Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)

[KingSweden24]

TRIGGER WARNING​

"...levels of denial about how bad conditions were actually getting. Miserable as they may have been in cold trenches, especially the men huddled together in the frigid "Red Snow" around Chattanooga, Yankee soldiers received fresh and warm bread every day, soup with beef, chicken and vegetables, and when on leave on the Eastern Front had Baltimore and Philadelphia to visit for a week. Across the no man's land that separated the armies was a bleaker picture - skinny, emaciated Confederate soldiers eating bread composed mostly of sawdust and soup that was often little more than broth and whatever the cooks could find on hand that day, and they were rarely if ever granted leave for more than a few days, and then demanded to stay proximate, out of concern from the upper ranks that they would desert and go home. Dixie's forces were hungrier, more exhausted, and less respected by their superiors than the enemy, and as the war entered its final year it was beginning to become glaringly obvious.

But, at least, the command economy imposed by the Confederate War Department starting in early 1915 and dominated by the logistics-obsessed Ordnance chief John Taliaferro saw to it that the Confederate Army actually had food. If the dark days of the Lean Winter of 1914-15 had not already impressed upon Confederate policymakers the dire conditions in the countryside, the Hunger Winter of 1915-16 ended any such pretensions. The year before, at least, the Confederacy enjoyed open trade through a variety of ports with the outside world, but after Hilton Head and Florida Straits the blockade had tightened like a vice and no food got in or out of Confederate Gulf ports in particular. While the Confederacy had always enjoyed ample, high-quality farmland for agriculture, many plantations were still growing large quantities of cotton or other cash crops (though at a reduced level compared to the antebellum years) out of some misguided belief that, sooner or later, the markets for cotton would recover and pent-up demand would reimburse them after several hard years. The Army requisitioned tens of thousands of pounds of food per day, meaning that after a mediocre harvest in late 1915 there was barely anything left for the civilians in charge of growing it.

Compounding problems was the importation of slaves into factories to do the work that white laborers would have done prior to the war thanks to extreme shortages, thus leaving farmland even less sufficiently worked than it had already, and the conditions that these slaves were subjected to in the increasingly strained factories of central Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas were the stuff of horror films. An estimated one in six bonded men who were sent to the factories or pit mines died from abuse, exhaustion or attacks by white labor uneasy about its work; crematoria were set up on many factory grounds in late 1916 to burn the corpses of those who had simply collapsed and expired on the job. Race and food riots plagued multiple cities across the Confederate industrial belt, most famously in Macon, Georgia on February 2nd, 1916, to the point that in February 1916 the Army internally circulated a "semi-secret" memorandum effectively questioning the security of the Presidential transition due by the 22nd when Ellison Smith would hand power over to James Vardaman.

But most slaves, being an investment and significant outlay of capital by their owners, were decently fed, at least compared to the yeomanry of the rural Confederacy, which in the Hunger Winter essentially titled into near-anarchy. A British diplomat who toured the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina described conditions as "pre-industrial" in a note back to Britain that inspired the British government to attempt to sponsor Red Cross humanitarian aid for civilians. Horses, despite their value, were slaughtered for meat, and famed Confederate writer William Faulkner, having lost a leg at Nashville and recuperating at home in Mississippi, recalled gangs of children wandering the woods searching for squirrels, rats and even cats to kill and bring home for at least a morsel of meat. Prices of all goods spiked as wartime scarcity created a thriving black-market economy, and the informal, totally unregulated Home Guard either participated in it and killed rivals or took the law into their own hands and violently lynched smugglers alongside accused deserters, who were seldom if ever given a chance to explain and sometimes included soldiers on leave. Anywhere between a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand civilians, more than quadruple the number of the winter before, starved or froze to death in the Confederacy during those dark months, and spring offered little to no respite from the horrors of the slow-moving final collapse of Dixie ahead of the armistice. [1]

The government was largely inured to these problems; despite his base coming from the yeomanry, Vardaman haughtily dismissed those complaining of hunger as simply insufficiently motivated to fight for the Confederacy, despite increasingly alarmed missives from the War Department and various governors describing what was actually happening on the ground. The government had commandeered the production side of the Confederate economy but financed it exclusively with bonds predicated on victory; unlike the United States, where the income tax’s original base rate had been doubled in the space of two years from fifteen to thirty percent despite the reservations of the Hughes administration (which had ironically campaigned on maintaining the base tax rate at fifteen percent in perpetuity) [2] in order to finance the war, and even then the United States left the conflict in the end with a huge load of new debt to be serviced. The Confederacy had not even levied an income tax at all, and European banks were starting to ask very pointedly where, exactly, Richmond expected to scrounge together the money to keep paying for their campaigns. Vardaman, to be sure, was open to such a tax, but his new Bourbon allies in Congress were not, and the fragile finances of Dixie thus started to come unglued along with its war machine and civilian infrastructure as the Hunger Winter delivered a body blow from which it could not recover..."

- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War

[1] We've arrived at the Full Cold Mountain
[2] It's enormously funny to me Hughes has basically had to backtrack on every campaign promise he made thanks to the war

 

[KingSweden24]

"...for such a forgotten battle, especially in the long shadows of Nashville before it and Atlanta and the March to the Sea after, was nonetheless among the most harrowing of the war. Pershing described the conditions his men were exposed to at Chattanooga as "medieval," and the campaign earned the moniker "the Red Snow" on both sides of the fighting. So when the breakthrough finally came in early February and his men were raising Old Faithful over hills on the other side of the Tennessee River they had stared grimly at for nearly three months as shells landed around them and they were as likely to freeze or starve to death as to die of their wounds, Pershing felt nothing other than relief and a determination to push on once his forces had suitably regrouped. They had fended off multiple counterattacks and even come back after having to retreat ten miles inland from their initial lines after a particularly violent and temporarily successful Confederate offensive, but now Chattanooga was theirs - the Tennessee Campaign, after nearly two horrifying years, was finally at an end. [1]

Strategically, Chattanooga was an important victory because it placed American forces in control of the entire Tennessee Valley but more crucially set them immediately on the edge of Georgia, thus touching that state for the first time in the war other than raids against Savannah from the sea. The previous capture of Knoxville and the fighting in Middle Tennessee had already significantly diminished the city's importance as a rail junction, however, and as they had previously in Nashville and much of Kentucky, Confederate planners had been clever about evacuating the vast majority of the city's light industries southwards. Now Georgia stood ahead, and as Pershing wrote to Stimson and Bliss on February 19th as he stood staring out over the snowy Appalachian foothills, "we shall deny them anyplace further to evacuate."

Pershing's men were utterly spent, however, and needed badly to regroup, and partisan attack by the Irregular Divisions had badly strained his supply lines at the height of winter, and so he identified early April as the target for his push into Georgia, with the city of Rome upon the confluence of the important Coosa his first objective. In drafting the plans for the Georgia Offensive with his two most trusted subordinates in Harbord and Menoher, Pershing determined that a massive drive to Atlanta would be the first stage of the campaign, and once the city was in his hands, his army would spread out into several columns across Georgia, with different destinations - Augusta for the left flank, Savannah for the center, and Columbus and finally Valdosta for the right flank. From there, these newly divided armies could easily punch into central and coastal South Carolina, with the factories of the Upcountry and Charleston in their crosshairs, while the westernmost formation would push towards Tallahassee and Jacksonville, thus finally cutting the Confederacy entirely in two. As such, Pershing viewed his campaign as considerably more critical than Lenihan's increasingly delayed push into Virginia, as it was in Georgia and, thereafter, South Carolina where the war would be won.

To that end, his near two-month pause to regroup and resupply was not just done to bring in fresh divisions of men for the final push but also to make sure that he had sufficient air cover, especially newer "diver-bombers" that had been developed by the Curtiss Aeroplane Company of upstate New York, to utterly harry the enemy from the sky as well as a full armored "cavalry division" of landships to push through enemy defenses. Harbord especially was skeptical that much could be achieved in the coming offensive without all these supplies, as more short-term attacks over the preceding year had always been limited by the American supply situation being superior, but not overwhelming. Confident that the Confederacy had no proper deterrent to these kinds of weapons, Harbord advocated doing the campaign "correctly, the first time, rather than correctly after learning from several mistakes that cost us thousands in human treasure." Pershing concurred, and as always, Bliss smoothed over any frustrations back in Philadelphia that he wasn't moving quickly enough.

Pershing would be glad he had taken the time to ponder his offensive, in the end. His thrusts towards Rome and Gainesville, meant to capture small factory towns on their own merits but also give him pincer positions to the northwest and northeast of Atlanta, were badly stymied by spring floods on the Coosa and Chattahoochee Rivers. Reconnaissance behind enemy lines also revealed that, after Chattanooga, the entire command structure of the Confederate defense of Georgia had been revamped, with all divisions stretching from the South Carolina state line on the Savannah River to Birmingham, Alabama consolidated under the command of General Mason Patrick, the man who had successfully led the initial invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania but been sent south for failing to prevent the collapse at the Susquehanna. Pershing had been concerned about facing Patrick head-to-head as it was simply in the environs of Atlanta, but especially now that he once again enjoyed a theater-level command. It was generally thought within the US War Department that Patrick was one of the most capable and clear-eyed Confederate senior generals and the successes in the Eastern Theater were, in large part, a byproduct of no longer having to face him directly in the field. Patrick had also become extremely well-versed in logistics having had a command in Atlanta, the beating heart of the Confederate transport network, for close to two years and understood his local geography and its defenses backwards and forwards. In other words, despite the end of the war potentially being in sight, Pershing understood perhaps better than anyone how difficult his objective would be, clear as it was on paper.

The Atlanta Campaign had begun..."

- Pershing

[1] In the spirit of me finding writing the blow-by-blows boring, just know that there was a bloody, terrible campaign around Chattanooga roughly modeled on Sherman and George Thomas's push for the city of OTL in the ACW, with corresponding Confederate counterattacks.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...British naval cutter that sailed from Montevideo to Buenos Aires flying the Naval Jack as well as the white flag of peace; Muller's presence in Buenos Aires was not publicized by the government for fear of unrest, though by evening on February 3rd the news that at least a Brazilian envoy of some kind was in the capital to request a ceasefire had spread and there was a mix of trepidation, excitement and anger, depending on one's political persuasions.

The war had strained and polarized Argentine society in some ways while uniting it in others, and Drago for better or worse was an independent president in every sense of the word. His pragmatism, humility and personal propriety during the hard years of tumult had endeared him to many Argentines who had feared that he would be a return to the pre-1890 oligarchy which he was still suspected of representing, but his nomination as an inoffensive compromise to prevent the Civic Union from tearing itself apart in 1910 meant that he was a President both with nobody to whom he owed any particular favors (especially as he was, after two and a half long, ugly years of war, looking forward to a quiet and peaceful retirement) yet also no natural political constituency save career diplomats at the Foreign Office who admired him. Conservatives reviled him as a puppet of Alem, while progressives found his moderation and disinterest in public policy alienating. Navigating the end of the war was thus, perhaps even more so than the prosecution of the war itself, the greatest challenge Drago had thus faced as he looked out over a country eager to end the fighting but also now with a blood feud against Brazil.

