Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Austria-Hungary always seems destined to face severe conflagration and destruction. And well, cease to exist in any TL.
Yeah it is too bad. It makes sense here with a POD well after the advent of nationalism and our author is doing a good job setting the scene but the country is a lot more resilient than most TL writers give it credit for. It took fighting and losing the most destructive war in human history to that point for A-H to shatter OTL. Wouldn't mind a good TL where A-H is just sorta there, surviving in some form or fashion to the modern day, one Great Power among several.
Hapsburgs surviving in Mexico is some hilarious irony, tbh, in this TL.
Yeah it is! I wasn't being critical of the impending end of A-H here in this timeline. Just speaking in general.
Oh, i wasn't disagreeing either. or really criticizing. I do find it hard to imagine how A-H would have survived anyway, even with whatever hypothetical reforms Franz Ferdinand was going to do.
There are too many variables in AH, simply because of the mass of people that want out - i mean it seems to certainly be the Germans vs non-Germans (though its way more than that) Plus, Balkans as well.
I do wonder though maybe if you take out the Austro-German parts, you'd have a Kingdom of Hungary reiged over by the Hapsburgs, that might work...
The number of nations where there are two different groups whose birth language is greater than 10% that is an active part of the country's political makeup is fairly small and the Author has already designated that two of the (relative) successes from OTL (Belgium and Canada) will not survive iTTL. Since Norway eventually gets its independence, I'm not sure if there are any iTTL. I think the status of Russia in 2023 (and what it goes through in the time period in between) is a deliberate black hole in what the Author has talked about.
For all I know, Persia in 2023 is a happy part of a SW Asian Muslim Superstate in 2023 with 15% of the delegates in the Union speaking Farsi as their first language.
When A-H collapses, the general consensus in this thread is that Italy will gain all it wants like Istria and Dalmatia as a fait accompli. But I think that there is a possible threat to their ambition.
Yet another powerful empire lies to the east. The Ottomans might want to change the loyalty of Belgrade and possible a Croat state towards Constantinople. Or maybe they would try to get Budapest as a friend. I am quite sure that Constantinople maintains a strong position in Bosnia and can make some moves if they just decide too. Now they also maintain a powerful fleet so Italy will have to think many times before they attempt something. They might have even reduced their debt to manageable level by now.
Are we sure that it's the end of the Habsburgs? In Europe that it? Won't people want to keep they around in some minor possession like some Adriatic Islands or Dubrovnik again also with Constantinople or London's intervention.
Yet another powerful empire lies to the east. The Ottomans might want to change the loyalty of Belgrade and possible a Croat state towards Constantinople. Or maybe they would try to get Budapest as a friend. I am quite sure that Constantinople maintains a strong position in Bosnia and can make some moves if they just decide too. Now they also maintain a powerful fleet so Italy will have to think many times before they attempt something. They might have even reduced their debt to manageable level by now.
Are we sure that it's the end of the Habsburgs? In Europe that it? Won't people want to keep they around in some minor possession like some Adriatic Islands or Dubrovnik again also with Constantinople or London's intervention.
I'm absolutely convinced that there will be a war between the OE and Italy within 30 years of the end of the CEW. The contours of which will be *greatly* affected by the ownership of the currently French Suez Canal.
The question in Europe will be "By the time of the end of the CEW, will Germany be viewed in any way as in (secondary) control of the Nicaragua Canal?"
The other option of course is that the negotiations get so ugly on who gets the Suez Canal that *another* war breaks out over the issue. (Britain and the OE vs. Germany and Italy, with the war being mostly Naval (I doubt the US loyalty to Germany will lead toward the US being an active participant)
Minneapolis General Strike (Part I)
"...the fundamental premise of "Root-ism," if such an ideology could be said to exist, was that the Republic needed an experienced and sober-minded President for the immediate postwar period, and that Elihu Root was uniquely equipped for such a task both from an administrative and partisan point of view. He had served in every Liberal administration
since the party's foundation and thus retained a singular understanding of the machinery of federal government both in practice and in theory, and knew every major player in both parties across the country.
