as Lodge (they weren’t called the “Hawks Nest” for nothing!)
Garrison is more interesting, since he’s close with Root personally rather than politically but he’s more of an internationalist (put otherwise, Root maintained and expanded upon Garrison’s proto-“Axis” once its scaffolding was put in place, but he may not have pursued the American-Argentine Alliance on its own first had he been in the seat). So the ideological biases he approaches a final treaty with could be different. Then again, the Hearst admin was burned repeatedly by the CSA starting as early as 1905, and Garrison’s experience and indeed his advice to Root during the 1912-13 transition suggest to me that he would not trust Richmond, at all.
TLDR; 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...anxiety.
It was lost on nobody that Root had never himself run on a general election ticket for any office, and though he was - for a lifelong bureaucrat, at least - a fairly talented orator who had spoken at every Liberal convention since 1888, a great deal of pressure was made to keep him "above the fray" of a general election campaign, both due to his rust as a campaigner and to create a sense of inevitability around his candidacy and lean into the public perception of him as a talented administrator hard at work in Philadelphia to bring the war to a conclusion.
Root did not mind this, and his contribution to the campaign was remaining cloistered in the capital meeting with diplomats and dignitaries while promising "the grand plan for peace" that would follow the conclusion of the presidential campaign and the war, meeting well-wishers at his fairly modest townhouse on Chestnut Street and giving interviews to any journalist, domestic or foreign, who needed a quote, all while a legion of surrogates fanned out across New York and the competitive Midwest where the election would be won or lost to make his case. Hughes was highly reluctant, due to his concerns for decorum while the war was still ongoing, to make many campaign stops, as was Vice President Hadley; instead, Root relied upon figures as diverse as Pennsylvania Senator Boies Penrose and American Bar Association chairman George Wickersham to rally conservatives put off by the Hughes Presidency's statism to the Hiram Johnsons, Bainbridge Colbys and Richard Yateses of the world to speak plainly to progressives about the need to keep the momentum of the Hughes years headed forward and "keep the fingers of Tammany off of the articles of peace."
The campaign of 1916 did not occur in a vacuum, of course, and was subsumed by events in the South but also, increasingly, at home. August and September of 1916 are remembered for Pershing's March to the Sea, and October for the final liberation of Texas and the mass surrenders in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida that placed American landships in spitting distance of New Orleans, and popular history acts in many ways as if nothing of import occurred other than the rapid collapse of the Confederacy in the final four months of the war starting in Atlanta and Richmond. But the first signs of economic trouble revealed itself as early as the late summer of 1916; shipyards in Seattle and Oakland had long since begun shuttering their production lines or converting tonnage to civilian vessels after two years of trying to produce as many naval hulls as they could, and unemployment in both cities more than doubled over the course of late 1916, presaging issues as munitions factories, textile mills producing uniforms, and other industrial production for wartime began gradually slowing down their output in anticipation that the needs of December 1916 would be well below those of September 1916. Stimson did his best at trying to manage this slowdown, using Root's deputies to secure contracts to sell munitions brokered through Drexel & Morgan, but hours being cut was already a discussion being had in local newspapers as the campaign advanced.
The economic minds behind the American war machine were fairly divided on what, if anything, to do about this issue. Much of the labor that swelled American industry in 1913-16 was foreign-born, and many politicians within the Liberal Party ambivalent about immigration suggested that a labor surplus could perhaps persuade unemployed Italians, Poles and Serbs who had made great sums in the war years to return home to start families and live comfortably in Europe. Other figures, such as New York's powerful financier George Baker or the soon-to-be-infamous Andrew Mellon, [1] viewed the coming labor glut and wind down of industrial wartime production as an opportunity to perhaps undo some of the "statist" rationing and economically nationalist policies Hughes had put in place that they believed, incorrectly, would be illusory and temporary.