Thankfully, Drago's background as a talented diplomat lent itself well to the task ahead. The Muller peace mission had been arranged largely at the behest of the British Foreign Office to bring the fighting in Mesopotamia to an end, with fear in London high that the rapidly fraying situation in Brazil after the Revolt of the Recruits would end in a revolution and civil war not unlike the simmering three-sided conflict in neighboring Chile and that perhaps something similar could occur in Argentina, too. Drago was well aware that Britain, especially its beleaguered Foreign Secretary Sir Ian Malcolm, needed any kind of win to point to after the failures of the Niagara Conference and its co-effort with France to negotiate a conclusive end to fighting between the United States and Confederate States the previous summer, and to this effect when the British had communicated via their ambassador ahead of Muller's arrival he had already mapped out terms he would find agreeable. While many in his government, or the government's immediate supporters such as Alem himself, had not forgotten that Muller had spent most of the last two years traveling between European capitals trying to delay an intervention in order to maximize Brazil's hand, Drago accepted the offer of a negotiated settlement "that could satisfy both parties" and an agreement was made to order a ceasefire effective February 7th, even though no real fighting had occurred for months, especially not after the Revolt. Drago and his ambitious young foreign minister, Leopoldo Melo, would soon thereafter depart for the most suitable neutral site available to the two combatants to bury the hatchet and find what was hoped to be a lasting peace - Asuncion, capital of Paraguay..."

- The Radical Republic

"...site steeped in a certain deep historical symbolism, national mythology and, Drago drily noted in his comprehensive wartime diaries, more than a dash of irony. It had been an alliance between Argentina and Brazil that had come together to smash Paraguay in the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance that destroyed the small, landlocked nation and left it impoverished, demographically gutted and diplomatically isolated for decades to come. Being a conduit for trade during the Great American War, especially for goods traveling through Bolivia and Peru to Argentina prior to Chile's exit from the war a year earlier, had helped it begin the process of recovery, and under President Eduardo Schaerer who would leave office soon after the Peace of Asuncion had enjoyed peaceful domestic politics and coherent governing policies despite the chaos on either side of the country. That it would be Paraguay brokering as neutral party the treaty between Argentina and Brazil was thus a set of circumstances lost on no-one.

Eusebio Ayala, the Foreign Minister of Paraguay and Schaerer's close confidant, was one of the chief architects of the peace, which was to Brazil's chagrin. Schaerer's Liberal Party, known domestically as the Azules, may have been to the right of the Alemist regime in Buenos Aires but nonetheless viewed the Civic Union's domestic program as something of a blueprint, especially for delivering political peace, and there were few in Schaerer's orbit who did not have a strong preference bordering on open bias for Argentina's position (indeed, Ayala had been one of the most prominent Azules to support Schaerer's desire to remain neutral, against many who had hoped to enter the war on Argentina's side). Accordingly, correspondence between Buenos Aires and Asuncion before Muller's peace feelers had already established an unwavering baseline that over the ten day Congress which Ayala arbitrated came very close to the final peace terms.

Both countries were desperate to exit the war what with hungry and agitated populations that were actively starting to riot, sputtering economies, and more than anything a simple exhaustion from the bloodshed. Argentina had been tested many times along the Parana but had held out every time, and it was fair to say that they had fought the war to a draw that, considering their expulsion from Uruguay in the opening weeks of fighting and frantic retreat through Mesopotamia thereafter. Whatever Brazil had hoped to earn coming into the war was now surely out of its grasp, and the peace terms would reflect that, but also entrench the early gains made by Rio de Janeiro as simple facts on the ground.

Argentina, as a fait accompli, recognized the Saraiva government in Uruguay and "denounced as a diplomatic policy" any attempts by the exiled Colorados to reestablish themselves in Montevideo, dismaying many more radical Alemists such as Hipolito Yrigoyen who had come to view Jorge Batlle's cause as a profoundly just one and moderate Civic Unionists and Drago as sellouts for abandoning them. There was, simply, no way for Argentina to do anything else seeing as how they'd been ejected from Montevideo in October of 1913, and even Alem had long ago made peace with the fact that Uruguay's dominance by its Lusophone, Brazilophilic minority and by proxy Rio de Janeiro was the price to pay for an end to the war.

Beyond that, though, Brazil had little to show for two years of bloody and disproportionate losses along the Parana. Rather than the full demilitarization of the Mesopotamia that it had mooted offering Buenos Aires in early 1914 - terms that Drago would likely have accepted - were watered down to simply demilitarizing the Uruguay River as a neutral border between the two countries, meaning that after two years of occupying the land between it and the Parana, Brazil would have to evacuate and watch Argentine soldiers triumphantly march across land in peace that they had failed to reclaim in war. At Ayala's insistence, no indemnities were paid by either side to the other, and all pre-war economic and trade privileges were restored on both sides - Brazil did not even reserve the right to dictate Uruguay's tariff policy against Argentina or, more worryingly, Britain.

Argentine reactions to this peace agreement were mixed but, considering the vast territories stripped from Chile and Brazil's evacuation from Mesopotamia and photos of triumphant soldiers raising the Argentine flag over their sovereign territory again in the weeks that followed the Peace of Asuncion, the majority of the country's citizens, many of whom had been fed into the meat grinder along the Parana at some point and come back haunted and broken by the experience, it was as good a peace as they could have imagined in the dark days of the winter of 1913-14. The country's politics were darker and less optimistic than they had been before, now, but they had come through the worst of it with more territory in Patagonia and the whole of the Tierra del Fuego and, most importantly, had their land back. Ambitions in Uruguay would have to wait for another day..."

- War in the Cone

"...even as Fonseca's nationalists rioted alongside socialists, syndicalists of the newly-formed Sindicato Geral do Brasil, and often simply flustered and bored veterans who needed something to do other than rot at home with their grief and guilt. Though it was patently obvious that Brazil had no other path forward, even Dom Agosto Leopoldo commented icily to his cousin that, "This is a surrender without suffering a defeat." Brazil would leave the war with worse gains than they could have demanded two years earlier, meaning that, in the eyes of many Brazilians, the entirety of 1914 and 1915 had represented nearly two hundred thousand men killed and hundreds of thousands more wounded for essentially nothing. If Fonseca had not been a villain before, he certainly was one now, but many turned their attention just as much to the establishment that had enabled him for years and allowed him to press on with his "blood-stained vanity" to produce his much-desired triumph. Monarchist newspapers tried to trumpet the Peace of Asuncion as a victory in that it prevented Argentine warships from entering Brazilian waters and that Uruguay no longer represented a "radical periphery," to which the hard right and hard left together scoffed and dismissed such claims as trying to put an optimistic spin on A Vitoria Mutilada - the Mutilated Victory.

Brazil was, for the first time since September of 1913, at full peace with her neighbor. Domestically, she would not know the antebellum peace she had enjoyed again for quite some time..."

- O Imperio do Futuro: The Rise of Brazil

(Obviously a lot going on in these updates, but this brings us to the end of the war in the Cone, and leaves USA vs CSA as the last front/theater of war)

 

[KingSweden24]

1916 Argentine Presidential election​

The 1916 Argentine general election was an election held on April 2, 1916 to elect the President of the Republic and the Chamber of Deputies of Argentina; Luis Drago, an independent informally affiliated with the ruling Civic Union, was limited by law to only one lifetime six-year term in office. The vote was held less than two months after the end of the Great American War in South America and the Peace of Asuncion with Brazil, and thus focused heavily on the restoration of prewar Argentina's economic growth in a postwar setting.

Due to the end of the war and its dominance since 1890 of Argentina's political system, the ruling Civic Union (UC) was expected to waltz back into power, especially as the conservative opposition split into reactionary and reformist camps. However, the war had split opinions of activists within the UC on postwar policy, President Drago had not cultivated a base within the party which made his choosing of a successor likely to hold, and the eminence grise of Argentine politics, former two-time President Leandro Alem, was in declining health and thus unable to exercise the influence he once had over the party's more restive radical wing.

A major reason why Drago had been chosen in 1910 in the first place was not just to preserve Alem's power and influence but also to prevent a party split between Alem's chief deputy Francisco Barroetavena and his left-wing nephew Hipolito Yrigoyen; said split emerged in 1916, as Yrigoyen announced the formation of a Radical Party in late February with an appeal to the masses and returning soldiers after Barroetavena was selected as the UC's nominee thanks to Alem and Drago's backroom influence. The split in the UC benefitted the candidate of the liberal-conservative Democratic Progressive Party, Lisandro de la Torre, who despite coming in third performed better than any opposition candidate ever had; Barroetavena won the election, albeit extremely narrowly (his winning margin was approximately 1.6%), and Yrigoyen could credibly have been said to have been denied election thanks to the Socialist Party of Argentina siphoning off close to 9% of the national vote. The 1916 election was the last one in which the Civic Union not only won, but was a credible political force in its own right.

---

"...at first glance straightforward. Major Autonomists such as Roca or even Saenz Pena were dead, and De la Torre's choice to exit into his own party that accepted the settlement of 1890 and desired to act as a classically liberal party within those parameters essentially meant that the opposition was in tatters. The Civic Union had in many ways become as much an institution and organ of government as the Constitution or Congress, in Alem's view, and as he predicted that he would die within the year, he was content to see his party press on one last time. [1]

It would indeed be one last time, though. The Civic Union had indeed become a vehicle for Alem's ideology but it was also now a vehicle largely associated with Alem the man as much as the views he espoused. He had dominated government as President twice, and from behind the scenes during the terms of two other men, but the challenges exposed by the war and Drago's own tempered ambitions meant that the rift of 1910 had not gone away but merely been dormant for the past six years, and now the boundless energy of Yrigoyen was arrayed once more against the UC's establishment in Congress and in Cabinet. Alem cared for his nephew, deeply, but the shift of his party to be a big tent of the center that appealed "to every Argentine in every province" was threatened by Yrigoyen's very explicit aim to make the UC a party not of liberal-progressive reformism but rather of the left, promising a campaign of even more aggressive secularization of society and suggesting that he would consider a political alliance with the Socialists, presaging the Popular Front of future years. Alem's decision to spurn his nephew on account of "personalism" seems the height of hypocrisy considering how much the UC revolved around Alem's individual influence to the point of El Viejo often chose candidates by pointing at them, facetiously and derisively nicknamed "el dedazo", or "the finger." But he had very genuine concerns about Yrigoyen's ability to temper his ambitions and there was more than a dash of not wanting to see his life's project be undone by his brash nephew's new ideas. As such, it was Barroetavena, the favorite of Alem and most of the party, who received the nod in January of 1916 at the party congress in Buenos Aires. Yrigoyen and hundreds of his supporters walked out less than ten minutes later, and the Civic Union was irreparably broken forever.

That parties were not to campaign while the negotiations in Asuncion were ongoing was initially seen as an advantage to Barroetavena, but Yrigoyen was nonetheless holding meetings with union bosses, deputies, and provincial governors while the Cabinet remained in Buenos Aires managing the last days of the war, and as such he had a surprising amount of momentum behind his new "Radical Party" as the campaign kicked off in earnest in late February. It also helped that Yrigoyen was a spirited orator with as much energy as his uncle, and Alem - ailing from exhaustion after his pro-war campaigns over the last two years - threw himself into countering his nephew when Barroetavena's rote, dull speeches about continuing in the traditions of the party failed to inspire the populace. The 1916 elections thus turned into the last grand tour of Alem against the budding new force of Yrigoyen, and Barroetavena himself became practically an afterthought. Argentines by the thousands, especially tired veterans returning from the front, came out to see the Old Man one last time, and considering the narrowness of the results - and that Yrigoyen and the Socialists together won nearly forty percent of the vote - it can be said that Alem's dogged campaigning in damp autumn weather won Barroetavena the Presidency.

Yrigoyen never forgave his uncle, even on Alem's deathbed months later, and the efforts wound up being for naught. High on elation after the Peace of Asuncion, postwar economic troubles soon consumed Barroetavena's Presidency, and Argentines rapidly began to tire of "the family feud," as the Radical-Civic Union rivalry soon came to be known. De la Torre nearly did as well as Yrigoyen, suggesting that Argentine voters, especially the middle and upper classes, were open to a moderate alternative to the flailing big tent that had just torn itself in half. As thousands of men returned from the front to compete with immigrants and women for work and prices fluctuated rapidly up and down as the economy shifted haphazardly to peacetime, the placid, personalist politics of pre-war Argentina were forever gone as the reactionary oppositionists and, soon enough, Alem himself died out and the generation growing up in the shadow of the men who had taken to the Artillery Park in 1890 stepped out for their moment in the sun..."