There was a second piece to this, however, beyond simply running on a vague idea of "experience" - that the Liberals, having won the war, could deliver to the public a worthy peace and a "return to normalcy" away from wartime rationing and the devastation of the front. This would have been a profoundly difficult task to accomplish for any man in this position - historians have generally taken the view that Hughes would have failed in this endeavor, and that a Democratic President such as George McClellan Jr. or a fourth-term William Randolph Hearst would have as well - but those specific choices made by Root, especially by his Cabinet, set his administration up to be particularly dismal. Several of those problems came home to roost as early as the spring of 1917, and were perhaps typified by the chaos of the Minneapolis General Strike, regarded at that time as probably the largest strike in the history of the United States, at least since the "Strikeout Summer" of 1886 or the Pullman Strike of 1894 - both events Root had witnessed himself as a Cabinet officer.
The General Strike's causes were myriad and complex, a mix of wartime and postwar labor grievances, ethnic tensions peculiar to Minnesota, and the economic shock of the end of the war, but whatever else helped cause it was badly exacerbated by the decision on May 5th, 1917 to wind up the Grain Board and suspend price controls. This was not entirely Root's doing; the Grain Board had already relaxed a number of controls since the fall before his inauguration, and by the time he took the oath of office it was probably one of the most unpopular institutions in the United States thanks to its aggressive moralizing policing of the use of grains to make beer in states where alcohol was legal (the cause of the infamous Milwaukee Beer Crisis in 1914), its arbitrary use of price controls and issuing of credit to farmers, and a general sense in the Farm Belt that its governors knew little about agricultural economics and didn't care to. Prairie Democrats like Dakota's John Burke had called for the Grain Board's abolition as early as late 1915, and the general contempt for it was one of the few things that the populist agrarian Western Wall had in common with the laissez-faire small-government Liberals that populated Root's administration to a much greater extent than Hughes'.
Where they disagreed, however, was on the solution. Burke and other Western Senators were of the belief that the Grain Board should be replaced by a permanent farm support bureau that provided agricultural credit, hail insurance, and other price supports farmers had long called for but which had been introduced piecemeal in the Hearst era and never quite to their satisfaction. Bills to that effect were drafted and introduced; in the meantime, Mellon called for the Board's suspension ahead of the 1917 planting season, of the belief that most farmers would prefer to proceed with their harvest knowing they were not at the mercy of the Board's decisions. Early May was fairly late for such an endeavor, and due to that Stimson argued vociferously that the decision should be punted until after the harvest, but Root deferred to Mellon for the first but not the last time over the suggestions of his protege, and signed the executive order winding up the Grain Board, with it set to be entirely disbanded no later than July 1st..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...only Ireland produced a proportionately higher level of emigres in the 19th and early 20th centuries than Norway, and the Irish emigrated to a far broader number of destinations than just the United States. The manpower needs of the Great American War and an economic depression in the mid-1910s had driven almost two hundred thousand Norwegians, [1] more than five percent of the country's population, across the Atlantic in the space of just five years, and unlike the massive amounts of Italians, Serbs and Greeks who flocked to American factories to provide wartime muscle, few if any of them returned to their cold, impoverished home. Norwegians found their way all over the United States, with large communities forming in Seattle, Chicago, Spokane, Dakota's Red River Valley, and Butte, but nowhere saw as many as in such high amounts as Minnesota.