While the consortium of bankers and investors who had helped finance the war, led by J.P. "Jack" Morgan, Jr. were not the shadowy cabal of puppeteers in the Root era that they were often perceived as or even particularly allied to the administration - Morgan was heavily exposed to massive amounts of French loans and assets and spent little time concerned with domestic American politics after the end of the war, while Baker never forgave Root his full-throated support of a peacetime income tax and made it a point not to associate - the men who had collectively financed the behemoth that crushed the Bloc Sud were in sharp disagreement on what the postwar period would look like, only that a sharp break from the economic trajectory of the Hearst and Hughes years was needed..." [2][3][4]
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
[1] Foreshadowing...
[2] Suffice to say this is not going to end well, for Root or anybody else.
[3] As a further addendum to this, the US finds itself in a very different situation here having Morgan, Baker et al not be the financiers for Britain and France, and thus emerging as a net creditor, but rather having them finance an American war, which means that the balance sheet facing the US in terms of its red ledger is primarily domestic. This is a big part of what makes the USA's economic foundations in the dire 1917-21 period so shaky; it has ballooning debt after the war and will have a deflationary, fiscally tight-fisted government in place during that time right as demobilization occurs and they have to start servicing that debt
[4] The idea for this update, for whatever it is worth, is based on the 1918-19 and 1945 recessions, which began even before the war ended but when it was obvious that peace was at hand and wartime production started to rapidly wind down in anticipation.
It was lost on nobody that Root had never himself run on a general election ticket for any office, and though he was - for a lifelong bureaucrat, at least - a fairly talented orator who had spoken at every Liberal convention since 1888, a great deal of pressure was made to keep him "above the fray" of a general election campaign, both due to his rust as a campaigner and to create a sense of inevitability around his candidacy and lean into the public perception of him as a talented administrator hard at work in Philadelphia to bring the war to a conclusion.
Root did not mind this, and his contribution to the campaign was remaining cloistered in the capital meeting with diplomats and dignitaries while promising "the grand plan for peace" that would follow the conclusion of the presidential campaign and the war, meeting well-wishers at his fairly modest townhouse on Chestnut Street and giving interviews to any journalist, domestic or foreign, who needed a quote, all while a legion of surrogates fanned out across New York and the competitive Midwest where the election would be won or lost to make his case. Hughes was highly reluctant, due to his concerns for decorum while the war was still ongoing, to make many campaign stops, as was Vice President Hadley; instead, Root relied upon figures as diverse as Pennsylvania Senator Boies Penrose and American Bar Association chairman George Wickersham to rally conservatives put off by the Hughes Presidency's statism to the Hiram Johnsons, Bainbridge Colbys and Richard Yateses of the world to speak plainly to progressives about the need to keep the momentum of the Hughes years headed forward and "keep the fingers of Tammany off of the articles of peace."
The campaign of 1916 did not occur in a vacuum, of course, and was subsumed by events in the South but also, increasingly, at home. August and September of 1916 are remembered for Pershing's March to the Sea, and October for the final liberation of Texas and the mass surrenders in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida that placed American landships in spitting distance of New Orleans, and popular history acts in many ways as if nothing of import occurred other than the rapid collapse of the Confederacy in the final four months of the war starting in Atlanta and Richmond. But the first signs of economic trouble revealed itself as early as the late summer of 1916; shipyards in Seattle and Oakland had long since begun shuttering their production lines or converting tonnage to civilian vessels after two years of trying to produce as many naval hulls as they could, and unemployment in both cities more than doubled over the course of late 1916, presaging issues as munitions factories, textile mills producing uniforms, and other industrial production for wartime began gradually slowing down their output in anticipation that the needs of December 1916 would be well below those of September 1916. Stimson did his best at trying to manage this slowdown, using Root's deputies to secure contracts to sell munitions brokered through Drexel & Morgan, but hours being cut was already a discussion being had in local newspapers as the campaign advanced.