- The Radical Republic [2]

[1] The Civic Union and Alemism definitely have some Vanguard Party tendencies here, yes
[2] Once I realized how early in 1916 this election was I wanted to make sure I got all my ideas down while they were fresh

 

[KingSweden24]

"...you can basically rewrite the entire first half of Argentina's 20th century if this happens; that election was that crucial. Why? Two reasons. One, it wound up being the election that determined how Alemism the ideology would outlive Alem, the man. The second reason was that it occurred basically two months after Argentina exited the Great American War and while its not like the Sun of May was getting hoisted over the palaces of Petropolis, there was definitely some excitement in the air over the war ending and people coming back to normalcy, and the difficult postwar transition hadn't hit yet. So there were a ton of factors compacted into one election, and whoever won was going to have a lot of drive in shaping what was to come. One doubts it would have been much good. [1]

It should be noted that Alem was a personalist party leader, but necessarily a personalist President, and he believed very deeply in the separation of powers between the Presidency and the Congress (and to a way lesser extent, the judiciary). From what we know of Yrigoyen's writings, he felt otherwise, regarding radicalism as an "expression of the masses" whose moral superiority outweighed constitutional niceties and formalities. While Yrigoyen was very much a small-d democrat and would have certainly honored term limits and other such restrictions on Presidential powers, he had just watched his uncle "manage" the Civic Union for a quarter century both in power and from behind the throne, and one would guess that he would draw similar conclusions about how to run his Radical Party. I think you'd see a much more hostile relationship between the Casa Rosada and Congress develop with an Yrigoyen who would likely not react well to being told things he didn't want to hear.

What's more interesting to me though is the political developments that would follow. A successful Radical Party in the 1916-22 term probably becomes the preferred vehicle of the working class rather than one of two along with the Socialists, which sets up a potential successor for Yrigoyen in 1922 very well during the economic boomtimes of the early 1920s. He was decently pragmatic so he may bury the hatchet with some Civistas after Alem's death and pick somebody in the vein of Enrique Perez Colman (though he is likely too young then) could have been tapped to lead the party into another election, which they likely win as the Socialists collapse their vote share. This, IMO, butterflies the emergence of the PDP entirely; without de la Torre winning with the support of what was left of the Civic Union after Barroetavena was forced to retire, the party never gets to entrench itself as the party of the bourgeois middle class, and that means that the Turno Pacifico of 1940-82 is gone entirely. You may thus see a much more polarized Argentine society between the Radicals and whatever equivalent of the right-wing National Democrats emerge; alternatively, the Radicals may shift to the center, and be something approximating PDP earlier on. Either way, there's no need for the Radicals and Socialists to cooperate, and hence no Popular Front, and hence you can basically wave goodbye to every Argentine President who in OTL was elected from either FP or PDP as well as the economic and political stability that the Turno and its collusionist politics produced. What you think of that turn of events depends on your worldview and how much better you think a more unstable Argentine politics might have been; the Turno had plenty of downsides and upsides, more tradeoffs than anything else.

So, yes, that's what I think, from my own Argentine perspective. Alem was a great, epochal figure and 1916 was Argentina bursting free of his shadow as his career entered twilight and he then died. An Yrigoyen who wins having exited the Civic Union and seizing his mantle is an Yrigoyen who basically gets to dictate the next twelve or so years of Argentina at his whim. It would be a very different Argentina than today's, that's for sure..."

- WI: Hipolito Yrigoyen wins the Presidency of Argentina in 1916?

[1] Keep in mind that in OTL, thanks to the Revolution of the Park being successful in 1890, much of what Yrigoyen set out to achieve in 1916 has already been accomplished by the Civic Union.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...expected the Texas Militia to have cut south via San Antonio. Instead, Ferguson's loyalists rode the train to Corpus Christi and attacked directly west, hoping to perhaps catch the dissidents off guard; if that was their intent, it did not work, and what is today regarded as the first proper battle of the Texan Civil War occurred on February 8, 1916 at Freer, about halfway between the coast and Laredo.

The group of men who had gathered at Freer to fight the Texas Militia - who, it should be noted, were sent south with little to no support from Confederate Army regulars stationed in Austin and among whom the weight of their forces were already engaged in keeping the US Army from marching further south than Texarkana or Dallas - were an eclectic lot, largely yeoman farmers, day laborers, Tejanos who had lived in the "Tex-Mex" for centuries, and even Mexican volunteers having streamed across the border, including some of Pancho Villa's men who were now bored (and not being paid) after the conclusion of the war between the United States and Mexico three months earlier. While amongst their number were a large amount of Militiamen, Texas Rangers and veterans of the Confederate Army, they were not a formal armed force, though the "Freer Boys" would within months form the nucleus of the Texas Republican Army.

If there is a theme to the events of 1915-16, it was Pa Ferguson's grievous mistakes that only served to accelerate Texan alienation from his administration and the Confederacy as a whole in the end. He had wasted crucial weeks in pursuing the Laredo Legislature to the border when he'd had the chance, choosing instead to wait for more reinforcements than the outgoing administration in Richmond was able to send. When he did finally realize how unseriously the Confederate Congress took the Laredo revolt and he did send a force, not wanting to leave the paths to Austin wide open, he instead pulled raw recruits who were keeping oilfield workers in the Port Arthur area in check, thus leaving his most talented cadres and veterans out of the battle. This delay allowed the Laredo Legislature to regroup and properly arm itself with the thousands of weapons flowing across the Rio Bravo from chaotic and lawless northern Mexico (indeed, the Texan Revolution can be viewed in some ways as an extension of the social conflict in postwar Mexico) and for its forces to not be badly outmatched when the Loyalists finally did arrive.

Contrary to much of contemporary and modern Texan historiography (especially in primary and secondary schools), the Battle of Freer was not some triumphant echo of Lexington and Concord or First Manassas; it was a largely inconclusive result playing out over the course of the day between two disorganized, inexperienced groups of men numbering about ten thousand apiece. Roughly five hundred casualties were recorded on each side and, after a successfully cavalry charge into the left flank of the Loyalists by Mexican volunteers scattered their defensive line, a retreat back to Corpus Christi and Laredo was ordered. Strategically, of course, it was a smashing success - the rebels had not been defeated and crushed, and that was all that was aimed to be accomplished at Freer.

Despite the tactically muddled fighting in cool, damp conditions, the news as it was reported across Texas, Mexico and the United States was that Laredo had held out and sent Ferguson's Loyalists packing, meaning that not only were there now two competing governments claiming legitimacy over Texas, but also that the dissident government had credibly defended itself with force, the first step in revolutionary legitimacy. Texas, a place whose history was deeply influenced not only by the American Revolution of 1776 but the Mexican, Texian and Confederate wars of independence, was exactly where such implications held a special meaning and struck a reflexive chord with many who over the past two months had been mostly perplexed by the breakdown of legal government in the state as the Yankees encroached from west and north.

Riots broke out not only in occupied Dallas and Wichita Falls, where the Lone Star Flag was waved without the Confederate Southern Cross [1], but also in the oilfields around Port Arthur, on the docks of Galveston, and in the railyards of San Antonio, Tyler, and College Station. Thousands more men, often with their families in tow, marched across the South Texas scrublands towards the camps around Laredo to volunteer, singing "The Yellow Rose of Texas" as their fathers and grandfathers perhaps once had decades ago. Legislators and makeshift soldiers alike had shown what was possible, each in turn - the spirit of rebellion was strong in the air.

In Laredo, this meant complications. Garner and Sheppard were still adamantly against any action aimed at Richmond, drafting a statement which laid out what came to be known as the Freer Demands: the immediate resignation of Pa Ferguson, the return of all Texans to their "native soil" to push out the Yankees, amnesty for all members of the Laredo Legislature, and full control by Texan politicians over political patronage. It was meant to provide both Richmond and Ferguson with a clear off-ramp from further violence, but the Yankee breakthroughs of the spring and summer in the East and Midlands had not yet occurred, and the new incoming Vardaman administration had been elected on a delusional platform of zero negotiation, with Philadelphia or anyone else, and the Freer Demands were issued a mere ten days before his inauguration on February 22, 1916. They would be dismissed out of hand, in full, and Vardaman's intermediaries further made clear that any "seditionist" would be shot, and his family if captured hanged, in retaliation for their revolt.

Gore, more so even than Garner and Sheppard who knew Vardaman and Martin personally (indeed, Sheppard had at one point considered Vardaman a good friend), understood that the new regime in Richmond would not be plagued by President Cotton Ed Smith's laziness and penchant for allowing political subterfuge to swirl around him and cut him off at the knees, especially not with the enemy at the gates of central Virginia and even Georgia. Much as the visit of the Yankee spies had caused him to ponder new opportunities, the depth of support for the Laredo Legislature in the wake of Freer led him to start thinking of what, exactly, the endgame was, especially with the Confederate Army having finally sent sufficient men to Austin to defend the capital but also potentially march south. Quoting John Adams, he told his colleagues that the time was upon them to make "a most fateful decision," and that if "we do not stand together, we will all hang separately." It was widely understood what he meant - it was no longer enough to hold out in Laredo. The fight had to be taken to Ferguson, and it was quite possible that it was no longer a dispute of Loyalists vs. Legitimists, but rather soon a battle of the Confederacy against Texan secessionists, whether they wanted it to be or not..."

- Republic Reborn

[1] Our in-universe term for OTL's Confederate flag, which I prefer using ITTL for the sake of familiarity to the "stars and bars" or whatever the lesser-known alternatives are called

 

[KingSweden24]

"...not caught looking ahead. Crerar spent much of the winter of 1915-16 traveling the wartime United States, including staying several days in Omaha with his idol, William Jennings Bryan, as he developed his treatise.

Published in March of 1916, On Canada and the United States was a series of essays published in pamphlet form, and later a book, that simply oozed early career Crerar. It was earnest, plain-spoken, and tended to draw broad conclusions. In the United Farmers, Crerar saw a parallel to what was happening in Canada in 1916 to what had been going on in the American Plains in 1896, and his "twenty-year theory" of Canadian politics trailing developments south of the 49th parallel by about twenty years was somewhat born from that experience. [1] Bryan's Populists, who had by the 1910s largely been absorbed into but in many ways also taken over the Democratic Party that had once been ultraconservative, had themselves been passionately reformist, largely agrarian partisans who sought to expand new rights to the people from a political establishment they considered distant both culturally and ideologically and controlled by an economic and social oligarchy, all descriptions that fit Ottawa's relationship to the Western Provinces to a T.

It was the retired Bryan working on a history of agrarian populism in the United States, however, who made the observation to Crerar in their teacher-pupil dynamic that what he really needed to focus his manifesto on was not what made populism in Canada and the USA similar, but rather what made it different, and Bryan had an idea on what the issue was that Crerar was not surprised by, even if the eventual conclusion was perhaps the kernel of his political activism for the rest of his life. Bryan noted that while superficially similar linguistically and culturally to one another, there was a reason why Canada was never interested in being part of the United States, and that was its culture of loyalty and hierarchy. It had been largely founded by Loyalists to the Crown after the American Revolution and its role as being a loyal part of the British Empire in North America was perhaps its defining trait from then on, distilled further in its hostility to (American-bred) Fenianism and, most critically, the strength of its Orange Order, an organization that had no equivalent in the United States despite the quiet background strength of the American WASP establishment. [2]

Crerar had never quite thought of it that way and while the root of this idea was present in On Canada and the United States, it was something he needed to consider more broadly and so, to the shock of many of his fellow United Farmers of Manitoba organizers, in late April of 1916 he requested to join the Lodge Number Sixty-One, in Winnipeg, and become a formal Orangeman. While some conservative-leaning historians to this day argue about whether Crerar was a spy aiming for subterfuge or was a secret Protestant-chauvinist who abandoned such views for opportunism, most scholarship on the man, even from the Right, largely are at the conclusion that Crerar was genuine in his declaration that he could not understand Canadian politics until he better understood Orangeism and what appeal it had to the Canadian people. He was not there to handicap his local Orange Lodge from within but rather learn from it and research it, and his findings offered him a level of nuance that he had not previously enjoyed that transformed his political career as much as his time with Bryan.