What set Minnesota aside demographically, too, was that while most Norwegians were economic migrants, a huge wave had arrived a decade earlier in the wake of the failed war of independence, the so-called Fivers (referencing 1905), of whom Michelsen was the north star but whom quickly diversified politically, as Norwegian nationalism was a large tent that included not just the conservative classical liberals like Michelsen but socialists and everything in between. This political sentiment was exacerbated by the fact that in Minnesota, the Norwegians found themselves in a place dominated politically by a machine of Swedes and German Lutherans, giving Minnesota an ethnic-based politics both unique to its state and complete opaque to outsiders, who had little understanding what exactly the tensions were all about, with many Americans, despite the long-running stereotype of the "Swedish nanny," not being able to tell the two cultures apart whatsoever. [2] Within the Twin Cities, however, it was a sharp contrast. Norwegians had their own Lutheran parishes and schools, their own grocers and laundries, and the Sons of Norway, a fraternal organization that quickly became the backbone of Minneapolis society and provided life and health insurance, legal aid and unemployment support. Social intermixing with Swedes, who tended to concentrate either in a different part of Minneapolis or in St. Paul across the Mississippi River, was almost nonexistent unlike in other areas, such as the more diverse Seattle, and Norwegians, regardless of their views on policy and despite the influence of long-tenured Norwegian-born (and Fiver-sympathetic) Senator Knute Nelson, stubbornly refused to vote for the Democratic Party that dominated Minnesota politics if for no reason other than that it was at that time run primarily by Swedes, such as Senator John Lind or the new governor, Charles A. Lindbergh.
Minneapolis thus was a fairly unusual place ethnically with a particular set of grievances and tensions within its public, which exacerbated its peculiar economic conditions as well. The Twin Cities lay at the point where two of the four major transcontinental railroads met after crossing Montana and the Dakotas and also upon the Mississippi River, thus making it one of the most critical junction points for transportation east, west and south in the United States. Its position also placed it where the industrial Midwest met the agrarian Farm Belt, and sat in close proximity to the Iron Range and steel mills of Duluth, possibly the most politically radical city in the country. As such, it had surged in population and industrial production during the war, as shipments passed through on nationalized railroads and barges of weapons and grain were shipped south to the front along with armed gunboats produced in St. Paul. It was a city unusually dependent on farming and industry and transport logistics, formerly the headquarters of Great Northern and Northern Pacific before the Rail Nationalization Order and still the headquarters of General Mills, the city's largest and most important employer with its massive grain elevators, warehouses, and mills. The suspension of the Grain Board and its price controls, and the anticipation of the re-privatization of the railroads soon thereafter, thus struck the city hard and suddenly at a time when thousands of veterans were returning to Minnesota only to find that jobs were scarce as factories laid off employees and downsized production needs with War Department contracts expiring, and consumer goods were prohibitively expensive after nearly four years of rationing and a major focus on war materiel being produced instead.
Michelsen was not entirely unsympathetic to organized labor, and indeed in his antipathy for the Swedish-dominated Democrats had endorsed the Socialist Thomas Van Lear for Mayor of Minneapolis in one of the final instances of the strange, era-specific municipal alliance between classic liberals and social democrats opposed to perceived Democratic corruption. Nonetheless, his liberalism was genuinely held, and he had campaigned with vigor for the Root-Garfield ticket in Minnesota even if it was in vain. He was thus not surprised when on June 1st, after General Mills refused a 12% pay raise after three years of wage controls during the war, ten thousand mill workers walked off the job and announced a strike, and in a letter written in the Norwegian-language Minnesota Norsk-Advokat he urged General Mills to negotiate with the workers as grain, wheat and beef futures absolutely collapsed across the board following the end of price controls. This encouragement fell on deaf ears, and by the end of the week, railroad workers announced they would no longer ship General Mills products out of sympathy, and dockworkers below the Falls of the Mississippi announced similar provisions. The Minneapolis General Strike had begun..." [3]
- Andre Sjanse: Christian Michelsen in America
[1] About 800,000 Norwegians emigrated to the US between 1825-1925 IOTL, for reference, so the USA is a whole lot more Norsk here with these kinds of numbers both heightened and sustained
[2] This happens a lot to me personally, lol
[3] Two notes. Yes, this is basically just an amalgamated version of the Seattle General Strike and the Winnipeg General Strike. Second, this got a bit too into the weeds on Norwegian-Swedish ethnic relations in Minneapolis so I wasn't able to cover the whole strike in one update as I'd hoped, but Part II will be forthcoming soon.