The economic minds behind the American war machine were fairly divided on what, if anything, to do about this issue. Much of the labor that swelled American industry in 1913-16 was foreign-born, and many politicians within the Liberal Party ambivalent about immigration suggested that a labor surplus could perhaps persuade unemployed Italians, Poles and Serbs who had made great sums in the war years to return home to start families and live comfortably in Europe. Other figures, such as New York's powerful financier George Baker or the soon-to-be-infamous Andrew Mellon, [1] viewed the coming labor glut and wind down of industrial wartime production as an opportunity to perhaps undo some of the "statist" rationing and economically nationalist policies Hughes had put in place that they believed, incorrectly, would be illusory and temporary.
While the consortium of bankers and investors who had helped finance the war, led by J.P. "Jack" Morgan, Jr. were not the shadowy cabal of puppeteers in the Root era that they were often perceived as or even particularly allied to the administration - Morgan was heavily exposed to massive amounts of French loans and assets and spent little time concerned with domestic American politics after the end of the war, while Baker never forgave Root his full-throated support of a peacetime income tax and made it a point not to associate - the men who had collectively financed the behemoth that crushed the Bloc Sud were in sharp disagreement on what the postwar period would look like, only that a sharp break from the economic trajectory of the Hearst and Hughes years was needed..." [2][3][4]
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
[1] Foreshadowing...
[2] Suffice to say this is not going to end well, for Root or anybody else.
[3] As a further addendum to this, the US finds itself in a very different situation here having Morgan, Baker et al not be the financiers for Britain and France, and thus emerging as a net creditor, but rather having them finance an American war, which means that the balance sheet facing the US in terms of its red ledger is primarily domestic. This is a big part of what makes the USA's economic foundations in the dire 1917-21 period so shaky; it has ballooning debt after the war and will have a deflationary, fiscally tight-fisted government in place during that time right as demobilization occurs and they have to start servicing that debt
[4] The idea for this update, for whatever it is worth, is based on the 1918-19 and 1945 recessions, which began even before the war ended but when it was obvious that peace was at hand and wartime production started to rapidly wind down in anticipation.
"Hey Elihu, what's your plan for dealing with the CSA?"
"I'll tell you after I get elected and not a minute before!"
"Great! Where do we sign up?" 🙄
Liberals in 1912: Vote for us, because a "meritocratic Cabinet, rather than the 'Tiger's Den' of Tammany Men who had surrounded Hearst in his second term had been one of Hughes' raisons d'etre, the core plank of his campaign." (Bolded emphasis is mine)
Public in 1912: Corrupt and incompetent Cabinet secretaries who only earned their position because of patronage are bad! We gotta vote Liberal!
Liberals 1913-1915: We appointed a wildly unqualified banker ("garbage-tier") in Myron Herrick to run the war department. His only qualification is that he's friends with the governor of Ohio - you know, the same former governor who is now our VP candidate in 1916. The guy does such a bad getting the country ready for war that Hughes fires him two months into the fighting.
Herrick's replacement at War is Nathan Goff, a man who is only better in comparison. He's way too old and stubborn to adapt to modern warfare, hamstringing the army of vital reinforcements just when they're trying to mount offenses in the summer of 1914.
Meanwhile, over at the Naval Department, we appointed a man who used his position to grease the pockets of his friends back home while also coordinating illegally with the city of Seattle to suppress union activity.
Liberals in 1916: Who cares about corrupt and incompetent Cabinet secretaries who only earned their position because of patronage? That's only a problem when Democrats do it after all!
Public in 1916: Yeah, who cares about that stuff? We gotta vote Liberal!
The double standard you've set up in this timeline is staggering. If a Democratic administration was half as corrupt and half as inept as the Hughes Cabinet has been the public would be howling and would throw them out on their asses. You know how I know? That's exactly what happened in 1912!
Yet the Liberals, once again, operate under different political rules. When will the decades of Liberal "well actually, we're the party of good clean government!" hypocrisy finally bite them in the ass?
Not to spoil too much but there’s a reason we introduce one Andrew Mellon in this update!