The realization he arrived at was that Orangeism was not merely about defending the Anglican-Presbyterian establishment of Canada and its prerogatives, or blind loyalty to the British Empire (Crerar disagreed strongly with the joke that Canadians were "more British than Britain"), even though these were nonetheless important throughlines of its raison d'etre. The Order also served an enormously important part of the social fabric of Canada, particularly in Ontario and Nova Scotia, which not coincidentally were the two provinces where the Tories tended to dominate. Crerar described the general cultural mien of Protestant Canada as "the triangle," of three basic points of social connection that reinforced a common culture but also a conservative hegemony. The overlap of Protestant churchgoers, Tory partisans and Orangemen was not by accident - participation in the one often led to participation in the others. As such, riding associations for Conservative Party elections were as much a social event and infrastructure as were attending church services on Sunday or Lodge picnics, marches or other events. Political activism, fraternal communalism, and religious worship thus came together as mutually reinforcing superstructures that were extremely hard to avoid. Many Protestant Canadians were not Tories because they hated Catholics, they were Tories because they attended the Anglican Church in Canada and everyone else in their town or neighborhood did the same, and at both church and at Lodge functions they met the same people they did otherwise who reinforced Tory ideas.

This insularity was further reinforced by the Order acting as an immediate resource for new immigrants to Canada. As discussed in the last chapter, 1910s Canada was in the midst of a huge immigration wave from Europe that saw particular concentration from poor Scotsmen, Ulstermen, and Englishmen from the less cosmopolitan Midlands or West Country. Jobs in Canada were plenty, especially in Ontario and booming Winnipeg (which by this point was arguably still the fastest-growing city on Earth, even as the Nicaragua Canal threatened its key position on the trans-continental route for British commerce), but moving to a new continent was a harrowing experience no matter where in the Americas it was done, and for these thousands of young, often male, Protestants from the British Isles the Order provided a sense of stability, help in getting on their feet, and assistance in then assimilating into a broader and greater "British Canada" that they then became just as defensive of as those who had been on North American shores for generations. Despite the decline in Order membership beginning in the late 1940s, as late as a few years before Crerar's death in 1975 one in five Protestant Canadian men met his wife through some kind of Lodge event, and sixty years prior it was more than two in five.

What Crerar came to realize over the course of 1916, then, was that the Order - and the affiliated but separate women's organizations that were beginning to grow rapidly in membership by that point - served as much a social and economic function as a religious and political one, and that was something that Laurier's Liberals and, now, the United Farmers were struggling to grasp, seeing it purely as a tool of the Conservative Party to maintain the discipline of their core voters. This did not mean that Crerar meant to fully buy in to what the Order believed or its rigid, hierarchical and supremacist politics, but rather that he began to see how it fit into the fabric of Protestant Canadian society and how many of its members had attachments to it beyond - or in some cases, despite of - its explicit agenda. This was the needle which progressive Canadian politics would need to thread, and so Crerar's next project, with On Canada and the United States published and increasingly well-received, was to plot out precisely how to do so..."

- The People's Prime Minister: Thomas Crerar's Remarkable Canadian Life

[1] Keep this figure in mind, though bear in mind this is Crerar theorizing this, not me, the TL's author
[2] I'm speaking a bit through Bryan here. IMO this is one of the biggest differences between Canadians and Americans - the former is way more amenable, culturally and politically, to following the rules and being "loyal", than the more "get off my lawn" culture of the USA, and one of the reasons I'm pursuing this thread ITTL is that it's interesting to turn that cultural instinct on its head into a more politically authoritarian worldview north of the border while the USA's overarching attitude gets threaded into progressivism rather than conservatism, a la OTL. That's me justifying my flipping of the two, at least.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...opposed. The actual efficacy of the Stolypin Land Reform is of course still debated in modern Russia, and both now and in the 1910s the program had its detractors from both the Right and, naturally, the Left. Rightist opposition to the land reform was of course fairly straightforward - it countered the traditions of the peasantry, disturbed the mir, and in some cases created an avenue to deny landholding nobility or the Church their due and their influence. Left-wing opposition to the Reforms was somewhat more sophisticated and, in some ways, esoteric, depending on what brand of leftism one adhered to.

By the year 1916, with four years since the Constitution, the functioning of the Duma had clearly left much to be desired by the budding Russian intelligentsia and the more radical workers organizations forming in industrial cities, particularly Moscow. Russian liberalism and leftism had, for many years, oscillated between traveling hand-in-hand and being bitter opponents; men such as Milyukov were both champions of the commoner and traitors to the Russian people, depending on which Marxist newsletter one read. But Milyukov was of course a classical progressive democratic liberal, very much a creature of the Russian literati, and thus too cautious and too alien a figure for the average Russian counter-Tsarist; moderate and conservative democrats such as Vasily Maklakov and Alexander Guchkov were even worse, despite their very real progress in acting as a calming and reformist influence upon the Council of Ministers.

The biggest split on the Russian Left starting in early 1916 was largely internal within the two main parties of Marxism, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (the SRs, known as the Esery in Russian) and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, or RSDLP, which contrary to its name was the more radical body of the two. Traditionally, the Esery had been the leading edge of Russian radicalism, born out of the zeal of the Narodnik movement of the 1860s and 1870s. It was an SR man who had grievously wounded Tsar Alexander II and others like him who had assassinated Konstantin Pobedonostsev. By 1916, and looming Duma elections that year, the SRs had begun to advocate working within the system to transform it, and thus decided not to boycott the upcoming elections, a position taken by their chief theoretician and leader, Viktor Chernov. There was a great advantage to this - the SRs, like the RSDLP, thought Milyukov a toothless idiot who spoke beautifully but accomplished little. Liberalism, to them, seemed unable to bring about the very real change Russia needed and only revolutionary democratic socialism would. Accordingly, weak as the Duma may have been, it needed their presence to function, and so rather than independents affiliated with the Esery running, the party itself would run a maximalist campaign, focused in rural constituencies home to their key base - the rural peasantry, especially those who were opposed to the dismantling of communal ownership of farm land and its consolidation into small but ample private landholdings.

This choice by Chernov was controversial within the party and divided it into the Right SR and Left SR factions, the latter of which was skeptical of this new commitment to participation in what they considered a sham democracy and the former eager to reunite with the social democratic Trudoviks led by Aleksey Aladyin and Alexander Kerensky, who had broken away from the Esery to participate in the Duma as the voice of the Left. Still, agrarian socialism held a certain strong appeal in a rural, agrarian country like Russia where the changes brought forth by the Stolypin reforms were having very real impacts and early on. The RSDLP, meanwhile, continued its line of total boycott of the "sham Duma" and instead began to advocate for more violent street demonstrations of workers to showcase their ability to threaten "bourgeoise industries and interests," led by the syndicalist-sympathetic Julius Martov in St. Petersburg. The RSDLP was not necessarily opposed to the concept of democracy - although a faction of exiles in Switzerland around Marxist intellectual Vladimir Lenin, whose brother had been executed by the government in 1887 as an Esery terrorist, were fairly explicit in their view that democracy itself was a bourgeoise invention [1] - but saw its role as being that of a vehicle for the burgeoning urban working class in Russian factories, railroads and shipyards who needed protection and that socialism was the sole vehicle which could provide that. While labor protection laws had proliferated under both Michael and his father, they were still viewed as highly insufficient, and the RSDLP was, unlike the Esery, less skeptical of the Stolypin Reforms (the SRs opposed them as they viewed it as a bourgeoise plot to end communal land ownership) and indeed thought they were insufficient in pursuing land reform. The RSDLP's issue, however, was that they scoffed at the idea of agrarian socialism and had indeed been founded as much to oppose the Esery as they had to overthrow Tsarism; they were explicitly Marxist to the point of ultra-orthodoxy, viewing the industrial urban working class and them alone as the knife's edge of the revolutionary proletariat. At a time when less than ten percent of the Russian population was engaged in such work (though the ratio was quickly growing year-by-year as the Russian economy expanded quickly), this stubbornness left them a narrow base and allowed men like Chernov and his allies Andrei Argunov, Alexander Antonov, and Maria Spiridonova to persuade themselves that their rivals on the hard left of Russian politics could be safely ignored as they rallied the peasants.

This indeed turned out to be true - the elections of 1916 saw the SRs and Trudoviks together win just short of a quarter of the seats in the Duma (with the Trudoviks the considerably larger of the two, but the SRs did impressively nonetheless), and when combined with Milyukov's Kadets and various unaffiliated but peasant-aligned deputies nearly half of the body, meaning that the People's Party and right-wing parties had now just a narrow majority, though the State Council was of course still inflexibily conservative and Tsarist. This watershed moment in Russian history proved that organizing and political advocacy could reach the Russian people and that demands for reforms could be heard, even if the body to which these men were elected had little ability to actually act on such reforms..."

- A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia

[1] As we do a who's who of Russian left-wing figures here, you'll notice our friend Vladimir Ilyich is nowhere near Russia

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Kernan's famous quote "there are lines on a map and then there are facts on the ground" is generally thought to have referred not just to the strategic situation that the Confederacy found itself in by late February and early March of 1916, right before the devastating string of Yankee offensives that would carry through for the next eight months until the end of the war but also the incoming Vardaman-Patton administration, an unholy marriage of rabid agrarian populism finally unconstrained from democratic norms to elite plantocratic influence. Four months is an eternity at war and in politics, and the inauguration of James K. Vardaman took place on February 22, 1916 under very different circumstances than his triumph the previous November.

The intervening winter having been possibly one of the bleakest episodes in North American history, surpassed only by the next few years of the postwar Confederacy, had dramatically changed the mood in Richmond, and Vardaman arrived "not to a triumphant anthem of coronation but to a funeral dirge," as Woodrow Wilson phrased it in his seminal The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916. Starvation and violence plaguing most of the country had left the mood sour even amongst the oft-detached political class in Richmond, and suddenly the Red Scarves that had erupted as a potent political paramilitary a year before were no longer seen as patriots but rather as rabble-rousers whom it was increasingly possible to ask why, exactly, they themselves were not at the front. Senator Martin had, for his part, begun to see after a whole year of trying to cohabitate with Vardaman why Tillman had always made efforts to stymie the Chief's ambitions, and was so worried of the Red Scarves attempting to carry out a putsch that he arranged with Kernan a curfew in Richmond during the inauguration; Vardaman, persuaded by fellow travelers that gunmen awaited his arrival in Richmond to slay him before he could put his hand on the Davis Bible, requested no inaugural ball be held "due to this hour of hardship" but also that the ceremony be held indoors, in the House Chamber, where some modicum of security and decorum may exist.

While the sporadic fighting along the Rappahannock was too far from Richmond to be audible, it may as well have been close by considering that, compared to Joseph Johnston's inaugural just six eternal years earlier, the city resembled a military camp. The tenor of proceedings was just as somber as one might have expected for a capital that worried of falling under siege within months and where the supposedly allied Senate President pro tempore and incoming President were both certain that the other meant to see him killed. Vardaman, in the well of the House, gave a remarkably pugilistic speech even by his standards, promising "an unceasing resistance to the tyranny of the Yankee," and declaring, "the Confederate way of life will be defended to every last drop of blood in every able body." In case his point had not been made clear, his concluding line of his inaugural address declared "the White civilization's last stand against n***er mongrelism is here in this hour, and I would hang every n***er from the Rio Bravo to the Atlantic before I broke even a single one of their shackles, and I would rather draw my last breath on this Earth than speak the degenerate, un-Christian lie that the n***er is or ever will be equal to the White man!" Not once in his brief, angry address did he once acknowledge the increasingly dire situation the Confederacy found itself in both with its now-complete lack of allies, its frayed economy, or thinning manpower.