(Also: special thanks to @DanMcCollum for his thoughts on helping me come up with some ideas for the Minneapolis strike)
since the party's foundation and thus retained a singular understanding of the machinery of federal government both in practice and in theory, and knew every major player in both parties across the country.
There was a second piece to this, however, beyond simply running on a vague idea of "experience" - that the Liberals, having won the war, could deliver to the public a worthy peace and a "return to normalcy" away from wartime rationing and the devastation of the front. This would have been a profoundly difficult task to accomplish for any man in this position - historians have generally taken the view that Hughes would have failed in this endeavor, and that a Democratic President such as George McClellan Jr. or a fourth-term William Randolph Hearst would have as well - but those specific choices made by Root, especially by his Cabinet, set his administration up to be particularly dismal. Several of those problems came home to roost as early as the spring of 1917, and were perhaps typified by the chaos of the Minneapolis General Strike, regarded at that time as probably the largest strike in the history of the United States, at least since the "Strikeout Summer" of 1886 or the Pullman Strike of 1894 - both events Root had witnessed himself as a Cabinet officer.
The General Strike's causes were myriad and complex, a mix of wartime and postwar labor grievances, ethnic tensions peculiar to Minnesota, and the economic shock of the end of the war, but whatever else helped cause it was badly exacerbated by the decision on May 5th, 1917 to wind up the Grain Board and suspend price controls. This was not entirely Root's doing; the Grain Board had already relaxed a number of controls since the fall before his inauguration, and by the time he took the oath of office it was probably one of the most unpopular institutions in the United States thanks to its aggressive moralizing policing of the use of grains to make beer in states where alcohol was legal (the cause of the infamous Milwaukee Beer Crisis in 1914), its arbitrary use of price controls and issuing of credit to farmers, and a general sense in the Farm Belt that its governors knew little about agricultural economics and didn't care to. Prairie Democrats like Dakota's John Burke had called for the Grain Board's abolition as early as late 1915, and the general contempt for it was one of the few things that the populist agrarian Western Wall had in common with the laissez-faire small-government Liberals that populated Root's administration to a much greater extent than Hughes'.
Where they disagreed, however, was on the solution. Burke and other Western Senators were of the belief that the Grain Board should be replaced by a permanent farm support bureau that provided agricultural credit, hail insurance, and other price supports farmers had long called for but which had been introduced piecemeal in the Hearst era and never quite to their satisfaction. Bills to that effect were drafted and introduced; in the meantime, Mellon called for the Board's suspension ahead of the 1917 planting season, of the belief that most farmers would prefer to proceed with their harvest knowing they were not at the mercy of the Board's decisions. Early May was fairly late for such an endeavor, and due to that Stimson argued vociferously that the decision should be punted until after the harvest, but Root deferred to Mellon for the first but not the last time over the suggestions of his protege, and signed the executive order winding up the Grain Board, with it set to be entirely disbanded no later than July 1st..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...only Ireland produced a proportionately higher level of emigres in the 19th and early 20th centuries than Norway, and the Irish emigrated to a far broader number of destinations than just the United States. The manpower needs of the Great American War and an economic depression in the mid-1910s had driven almost two hundred thousand Norwegians, [1] more than five percent of the country's population, across the Atlantic in the space of just five years, and unlike the massive amounts of Italians, Serbs and Greeks who flocked to American factories to provide wartime muscle, few if any of them returned to their cold, impoverished home. Norwegians found their way all over the United States, with large communities forming in Seattle, Chicago, Spokane, Dakota's Red River Valley, and Butte, but nowhere saw as many as in such high amounts as Minnesota.