But, once again, there are lines on a map and facts on the ground. The Confederacy as March of 1916 arrived could not win the war simply because it really wanted to, and as the year marched on, the difference between areas under formal control by Richmond's forces and those that were not became increasingly ambiguous, and not only thanks to the open declaration of revolution in Texas. Slave revolts began to become considerably more common, especially in the rural Mississippi Delta where proximity to Yankee forces in Memphis and northern Arkansas had seen a cascade of rifles, bullets and crude explosives stream into the backwoods and bow lakes, finding their way into the hands of escaped slaves. More plantations were burned across the Confederacy, either by slaves or by American soldiers, in March of 1916 than the whole of 1915, and the figure would nearly double as April arrived. Home Guard and Red Scarves were increasingly at war with their own citizenry as many men, some who'd been maimed in battle, simply refused to return to the front when accosted, and deserters were for good reason not keen to see a noose in extrajudicial killings that often occurred with little to no evidence other than hearsay. Vardaman may have been the defiant new President who spoke boldly about carrying out a total resistance punctuated by a race war - but what was he President of, exactly?..."

- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33

 

[KingSweden24]

"...categorizing the Second Empire into three "periods" - Early Empire, High Empire, and Late Empire. The exact definition of Late Empire varies, usually but not always characterized by historians as beginning with either the death of Napoleon IV or the death of Georges Boulanger, but outside of a few figures who peg its arrival much earlier - sometimes as early as the Paris Bourse crisis of 1890 - it is generally agreed to have begun sometime in the first six years of the reign of Napoleon V and continued on through the ensuing decade, the Central European War, and the Second Empire's eventual overthrow.

Late Imperial France has been a subject of scholarly exploration for decades now as interest has risen in French politics of the period being downstream of French culture in that same period, as a potential avenue for exploring the causes of the Central European War. In part, this was thanks to the increasingly fragile political position of Raymond Poincare, and a great deal of early 20th century analysis has generally viewed Poincare's belligerency towards Germany and Italy, particularly as the internal situation in Austria-Hungary deteriorated 1918-19, as being a response to this. But why was Poincare's position so increasingly fragile?

The answer is in part that the France of the late 1910s was a deeply anxious country that increasingly lacked confidence in itself, either domestically or internationally, and that anxiety found belligerent nationalism as an outlet that could unite anticlerical liberals and radical socialists with monarchist conservatives towards an external enemy, a process that Poincare pursued with vigor. The reality is that France, despite being a world leader in aerial and automotive technology, was beginning to feel like it was drastically falling behind its peer nations, particularly after the Anglo-German Convention of 1916 that split Portuguese Africa in half, and this general sense of national malaise trickled down to - or perhaps was fueled by - the deep social divisions and anxieties of the country. Since the National Contract had been promulgated by Napoleon IV in 1878, the government of France had gone out of its way to attempt to marry the working classes, viewed as a better monarchist bulwark than the liberal bourgeoisie and urbane intelligentsia, to the Crown. Unlike most European states, the shadow of Revolution - be it 1789, 1830, or 1848 - hung over the Second Empire, and it was taken as fact by monarchist officialdom that the abortive Paris Commune of May 1868 had simply been a fourth edition of such upheavals strangled in its cradle. As such, republicanism was viewed as the enemy much more ardently at the Tuileries and as a much more live and real threat than elsewhere, and this anxiety colored both policy, such as France's generous welfare state that was grounded partly in Catholic social teaching, and politics, such as the near-panic from Prime Minister Poincare about his ill-advised decision to go to the polls in October of 1915 rather than six months later in which his Bloc Nationale lost her majority and was faced with insurgents of both Right and Left.

The specter of previous French upheavals was, of course, a hallmark of French politics (and perhaps even continues to be today), and by 1916-17 it could be credibly said that there was not one France, but rather two. There was the France of small medieval villages and rolling hills, of ancient vineyards and orchards, punctuated by church spires and associated with a rural, bucolic life. This was the France of Napoleon IV and Georges Boulanger, and the France with which the privately irreligious Raymond Poincare struggled to connect. Then there was the France of the cities, primarily embodied by Paris. Despite the conservatism of the French government, its capital had nonetheless retained its reputation as the City of Light, a place where artists, intellectuals, exiles and free-spirits gathered at cafes to debate philosophy, paintings, music or the emerging art form of cinema. Paris was a hotbed of radical, often republican, activity, and while Church attendance and religiosity across France itself was high (and growing, contravening trends elsewhere in Europe where it was flat to in slight decline), Paris was regarded as the epicenter of secularism, a political philosophy espoused in France as laicite.

Observers of French culture and politics, particularly from the polycentric United States, were often amazed at the vitality which Paris had in the French economic and political geography while also being stunned at how it seemed to exist in a different world than the conservative provincial France. Schools across most of the country, particularly in the south and east, were generally operated by the Church in partnership with the state and monastic orders; Paris, and to a lesser extent Lille and Marseilles, saw the bulk of their teaching done in private, secular academies as politicians who represented their interests, such as Aristide Briand of the Union of Socialist Reform, advocated for nationalizing these lycees and extending their purview to every student in France, a position which was met with considerable hostility from the devout majority.

It left France as a polarized country, split between its growing and cosmopolitan capital and satellite cities and traditionalist countryside, both claiming with some credibility to represent French interests abroad and at home as political and cultural practices were fairly homogenous depending on what side of the split one was on. However, one thing around which French society was not polarized was an intense French nationalism - for liberals, its legacy of revolution and reform, and for conservatives, its status as the chief defender of modernizing political Catholicism in Europe [1] - that was often directed externally. It was thus the case that most of the French public was equally contemptuous of Germany, Britain, Italy, even Spain, and with this being one of the few things that united a country that felt anxious about its place as the Great Power of the continent in Berlin's growing shadow, it was of course an itch that the French political class was ever-eager to scratch..."

- The Central European War

[1] Something I think is important to note about French Catholicism ITTL is that it takes pride in the National Contract and, due to having had to defend itself from secular and republican impulses over the 19th century in a way that, say, Habsburg Austria has not, but also not being actively sidelined by anticlerical forces as in Italy, has allowed it to both be more proactive in how it deals with the public and more sophisticated in its organization.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...agreement that had not been acted upon by either side; it was for that reason that on February 29, 1916, Marines crossed back into Guatemala from El Salvador to punch their way to the capital as Mexican forces seized two major crossings of the border from unstable Chiapas to prevent a Huertista evacuation. In theory, under the stipulations of the Treaty of San Diego, Mexico was meant to have left Guatemala entirely alone, but the ink had been dry on that document for only four months before the United States was already acquiescing to Mexican intervention in the region, as forces under Aureliano Blanquet, at one time a good friend and ally of Huerta, moved off of their border positions in a scramble for the capital, with Mexicans embarrassed by Huerta having received the signal from Mexico City that it would be preferable if his scalp was taken by his own, rather than the Yankee.

Simple geography largely dictated the events to come. Mexico overran northern Guatemala's Peten Department and captured Quetzaltenango, but Guatemala City's collapse was carried out by American Marines who refused surrenders from many of the Huertistas there, simply shooting them in the head and leaving them in a mass grave on the edge of the city while declaring that the "official" Army of Guatemala was welcome to be in charge of the country again. The problem, of course, was that there wasn't much of an official army left, after two years of brutal war in Nicaragua, Estrada Cabrera's various purges of his officer class, and finally Huerta massacring his enemies to keep hold of power in the country. There wasn't much official of anything in Guatemala, and Butler's missives back to Philadelphia suggested that a long campaign of nation-building would be required to restore the country to any semblance of governability.

Huerta, of course, escaped into the jungles of northeastern Guatemala with many of his men, where a few months later he would die of some unspecified tropical disease believed to be yellow fever, thus dissolving his strange army of pseudo-mercenaries into the guerilla groups increasingly in control of Honduras and parts of rural Guatemala, paramilitary cliques that essentially came to hold their own fiefdoms with the support of fruit mercenaries and making a joke of any kind of idea of central government and structure in two of the three member-states of the now-dead Centroamerica..."

- The Forgotten Front: The Isthmian Campaigns of the Great American War

 

[KingSweden24]

"...new ships put to water in late 1915 were designed more with the intent of being able to quickly ferry soldiers onto land, and by March of 1916 nearly three hundred aero-planes and four hundred landships were coming out of American factories per month. Even without some tactical successes by the Yankees, this superiority in weaponry would have been extremely difficult for Confederate forces to overcome. The disparity in artillery, armor, air support and even simple things like shoes and coats by the spring of 1916 was remarkably vast despite the game efforts of the foundries and arsenals in Birmingham, Anniston, Augusta and Macon, or even the uniform mills in Durham and Greensville; the Confederacy was, quite simply, outgunned on paper.

Two battles occurred in early March - on March 8th the Norfolk Landings, and on March 10th the Rapidan Offensive - that both secured their immediate tactical and strategic objectives and in doing so greatly complicated Lejeune's defenses of Richmond. In the former, the new landing vessels were deployed both from the Chesapeake and the Atlantic to storm the shore of Virginia Beach, a sleepy resort town that nonetheless enjoyed a large, sustained open beach abutting flat (if marshy) land for a thrust at nearby Norfolk. These landings were supported by coastal bombardments from the US Atlantic Fleet that had little else to do at that point in time, shattering most of Norfolk's ample coastal defenses over the course of three days as Marines and Army infantrymen pushed their way in to take the city. Norfolk fell on the 12th, and the next push was the new shipyards in Hampton across the water, captured on the 14th. The fall of the Hampton Roads as a Confederate waterway was timed with a major push by Lenihan in the north, not at the hardened defenses at Fredericksburg where he had failed previously to break through into central Virginia but rather further west, near Culpeper; while the offensive took a whole ten days, the successful breaking through at Culpeper placed Lenihan's forces upon the Rapidan and thus hooking the left flank of Lejeune's forces southwestwards, threatening to break that end of the Confederate line.

For Lejeune, this was disastrous, regardless of how tenacious a fighter he was. For one thing, it did not only create issues for advances towards the capital but also his ability to coordinate with Lee in the Shenandoah, where Hall's push southwards towards Roanoke could now be supported from Lenihan overland directly rather than via a long supply line via Harpers Ferry. This merged both sub-theaters into one single offensive deeper into industrial Virginia and her hinterland where much of her food was grown, and as these attacks were occurring during the spring planting season in the Valley, it seemed fairly obvious to Lenihan that his army, and civilians, had seen nothing yet as far as another winter of starvation might go.

The ability of forces under Charles Farnsworth out of Norfolk to make progress was not to be underestimated, either, though Lejeune had anticipated this enough that he had placed four valuable divisions near Williamsburg to act as a screening defense. The Virginia Peninsula, site of the famous failed attempted by George McClellan Senior to take Richmond in 1862, was the most direct route with the most favorable terrain towards the capital from the Chesapeake Bay, and both sides knew this. Lejeune's only advantage was the small number of landships that Farnsworth was able to put ashore and the marshes south of the James River concentrating all Yankee forces on a fairly narrow pathway; defenses at Williamsburg were easy to construct and man and support with air power, and Farnsworth's advance was for the time being checked.

That was little respite to the men at Fredericksburg, who had to finally abandon their excellent defenses there as Lenihan finally broke through on April 27-28th, with horrific casualties for both sides in the last major battle of the war with such high losses for the United States. There were simply to many planes raining fire from the heavens, too many landship "tanks" barreling through Confederate lines (especially in the Rapidan area), and too much artillery hammering trenches as small, targeted "Hellfighter" shock forces attacked in precise weak points of the trenches to get behind and clear the path for the men force. The Third Battle of Fredericksburg was the charm for Lenihan, who at last had what he'd promised President Hughes he would achieve when he had been moved to this theater a year earlier after the Fall of Nashville - a fairly clear path to Richmond..."

- The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Wittenmyer's frontal operational push from Scottsboro, Alabama in support of Pershing's positions around Rome. It was here that the value of the "tank"-type landship quickly became apparent, as Wittenmyer's armored cavalry, with limited aerial and long-range artillery support, was able to form a screen all the way south to Gadsden, which fell on April 11th with minimal American casualties in a considerable shift from what had been the case in previous campaigns.

This thrust in northeastern Alabama created space for Pershing's main force to focus primarily on crossing the Coosa with the end of the high of the spring flooding, though hundreds of horses and dozens of landships were still lost to rapid waters or had to be left behind until the level of the river receded further. Bridging the river became a gruesome fight, reliant primarily on superior firepower to "destroy the hills before us" as men scrambled over the river and into view of the target: the city of Atlanta, Georgia's state capital and the crossroads of much of the Confederate railroad system. The first line of Patrick's defenses were breached on the 22nd of April, placing Pershing's forces on an arc running roughly from Marietta to Alpharetta and then Gainesville well to the northeast. The Siege of Atlanta had thus begun.

As the one-year anniversary of the Fall of Nashville approached, Atlanta's civic leaders were determined not to see what had happened to Tennessee's capital and economic heartland happen to their own, and under a white flag, Mayor Courtland Winn and several other officials approached Pershing on May 6th, two days after a severe artillery battery from fifty kilometers out had indiscriminately destroyed not just a railyard but several residential neighborhoods adjacent. Pershing's strategy was obvious as it was also simple - he aimed to press out at the flanks to cut railroads from Macon and Gainesville, and thus cut routes into Atlanta from Alabama and South Carolina, and worsen Patrick's supply situation, which based on reports from spies in the city was considerably worse than the United States had anticipated. Being bad for the soldiers defending the city meant it was even worse for the civilians who had still not evacuated southwards, and Mayor Winn approached Pershing in person to request that he ponder this as Yankee troops pushed into the city, even suggesting that some civilians be allowed to evacuate northwards behind Yankee lines where they could find food, water and medicine, a provision that Patrick had reluctantly acceded to provided it be kept secret from the bombastic new President in Richmond, James K. Vardaman.

Pershing received Winn with courtesy but asked him to ponder how an American army could be justified in such "soft treatment of an enemy city" after what had befallen Baltimore and Washington as well as the bombardments of Cincinnati and Harrisburg and repeated aerial raids on Philadelphia. "War is hell," Pershing replied tersely, "and it cannot be refined. This war can only end if your people can no longer fight it or unequivocally surrender, and I will prosecute this war to effect the former until you all come to your senses and pursue the latter." Nonetheless, he agreed to allow the evacuation of women, children and slaves from the city during a three-day ceasefire on May 12th, before resuming his offensive maneuvers, but not behind American lines where they would become his army's responsibility. The quote "war is hell" is specifically from then on attributed to him, and easily one of the most famous utterings in American history..." [1]

- Pershing

[1] If it wasn't already obvious that I'm setting up "Sherman's March to the Sea, but with tanks and planes," here's your confirmation of exactly what's going down

 

[KingSweden24]

"...triumph of the "New Republic" even as the war stalemated along the Maule River, with "Colorados" unable to force their way past Blanco defenses but Aldunate's men nonetheless too poorly equipped to muster a serious counterattack; this dichotomy, of progress on paper but frustration as far as facts on the ground, was perhaps symbolically representative of what was to come of Alessandrist Chile over the next eight years until the Revolution of 1924 put the flailing polity out of its misery.

It should not be understated, however, what a new leaf the Constitution of 1916 represented, and the optimism and enthusiasm that greeted Arturo Alessandri as its first President. The provisional Chilean government, dominated by the center and center-left, promulgated the new constitution that signified the end of the Old Republic. [1] The powers of the Presidency were greatly reduced while the Presidential term was extended to six years, with the prohibition on succeeding oneself maintained but the lifetime limit of a single term lifted, rare provisions of the New Republic's governmental structure that would be maintained during the Socialist Republic in turn. The Senate was reduced in number and powers, shifting much of the influence to an expanded and much more influential Chamber of Deputies, suggesting to some that the New Republic would be parliamentary; the powers of the judiciary were further strengthened as well, to provide an additional check.

The constitution was remarkably progressive and drew heavily on ideas from both the United States and Argentina, but went further than either in many ways. The right to vote was enshrined as "inviolable" and indeed was the first article; the second article was the right to "free speech and conscience," with the Church and the Chilean state separated formally. Elections were to be regulated by a judicial electoral tribunal to end vote-rigging as had been common in the Old Republic, and the "dignity of the Chilean worker and their rights" were not to be "denigrated or denied," which the Figueroa Larrain brothers drafted in a fashion to avoid more serious worker's rights being constitutionalized. Considering the rampant corruption of the Blanco political class and power of the conservative Church prior to the Grito de 18 de Enero, this represented a sea change in Chilean politics.

Nonetheless, the explosion of radicalism across Chile in 1915 left many citizens feeling dismayed that, after Alessandri's bursting onto the political scene the previous January, this was the best his movement could do. Recabarren did not denounce the document out of hand - a fact few of his fellow revolutionary socialists ever forgot or let him forget - but he nonetheless referred to it as a "well-intended reform, but born of bourgeois principles and grievances rather than those of labor" and expressed skepticism about many of the provisions it lacked, most notably a more explicit defense of labor unions or the ten-hour working day; others were curious why land reform was not enshrined alongside the separation of Church and state, or why socialism was not proposed as a foundational aspect of the state. Even Alessandri had wanted to write legislative initiative for the President into the constitution, and its denial to him frustrated him to no end, as he predicted (correctly) that the structure of government would not work if a Chamber of Deputies that disliked an incumbent President was seated and refused to work with him.

Alessandri, standing as the only serious candidate for President, was thus easily elected and was inaugurated on April 10th, with as many as half a million citizens of Santiago in the streets the day of his inauguration, which was guarded under tight watch by Altamirano and the most elite of the Chilean Carabineros. In his address from the same window of La Moneda where President Riesco had been slain just over a year earlier, Alessandri spoke for close to an hour, without the use of notes, declaring "the dawn of a new day in the new Chile" and promised "the crushing of the oligarchy, insurgency and banditry in all of the country."

This was easier said than done, and not only due to increasingly fidgety Socialists in the Copiapo region who had still refused to submit to formal political power in Santiago and in concurrent Congressional elections swept essentially every district north of La Serena (Alessandri's Radicals, of course, dominated not just the Central Valley but all of Southern Chile "in absentia," thus enjoying a supermajority that made a farce of the new democratic constitution their champion had just helped shape.) Chile had exited the war about a year earlier in economic collapse, and despite the resumption of trade with Europe - Britain in particular - the ruinous terms placed upon it and the partial occupation of some northern ports by Bolivian soldiers to see to it that reparations were successfully paid had nonetheless created a situation where Chile was only barely able to feed itself thanks to humanitarian imports, let alone economically thrive, especially with the South in Blanco hands. Criminal gangs thus roamed the countryside, often in combination with the rural police, and a state of lawlessness descended over the country that Alessandri for all his good intentions was poorly equipped to combat. Blanco paramilitaries also found it much easier to infiltrate northwards amongst those sympathizers who had not fled southwards during the chaos of 1915, and the new "Alessandrist" Constitution seemed to confirm all of their worst fears about the New Republic, particularly the severely curtailed public role of the Church in matters of state. Despite the anticlerical program of Alessandri being severely cabined compared to other liberal regimes around the world - church schools and properties were not seized, and no religious orders were formally expelled - the curtailment of the Church's prerogatives nonetheless offended a great many Chileans who had turned to faith in the aftermath of the Great American War's various debacles and now saw Alessandri as persecuting them alongside the clergy. This, far more than the conservative political instincts of the Blancos, was what inspired a spate of terrorism across Colorado-held Chile after Alessandri's inauguration, presaging the rise of right-wing, Catholic paramilitarism throughout the rest of the 20th century..."

- Between Two Chiles

[1] Sans Balmaceda and the 1891 Chilean Civil War, there is no distinction between "Liberal Republic" and "Old Republic" in TTL Chilean historiography.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...battles at Encinal and Catarina leaving the State Militia badly bloodied and in retreat. It is often contended that these two skirmishes in early April, which repulsed Loyalist forces northwards towards San Antonio while leaving the pathway to Corpus Christi wide open, were the main reason why the Provisional Government of the Republic of Texas was declared by Garner on April 17th - Texas Day today - but it was only one reason.

The other was that it was becoming increasingly clear that the bulk of Confederate forces were going to be unable to actually march back into Texas anytime soon to restore order, but also that there was no ending to the crisis that left Texas inside the Confederacy but with all her privileges. On the floor of the Confederate Senate, Hoke Smith - the powerful Georgian who had gone from Secretary of State to the upper chamber - proposed splitting Texas into two states upon "reconquest" to even out its land size comparative to other states but also thus to defang the ability of its populist Westerners to dominate the slaveholding, plantation-economy Easterners. To a Texas that was starting to see the proceeds of a modern industrial, oil and cattle economy, this was essentially a ploy to further isolate them. It also became clear, based on both Ferguson's rhetoric and that of President Vardaman, that every man and woman in Laredo would be hung as traitors, possibly even the children.

Garner and Sheppard remained ambivalent about exiting the Confederacy [1] formally but Gore gave a rousing address to the gathered men there speaking of "the fourth revolution" - 1776, 1836, and 1861 being the previous three - as the final destiny for "this Texan race." In his view, Texas had been forged in the fires of secession and independence in some form from Great Britain, Mexico and the United States, and it was time to take "the last great leap into the freedom our forefathers deeded us - we are the generation that will finish the task!"

And so, on April 17th, 1916, Garner stood before a gathering of beleaguered soldiers waving the Blue Bonnet flag of rebellion and held up a sheet of paper, the Texas Declaration of Independence, which he and the rest of the Laredo Legislature had just signed after six hours of spirited debate. "It is the Texan destiny to forge its own path, free of the tyranny imposed from above by Richmond via their creature James Ferguson!" he announced. He was named Provisional President on the stipulation that his sole task was to steer Texas through the coming independence struggle and help draft a Constitution, while Johnson was named his Vice President.

News of the Laredo Declaration arrived in Austin quickly and caught Ferguson off guard, as did news a few days later that what were now the Republican forces had captured Corpus Christi. Events transpired enormously quickly from there - the United States announced via diplomatic missive that it regarded the Provisional Government "as the rightful government of Texan clay," thus immediately declaring that it recognized the Second Republic and intended to establish diplomatic relations with it. Other countries were considerably more ambivalent, particularly Mexico, in wanting to see in what direction the wind blew with the Confederacy before making a move, though Mexico City's sympathies of course continued to remain firmly with Laredo rather than Austin..."

- Republic Reborn

[1] It's Texit time!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...fully functional local economy; for most Punjabis, the revolt had in the end not uprooted as much of their day-to-day lives as they thought. (Some more modern scholarship, it should be noted, strongly disputes this longstanding perspective on the Ghadar Mutiny - stories of Mutineers shaking down families and killing civilians due to suspected pro-British sympathies have emerged in modern India after being suppressed for decades as they raised uncomfortable questions about the legacy of the Mutiny and why the rest of India did not rise in 1915-16 to join the Ghadarites when they are so feted today).