What set Minnesota aside demographically, too, was that while most Norwegians were economic migrants, a huge wave had arrived a decade earlier in the wake of the failed war of independence, the so-called Fivers (referencing 1905), of whom Michelsen was the north star but whom quickly diversified politically, as Norwegian nationalism was a large tent that included not just the conservative classical liberals like Michelsen but socialists and everything in between. This political sentiment was exacerbated by the fact that in Minnesota, the Norwegians found themselves in a place dominated politically by a machine of Swedes and German Lutherans, giving Minnesota an ethnic-based politics both unique to its state and complete opaque to outsiders, who had little understanding what exactly the tensions were all about, with many Americans, despite the long-running stereotype of the "Swedish nanny," not being able to tell the two cultures apart whatsoever. [2] Within the Twin Cities, however, it was a sharp contrast. Norwegians had their own Lutheran parishes and schools, their own grocers and laundries, and the Sons of Norway, a fraternal organization that quickly became the backbone of Minneapolis society and provided life and health insurance, legal aid and unemployment support. Social intermixing with Swedes, who tended to concentrate either in a different part of Minneapolis or in St. Paul across the Mississippi River, was almost nonexistent unlike in other areas, such as the more diverse Seattle, and Norwegians, regardless of their views on policy and despite the influence of long-tenured Norwegian-born (and Fiver-sympathetic) Senator Knute Nelson, stubbornly refused to vote for the Democratic Party that dominated Minnesota politics if for no reason other than that it was at that time run primarily by Swedes, such as Senator John Lind or the new governor, Charles A. Lindbergh.
Minneapolis thus was a fairly unusual place ethnically with a particular set of grievances and tensions within its public, which exacerbated its peculiar economic conditions as well. The Twin Cities lay at the point where two of the four major transcontinental railroads met after crossing Montana and the Dakotas and also upon the Mississippi River, thus making it one of the most critical junction points for transportation east, west and south in the United States. Its position also placed it where the industrial Midwest met the agrarian Farm Belt, and sat in close proximity to the Iron Range and steel mills of Duluth, possibly the most politically radical city in the country. As such, it had surged in population and industrial production during the war, as shipments passed through on nationalized railroads and barges of weapons and grain were shipped south to the front along with armed gunboats produced in St. Paul. It was a city unusually dependent on farming and industry and transport logistics, formerly the headquarters of Great Northern and Northern Pacific before the Rail Nationalization Order and still the headquarters of General Mills, the city's largest and most important employer with its massive grain elevators, warehouses, and mills. The suspension of the Grain Board and its price controls, and the anticipation of the re-privatization of the railroads soon thereafter, thus struck the city hard and suddenly at a time when thousands of veterans were returning to Minnesota only to find that jobs were scarce as factories laid off employees and downsized production needs with War Department contracts expiring, and consumer goods were prohibitively expensive after nearly four years of rationing and a major focus on war materiel being produced instead.
Michelsen was not entirely unsympathetic to organized labor, and indeed in his antipathy for the Swedish-dominated Democrats had endorsed the Socialist Thomas Van Lear for Mayor of Minneapolis in one of the final instances of the strange, era-specific municipal alliance between classic liberals and social democrats opposed to perceived Democratic corruption. Nonetheless, his liberalism was genuinely held, and he had campaigned with vigor for the Root-Garfield ticket in Minnesota even if it was in vain. He was thus not surprised when on June 1st, after General Mills refused a 12% pay raise after three years of wage controls during the war, ten thousand mill workers walked off the job and announced a strike, and in a letter written in the Norwegian-language Minnesota Norsk-Advokat he urged General Mills to negotiate with the workers as grain, wheat and beef futures absolutely collapsed across the board following the end of price controls. This encouragement fell on deaf ears, and by the end of the week, railroad workers announced they would no longer ship General Mills products out of sympathy, and dockworkers below the Falls of the Mississippi announced similar provisions. The Minneapolis General Strike had begun..." [3]
- Andre Sjanse: Christian Michelsen in America
[1] About 800,000 Norwegians emigrated to the US between 1825-1925 IOTL, for reference, so the USA is a whole lot more Norsk here with these kinds of numbers both heightened and sustained
[2] This happens a lot to me personally, lol
[3] Two notes. Yes, this is basically just an amalgamated version of the Seattle General Strike and the Winnipeg General Strike. Second, this got a bit too into the weeds on Norwegian-Swedish ethnic relations in Minneapolis so I wasn't able to cover the whole strike in one update as I'd hoped, but Part II will be forthcoming soon.