Still, despite this, Punjab was isolated after the recapture of Sindh, and trade via Russia and Afghanistan could not displace access to the full Indian market or the ports of Bombay and Calcutta, and the Bengali revolutionaries had the vast and friendly hinterlands of the North-East and chaotic peripheral China to fall back on. [1] The Mutiny began to come fully unglued with Kitchener's Amritsar Offensive in early March, which lasted a whole month but by mid-April had captured Sikhism's most holy city and thrust the Ghadarite army back towards Lahore, badly battered and having inflicted crippling casualties on it. But this did not come without a cost; tens of thousands of Anglo-Imperial soldiers were killed or badly wounded in their push, the poor logistics of Kitchener's forces were exposed, and more reports of poor treatment of native Indian forces fighting under the Union Jack, including allegations of throwing Hindu men into the line of fire as cannon fodder, continued to trickle out, angering a great many others. The behavior of the Indian Army upon entering Amritsar, out of British hands for close to a year at that point, did not help things; several hundred people were massacred in the sack, and thousands of women were allegedly raped, both by native and Imperial soldiery.

Still, the Battle of Amritsar was a body blow to Ghadar, which now had the distinct credibility of having held out against London for over a year throughout much of Punjab but which had failed to fully ignite a spark across all of India. At a moment when his political identity was starting to form, the Mutiny was thus an incredibly important moment for Bose. It was all that Indian students in Calcutta talked about, especially with small-scale terrorist attacks across Bombay by the Samiti carried out successfully as opposed to the retreating Ghadar forces on the other side of the Raj. Bose had a fairly simple set of theories - that the Ghadar Party had been too dependent on foreign financing and ideologues (that being vast network of thinkers and advocates on the North American West Coast, especially in British Vancouver and in San Francisco in California), too concentrated in Punjab's large but oft-insular Sikh community which gave it limited appeal beyond, a distinct failure to properly coordinate with the Samiti and Jugantar in Bengal, and not being able to speak to the vast Indian population in time to catch fire. With Sikhism's cradle in Amritsar fallen back to Kitchener's hands, Bose suspected it was only a matter of time before Ghadar collapsed completely, though the remarkable violence in the campaign forced British forces to regroup before attempting to push on Lahore that summer.

Nonetheless, while the Ghadarites had not lit a fire in India in February of 1915 as they had hoped, they had lit a spark, and there was no way to undo what had been done. The rage carried through from Ishii Maru to the events in Lahore did not destabilize Indian politics but nonetheless shocked the Indian public, especially in part the British response which was essentially to confine the whole of the country to their cities and grinding India's economy to a halt so it could more easily crush the rebellion. The Indian Police apparatus had swelled and informants ran to the British with even so much as a whisper of discontent, meaning that the civil service's focus began to shift from the governance of the Raj daily to investigations, harassment and documentation. The India Office in London winced at some of these tactics but, with both India and Ireland in crisis simultaneously, felt the hard hand was absolutely necessary and did little to check Kitchener's increasingly tyrannical methods of beating back opposition and pressing onwards into Punjab and keeping Delhi secure; the Ghadarites would scatter once Lahore fell in late June, their revolt defeated on paper, but the fire of passion continued to burn and insurgency in Punjab and neighboring regions would simmer for years to come, emerging as an ulcer for the British nearly as intense as the escalating one in eastern Bengal and northern Burma.

Perhaps nobody exhibited this transformation in public and elite opinion quite like Motilal Nehru, who upon his release from prison in Madras made his famous "Appeal to the Indian People," or Madras Appeal, in which he stated definitively that moderated local control, long a goal of the Indian National Congress (especially its more moderate Naram Dal faction), was "plainly impossible." Nehru had been "converted by facts," as he phrased it, and now identified with Bal Gagandhar Tilak and other hardliners within the INC of Garam Dal, who were definitive in their demand for Swaraj. It seemed plain now to Nehru, both from the ability of Ghadarites to hold out for over a year against the full might of the British Empire and then the British response being so cavalier towards Indian opinion, that India could only sustain itself through self-rule in some form much stronger than what had been proposed previously. The march towards independence was, quite definitively, at its beginning..."

- Bengal Tiger: Subhas Chandra Bose and India

[1] I want to emphasize yet again that there's basically a swath of Asia running from Yunnan through the Lao Highlands to northern Burma and the modern-day Northeast Provinces in India/northern Bangladesh that is essentially ungoverned/ungovernable. That will... be important, and for a long time

 

[KingSweden24]

"...considerably more hesitancy in Cape Town. It had been under a Conservative government in 1877 that the attempted Carnarvon Plan had been pursued at the behest of the Colonial Office to amalgamate South Africa into a single entity combining the English settler colonies at the Cape and Natal with Native kingdoms and the Boer States, an enterprise that had ended in disaster and fomented mistrust between the region's [1] polities for decades to come. So it was with more than a little trepidation that the Malcolm-Jagow Convention, signed in Hamburg between the British and German governments without input from the Parliament of South Africa, was received by local leaders, who saw in its contours the long shadow of similar schemes hatched in London forty years earlier.

The geopolitical situation was thus badly scrambled. The Free Republics were now hemmed in on both sides on the map by British red both to their southwest and now to their north; despite Oostburg's booming growth, British possession of Lourenco Marques directly threatened Boer access to the sea and placed a level of dependency on British commerce that had not been there before. The Germanophile governments of the Free Republics had long suspected that Portugal's hold on Mozambique was waning, but had held out hope that an alliance of Germany and the Netherlands would impress upon the British the need to preserve the independence and dignity of the Boers; Berlin's eagerness to split Portuguese Austral-Africa in half with Britain and leave Pretoria and Bloemfontein out to dry in the process put paid to such ideas. It was thus generally assumed, after two decades of improving relations even despite the occasional bellicosity from Joseph Chamberlain, that the next part of the plan for Britain was to absorb Basutoland, Swatiland and Zululand and then force the Boers into a confederation of states stretching from Mombasa in the north all the way to the Cape which would inevitably be dominated by culturally and politically Anglophile settlers.

Ironically, the constituency most in favor of this process were the Cape Dutch, who were increasingly outnumbered demographically thanks both to large-scale immigration (especially from Britain's West Country, Cornwall, and Wales) and the increasing outmigration of poorer Cape Dutch into the interior to work in the booming goldfields of the Witwatersrand. [2] The common view amongst many of the Afrikaner Bond's most outspoken members was that only by uniting with the Boers of further inland, rather than simply following them on a Little Trek via railroad to flee English cultural hegemony, would the Afrikaner culture thrive and be able to dominate the whole of southern Africa. [3] Thus it was that SAP, as well as the declining conservative Progressive Party that had started losing steam with the deaths of its chief ideologue, Thomas Scanlen, and chief financier, fruit baron Cecil Rhodes, became as leery in 1916 of "Unionism" as their forebears had been in 1877 of similar ideas; put simply, the liberal Merriman government based in trade-dependent and urbane Cape Town had little interest in subsuming its interests (and, perhaps in less noble terms, those of its English-speaking constituents) to Pretoria and what a great many thought were outright theocratic Dutch Reformed farmers and burghers with little care for the affairs of the Cape.

The elections of 1916 thus occurred under this cloud, with the SAP winning a reduced majority, but a majority nonetheless, on this platform of total opposition to "further Union." The Afrikaner Bond emerged as the chief opposition party as anti-Union Progressives flocked to the SAP out of fears of splitting the vote, and the first independent socialist politicians who would eventually form the South Africa Labor Party entered Parliament for the first time. The elections revealed a restive South Africa, one that was staunchly imperial in its outlook but firmly committed to the longstanding principles of local rule, and while proud of London for its new territories were uninterested, once again, in seeing their country be used as a tool in the Colonial Office's world games; it also revealed a Cape Dutch community that increasingly identified its interests on ethnic, rather than regional, terms, an ominous sign for social harmony.

Merriman retired in June of 1916, not long after the successful polls, shortly before his 75th birthday, having governed South Africa for over a decade. His replacement would be James Molteno, son of former Prime Minister John, and it was the younger scion of the Molteno family who would user in with his new majority what is today referred to as the "South African Model." Merriman had been a staunch opponent of women's suffrage and an alteration of the qualified franchise that set a property requirement of fifty pounds since 1899 under John Sprigg; the party's grassroots had shifted against both of these policies, however, and Molteno followed them, in late 1916 following Australia in granting women the vote across the land while reducing the qualified franchise to thirty pounds, allowing tens of thousands of additional voters onto the rolls and making the country's democracy far more universal. Of course, there were cynical political reasons for this, too; women were thought of as being even anti-Unionist than most men (though less so among the Cape Dutch) and it was widely assumed that the thousands of Natives allowed onto the rolls with the reduced property qualifications would support the SAP to avoid the threat of falling under Boer rule. The campaign for expanded suffrage, then, was the other side of the coin of the struggle against Unionism for Molteno's government..."

- Mosaic: The Endurance of South Africa

[1] I'm going to need a good name for the "greater South Africa" region since it's balkanized ITTL. "Transzambezia," maybe?
[2] And, it should be noted, much fewer of these British immigrants winding up in the Transvaal than OTL, thus making the Cape and Natal noticeably more British and the OFS/Transvaal noticeably more Afrikaner
[3] A view that inevitably won out over more moderate instincts in OTL

 

[KingSweden24]

"...push further southwards; Irregular activity was much more difficult to sustain deep within Kentucky when the front lines had shifted from the ridges north of Nashville to the banks of the Tennessee River.

Pershing was also very leery of leaving his supply lines hugely exposed and thus viewed fortifying Kentucky as a redoubt of Yankee logistics as an absolute priority, and here his lifelong sympathy for Negro concerns and soft spot for the mission behind ONE, [1] having taught at a colored school in Missouri as a young man before going to West Point, came into play. Extending the thrust of his forces deep into Georgia would mean leaving hundreds of miles of lines exposed to sabotage and attack by Irregulars behind him - indeed, damaging bridges and railroad tracks rather than lynching suspected collaborators became a more important activity for Forrest's men by 1916 - and thus from the masses of Negro refugees who had fled north and been arrested from traveling further at the Ohio he recruited a small army of depot guards, day laborers, cooks, railroad attendants, and other jobs that required little skill or literacy but was hugely important in keeping the war machine humming as it reached deeper and further into Dixie.

This limited but tangible incorporation of thousands of unskilled but hardworking Negro laborers into the logistical network of Pershing's army occurred in tandem with a considerably more organized processing of refugees now fleeing places like Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi. Whereas the Yankees had been overwhelmed by the flood of slaves through much of 1915 as they tried to squeeze the vice on Nashville, near the end of the year Pershing's staff had better solved processes for sorting through refugees, and even though thousands still were able to make it across the Ohio (or into Missouri through the Ozarks) and head for cities with large prewar Negro populations such as Cincinnati and Indianapolis or the beating heart of American rail and industry at Chicago, the squalid and disease-ridden camps were mostly no more, with refugees instead assigned to makeshift shantytowns on the edges of major Army camps or Kentucky towns. Limits were set on who was allowed to officially "get papers" to the United States, but for those left behind - which was the vast majority - schools appeared as quickly as small schoolhouses could be thrown together, with thousands of young women teachers, Black Yankee abolitionists, clergymen (particularly Baptists and Methodists), and even some wounded Army officers (Quentin Roosevelt being a famous example) serving as teachers, often on a volunteer basis, on behalf of ONE.

This meant that by late spring of 1916, as Pershing was pushing into Atlanta and the Confederacy was crumbling, the Commonwealth west of the Kentucky River had become considerably more colored in its demographics (indeed, many White Kentuckians fled south or east as a result) and also formed the nucleus of a functioning self-governed polity, which while poor and unstable nonetheless had a serviceable judiciary under military occupation for civilian matters, commerce, and an increasingly literate and educated Negro populace that was passionately ebullient about its newfound freedom and emancipation. Western Kentucky would never be the same, and as the end of the war approached further south, the question of what exactly Philadelphia was to do with this small corner of the Confederacy..."

- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy

[1] For those who've forgotten - Organization for Negro Education, founded by Booker T. Washington before his death and thus very much a purveyor of Bookerite thinking on Black empowerment. Pershing, in case it isn't obvious, largely aligns with that style of thinking.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Lejeune's recently-published war memoir recounts the events of May 21st as "perhaps the most harrowing of my long career," in which he suggested that traveling to Heritage House to meet with Kernan, President Vardaman, and Secretary of War Robert B. Macon, an utter nonentity chosen for his likelihood of subservience towards the President and, crucially, ASO.

The "Pamunkey Meeting," as it has come to be known in only the short years since the end of the war, in many ways was the first time Vardaman had been forced to actually grapple with the notion that the Confederacy was losing the war and that, by Kernan's in the end optimistic estimate, there were perhaps seven to eight months of "fight remaining in Dixie." Kernan and Macon had both long since learned that Vardaman was not a man for facts and data, despite the former being an obsessive mind who pored over minute figures down to the number of wounded on daily bases in military hospitals across the Confederacy. This was impressed upon Lejeune as the general was brought into the Blue Room at Heritage House, where just less than three years earlier Tillman and Smith had made their fateful pact to go to war with the Union preemptively.

The news Lejeune brought was dire. The breakthrough at Fredericksburg a month prior had left much of central Virginia prone to the advances of the enemy, and as they gathered Lenihan's forces were seizing Charlottesville and placing themselves upon the South Anna River, which if they crossed would essentially negate Richmond's western defensive lines, or at least badly stretch them. The central thrust of the Yankee "Army Command East" was gathering north of Ashland, which would allow it to attack across the Pamunkey River - the so-called "trigger" which would presage an evacuation of Richmond, at least in theory, as it had after all been the mere suggestion of such a tactic that had ended Hugh Scott's career eighteen months earlier at Thanksgiving 1914.

Vardaman's main question was around the stability of Richmond's western defenses; Kernan replied that while the Yankees under Farnsworth had advanced past Williamsburg, they had been stopped in a bloody engagement at a chokepoint at the eastern end of the Middle Neck at the Battle of the Chickahominy and he was confident they were sufficiently pinned down. Vardaman asked all three men, then, what their suggested course of action was. Lejeune, hoping to play to Vardaman's vanity and political zeal for fighting on, noted that once the Yankees were across the Pamunkey there was very little that could be done to defend Richmond from attacks from north, east and west, but that the James River and the Roanoke River beyond it provided excellent defensive barriers and suggested at the very least that preparations begin to be made to prevent a breakout into east-central North Carolina. Kernan concurred, as did Macon, and Vardaman begrudgingly agreed to this course of action and asked that Congress, as well as Vice President Patton, head to Charlotte - seen as more defensible than Raleigh - while he stayed behind until the defense of Richmond was untenable. Lejeune was nonetheless not spared an angry tirade from Vardaman, who pointed a finger straight at him and noted that "this is the fault of you generals and your unwillingness to do what must be done," a remark that would haunt him to this day as he pondered in his memoirs whether he indeed did enough to keep Richmond out of Yankee hands..."

- The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916

"...on patrol at Monticello. Lenihan admired the structure and made sure to order that it be preserved entirely, and made it his headquarters for the push towards Roanoke and Lynchburg, which he viewed increasingly as just as important as Richmond. This in the end was highly ironic, as it was on a walk of the Monticello grounds with his chief of staff and a young officer name Dwight Eisenhower on the morning of June 6, 1916, that a sniper's bullet took Lenihan's life with a shot through the chest, and Lieutenant Eisenhower was badly injured with a shot to the lung himself.

The shock of Lenihan's assassination rippled across the United States; along with Liggett at the Susquehanna and Pershing's various campaigns, he was one of the three generals who had most placed himself in the public's imagination, and it was said that spontaneous weeping and other grieving occurred almost instantly as the news traveled. President Hughes ordered all flags flown at half mast for a week, and offered Lenihan's widow to speak at his funeral; along with Joseph Murdock at Hilton Head, he was the most senior United States officer to lose his life in the war, and their national martyrdom are the reason so many streets and schools today bear their names still.

Lenihan's death was, like Murdock's, doubly ironic as it occurred on the eve of his greatest triumph. With Charlottesville's fall on May 22nd and the successful breaking of Confederate lines along the South Anna on June 2nd, followed by the Battle of Ashland on June 8th, the paths to Richmond were entirely opened save for the small and ferocious defenders to its west holding off Farnsworth's increasingly large force on the Middle Neck. Herman Hall, Lenihan's most trusted and capable subordinate, was given new command of ACE and sent ahead a message to Lejeune in Richmond demanding the immediate surrender of Richmond and with it "ideally an end to this war."

On June 16th, the artillery defenses in the hills around Mechanicsville grew suspiciously quiet, and Hall's men - supplemented with landship and air cover - moved forward carefully, finding abandoned trenches all the way to the city. The Confederate government, it turned out, had evacuated all of Richmond north of the James and a new line of defenses set at Manchester to the capital's south, Petersburg, and the Appomattox and Roanoke Rivers. This choice to abandon a largely indefensible position saved Richmond the fate of cities like Nashville or Atlanta, and on June 17th, having cleared scattered defenders, Hall personally raised the Stars and Stripes over Heritage House, which he immediately declared his headquarters, and American soldiers used the Confederate Capitol building as sleeping quarters, with photographs taken of infantrymen putting out cigars on Senators Martin and Tillman's desks with their feet up, and others using Confederate flags as rags to clean their rifles. Richmond had fallen largely nonviolently, a symbolic victory for the United States that flew in the face of the chest-puffing "total resistance" rhetoric of Vardaman just four months prior and declaring louder than anything else could have - save events in Atlanta over the next three weeks - that the end was nearing for Dixie..."

- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100

 

[KingSweden24]

"...more than a few suspected foul play. The decisive majority which the Concordancia entered the Imperial Assembly with at the conclusion of the late April elections was perhaps not so suspicious, though, in seeing that the former Bloc Independiente had absorbed not only Limantour's Liberal Union in the fold but also moderate reformist former Maderistas who were put off by what had gone on during the Biennio Maderato (particularly vis a vis the justice system) and moderate conservatives who were uninterested in sharing the fate, either political or corporal, of Creel or Molina. In that sense, what Reyes represented with the Concordancia was a big-tent, catch-all postwar party meant to unite Mexico behind it and rebuild together, putting an end to the polarization, violence and discord that had plagued Mexican politics since the collapse of the UP that was, the UP of Zuloaga and Miramon, in 1907. It was not just the increasingly confident cosmopolitan upper and middle classes that represented Reyes' base that felt that way, either; after the Maderato, the Panic, the war, the Red Battalions and finally the October Putsch, most Mexicans simply felt exhausted and ready to return to the good days of yesteryear, and in El Primer Jefe they had an easy vehicle to do so. [1]

Reyes further smoothed over ruffled feathers by appointing a Cabinet that was equal parts his former allies (dismissed as cronies by men such as Abraham Gonzalez) as well as rivals, so he could keep a close eye on them. Lascurain was kept on as Foreign Minister to take advantage of his experience, while Limantour was made Minister of Public Works, a good fit for his more technocratic mind; de la Barra was meanwhile given the Ambassadorship to the Austrian court, the most prestigious diplomatic posting in Mexico. But it was Reyes' trusted inner circle who got the best positions. Carranza was made Minister of Finance, a crucial position for one of Mexico's cannier politicians and the man widely viewed as Reyes' civilian protege, while Carbajal - perhaps in return for his loyalty throughout 1915 - was anointed Minister of War, a downgrade from Finance as he had held since October but one he was made to swallow regardless. Miguel Mondragon, long Reyes' favorite, was made Chief of the General Staff; the Reyes Era had fully begun, and there was no question who was totally in charge.

For Reyes, the peace with the United States was just the first step, especially as aspersions were cast on his electoral triumph on the heels of staging an effective putsch to take over the civilian government. It thus surprised nobody that Reyes, in his first speech after the election, announced in essence that having consolidated power in Mexico City, it was time to reconsolidate Mexico under his rule - even if he did not use such strong language. What did surprise most was that he turned his attention towards Pancho Villa in the north first, rather than the much closer and larger Zapatista revolt that now held sway across a wide swath of the Mexican south. This was for two reasons. The first was that, quite simply, Zapata actually had a genuine political program of land reform and peasants' rights, a program that made him much more dangerous than the dashing and daring banditry of Villa but also a more sympathetic figure to the Mexican street and also, surprisingly, to a number of Reyista officials, particularly Carranza, who was a known advocate of limited land reform and restoring some rights to ejidos that had deteriorated over the years. The other was geopolitical and historical; Reyes had come of age militarily putting down the Revolt of the Caudillos thirty years earlier and he regarded trouble in Mexico's long-restive Norte as the biggest threat to the government of the day, and also wanted to make sure that the explosive issues in Texas did not spill across the Rio Bravo and trigger a transnational revolution that would be virtually impossible to quell. Villa was thus the priority, and the reorganized Mexican Army marched north on May 5th, 1916 [2] to challenge his control over Chihuahua and her environs.

The operation to defeat Villa actually veered relatively close to disaster, and Mexicans today perhaps do not realize how close Reyes' forces were to being successfully ambushed and perhaps even defeated by Villa in the hills west of Torreon on May 13th; only a lucky spotting by a scouting plane and quick thinking from the commanding officer Pablo Gonzalez averted a successful pincer. Having avoided Villa's trap, Gonzalez's forces regrouped in Torreon, resupplied themselves, and then carried out a series of increasingly aggressive attacks supplemented by aerial cover and the use of rail-mounted artillery to Camargo, Parral, and Delicias over the course of the next three weeks, until attacking Chihuahua from both south and east on June 7th and surrounding a major element of Villa's most experienced fighters. Villa and his two chief lieutenants were able to slip the vice and escape towards the Arizona border and the US forces across from Agua Prieta, but close to ten thousand Villistas were killed, wounded or captured at Chihuahua and the survivors were, to the man, thrown in labor camps across the Mexican south with stiff sentences of ten years; it was rumored that Reyes himself intervened to prevent amnesty or pardons for any of the men, who unlike Zapata's followers were dismissed as bandits and criminals.

The ferocity of this response did not go unnoticed in the south of Mexico or elsewhere, for that matter. Zapatista activity slowed notably throughout the summer of 1916 as the rebel leader considered how best to continue his cause now with the full attention of Reyes upon him and Guatemala and Honduras in total anarchy. American observers were also put off, though for other reasons - Villa had in the United States become a celebrity, aided by a remarkably sophisticated public relations operation [3] that included photographers (and even a film crew) capturing his exploits. To many Americans, Villa was not an opportunist warlord but rather the handsome and noble ally of Pershing, immortalized in the photos and footage of him in a pith hat or, more iconically, his grand sombrero on horseback with looping bullet belts. It was this image of Villa that was cultivated throughout the 1920s during Villa's lengthy exile in the United States, where he spent much of the early half of the decade in California (including playing himself in a number of films that helped further build his folk legend status), before retiring to New York, where he would die in January of 1932..."

- The Matriarch: Empress Margarita Clementina and the Emergence of a Modern Mexico

[1] But also the election was probably totally rigged, notwithstanding all this, because come on
[2]
[3] This is true to OTL - before he poked the bear with the Columbus, New Mexico raid, Pancho Villa was held in very high regard in the United States via a very savvy PR campaign to enhance his image and deride that of Huerta. It is in part from there which the song La Cucuracha, sung by Villistas about Huerta, came from, and he really did portray himself in film