(Also: special thanks to @DanMcCollum for his thoughts on helping me come up with some ideas for the Minneapolis strike)
One can never go TOO far into the weeds when discussing ethnic relations within local regions. I could read a whole book on this stuff
Also, lets take a moment to sympath for Governor Charles Lindberg who finally got elected, and now has to deal with this crap landing right on his lap (and though he's likely sympathetic to the striers, most are just gonna hate on him for being a Swede!)
Thanks! Not sure how much I helped in this case: but I'm more than happy to take credit where it is given
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With Repression in india will Indians flee to America and south America or even Africa?
Does mutiny impacted Indian religious framework in india and among diaspora?
Does Indian diaspora in America now wealthy enough to actively support various indian religious institutions like Ramakrishna Mission and others to Carter their needs?
Does mutiny impacted Indian religious framework in india and among diaspora?
Does Indian diaspora in America now wealthy enough to actively support various indian religious institutions like Ramakrishna Mission and others to Carter their needs?
A large segment of the TTL Finnish immigrant population is likely to end up to Minnesota as well, since Canada is most likely less hospitable towards them than in OTL and the general Russificiation of the Grand Duchy continues.
Be right back, gonna take a victory lap after predicting this exact thing happening a year ago. On a serious note, if I, a rando on the internet with too much time on his hands can predict something so obvious, why can't any of the allegedly smart guys in Philadelphia?
This is my shocked face when we have yet another instance of Socialists and Liberals allying. I'm totally floored!
Of course, this full-throated endorsement of Root and his disaster of an administration will not cost Michelsen at all when he marches to his coronation as Governor of a previously-safe Democratic Minnesota in 1920. Let me guess how that election goes: a breathtakingly incompetent state Democratic party combined with a third party siphoning off votes means Michelsen waltzes to the statehouse.
They shouldn't benefit. They're the junior partner in this Liberal ruling coalition and when things go to hell they should be punished for enabling Liberals and their failed policies. The only reason the Senate is Liberal is because of two "Fusion Liberals" (read: Socialist-aligned) from Washington and Oregon. The Socialists own this slow-rolling disaster just as much as their Liberal overlords do. The Socialists made their bed by overtly allying with the Liberals, they should be forced to sleep in it.
Classic Hay Democrat, whitewashing his party participation of the Grain Board. Farm Belt Democrats supported, nay, revered the Grain Board, due to price fixing. The socialist party, however, has been fighting against it for the little man since the Milwaukee Beer Garden Riots and the war on alcohol.
Socialist-aligned senators voted lockstep with their Liberal masters for George Wickersham, a conservative and a rabid anti-Semite, for the Supreme Court. Tell me again how putting that scumbag on the court is fighting for the little man?
Michelsen was already Governor during the war years in Minnesota and seems to be the outgoing incumbent, with Charles A. Lindbergh currently stepping into that role as the newly elected Democratic governor of the state. I highly doubt Micky's coming back for another go in 1920 (especially as that year is likely to be a landslide of all landslides for the Dems). And I see absolutely no indication in the ATL or OTL that Lindbergh is going to be incompetent - whatever you may think of his isolationism - so I can't imagine why he'd be subseptible to a Liberal challange in that year, even if the party was able to draft Michelsen for another go.