Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Sorta, yeah.
And there's reasons for this beyond simply his ego. One, basically every European country is doing this. In France, the National Bloc/Ligue des Patriotes has seen their support erode sharply, thanks to Poincare's dumb decision to call snap elections in late 1915. Italy has a similar effect with the Unione Liberale collapsing and needing outside support. Austria... self-explanatory. So all the old 19th century establishment parties are seeing the writing on the wall and the powers that be are very worried.
This leads into point two which is that the Imperial German constitution was, to put it bluntly, a clusterfuck designed on the fly by Bismarck for the benefit of, you guessed it, Bismarck. Some of the tweaks that Friedrich pursued in the 1880s arguably made it worse in mandating a separate Prime Minister of Prussia from the Chancellor of the Reich, because much of Bismarck's authority flowed from himself personally holding both those jobs (plus the Foreign Ministry portfolio of both... he was a busy man). So it takes a Bismarckian character to make this shitshow work at all, and Furstenburg is sort of that. The Drehung is a good encapsulation of this - he's a landed noble who serves in the Prussian Herrenhaus by right (appealing to the DKP), but is a Catholic with deep familial and financial ties to South Germany (appeals to Z), who is not just a major landowner but also a successful businessman in his own right (appealing to NLP and DRP). So he is able to speak to several quadrants of the SDP-skeptics simultaneously without really worrying any of them, a skill Bismarck himself most certainy did not have, especially ITTL where the wheels come off for him much earlier without Wilhelm I to boss around for as long.
The problem for Furstie here is that if the SDP starts actually getting close to taking power, his Drehung is in trouble, and his prestige is based on his cobbling together of said Drehung and making it much more firm than anything Bismarck ever attempted. And he's already been in the job of Reich Chancellor since 1904, almost as long as Bismarck was Chancellor of Germany... which is starting to make him nervous.
Speaking of which, the best April Fool's shitpost I saw this year was a tweet screenshot of somebody describing Margaret Thatcher as an "anticolonial thought leader who liberated the Falklands from Argentine imperialism."
Dumb joke, but one for which I'm the audience.
Eventually? Sure. But with a surviving German Reich TL, I've always found it much more interesting to explore how Germany would function moving forward from WW1/(Insert WW1 Analogue Here) long-term with all the unique setups of said Reich
Biggest issues, short term, are: that the Kingdoms are still technically fairly autonomous, that the constituencies for the Reichstag not only haven't been redistributed between kingdoms/principalities/duchies since 1868 but the boundaries themselves haven't been redrawn (so malapportionment is hugely severe), and finally that in Prussia the three-class franchise is still intact.
They’re less likely to be living in households without a male parent, in regions with a complete breakdown of community institutions and governance, and in places which lacked the ability to get the harvest in due to depopulation or disorder. For the next decade the black “warlord states” in OTL’s black belt are probably the best/least horrific place in the CSA to live aside from Texas and a handful of coastal enclaves that see enough trade to fund self-defense forces.
The Happy Warrior
"...converted the massive, hangar-sized building where armor plating had been put on railcars during the war into Schenectady's new convention hall, in part an effort to attract the 1920 Democratic National Convention to the small but densely industrial city northwest of Albany. The idea that such an event would every go to "sleepy little Sch'nady," as it was put, was ludicrous, but the new building - called Hudson Hall by its promoters - nonetheless served as a new, large venue for the 1918 Democratic convention for New York the first weekend of August, as the party gathered to choose and nominate a full slate of candidates for statewide offices. It wound up being one of the most momentous conventions in New York history, its impact echoing deep into the present day, even if few suspected that would be the case, then - or if they did, it was for other reasons entirely.
The 1918 New York state Democratic convention in Schnectady was, in many ways, about the Shakespearean play [1] that was William Randolph Hearst's personal and political life; Robert Wagner would remark at Hearst's 1951 funeral that Hearst's life was in some ways "an opera, in five acts:" his first decades of life culminating with his graduation from Harvard and his layabout years in San Francisco and managing his father's mining empire; his rise to power in New York as one of the most talked-about eligible young bachelors of the time in the mid-1890s and then his populist campaign for Governor in 1898 and meteoric rise to national pre-eminence; his Presidency as the climactic action of the third act; and then the 1910s as something of a falling action, in which the Democratic Party both nationally but especially in New York lived in his long shadow, followed by the time after 1918, in which he absconded into a semi-exile of denouement in Beverly Hills and his lavish coastal estate in California with his mistress and true love, Marion Davies. It is critical to think of 1918 as the time between those fourth and fifth acts of a man who defined the first two decades of American politics in the 20th century, and very much the endpoint of his influence.
Hearst had in many ways been impossible for Democrats to escape, especially in his adoptive home state, and for good reason. He was the first President since Andrew Jackson, who ranked among his many idols, to have served two full, consecutive terms. After two decades of haplessness in the face of an organized, well-funded Liberal machine, the Democrats had roared back after the turn of the century and governed under Hearst with supermajorities in both Houses of Congress, passing the ambitious Fair Deal agenda that dramatically expanded the role of the state and ushered in a progressive revolution in national, state and local governance whose echoes were growing louder in the postwar economic calamity of 1917-20. For an entire generation of Americans, he was in many was the definitive President, one who defined a decade as Jackson had the 1830s and ushered in a time of prosperity and national confidence. He was, honestly, truly and for good reason, still popular with the American people, particularly in the postwar, when his administration came to be seen as a time of peace and stability, even as it had ended in recession and deteriorating relations with the Confederacy in its final year. This wave of soft-glow Hearst nostalgia was strongly apparent by the summer of 1918, and had of course not gone unnoticed by the man himself, who had never quite gotten over his defeat in 1912 and had worked diligently to maintain his relevancy in New York Democratic circles and carefully plotted a way back to prominence, with this year being identified as the likeliest time to make his move. 1914 had been too soon to come back after the Presidency, and Hearst had deduced correctly that 1916 was likely the poisoned chalice even as the war was wrapping up and the popular Hughes chose to stand down [2]. 1918 was the time of promise, the first step in his grand comeback, first to Albany, then on to Philadelphia.
On paper, Hearst's plan was sound, and indeed as the New York Democratic county and precinct chairmen, ward bosses, and other delegates arrived at Hudson Hall, the general sentiment was that while Hearst's vision of a glorious coronation was probably over-optimistic, it was still his race to lose purely thanks to the prestige of his name and his cachet in the party as the winningest Democrat of the last eight decades, who had only lost one election and that was by virtue of a "curse" in 1912 via breaking the Washington precedent. But elections are not won by paper, they are won by people, and here Hearst had significant limitations.
The first was that the New York Democrats were hungry for a win. Since 1915 the state party had been starved of the federal patronage it had grown fat on with Hearst and Bill Sulzer in charge in Washington, with both Senators being Liberals, and the loss of the New York mayoralty in 1917 had stung, badly. Through that lens, there was a great deal of recency bias; Hearst had lost the Presidency in 1912, factional party infighting had contributed to losing a Senate seat in 1914 to what was then considered a weak Liberal opponent in James Wadsworth, his close ally George B. McClellan, Jr. had lost the election in 1916 (though made it closer than another perhaps may have, considering the context of the race), and then in indulging his vindictiveness had denied Al Smith the mayoral nomination the next year and led to a Socialist sitting in Gracie Mansion dissembling the patronage machine Tammany Hall had spent two decades building, oiling, and fine-tuning. Seen from such a perspective, Hearst seemed less like a sure thing, and more like a liability, and the man had done little to nothing to combat this perception amongst his co-partisans. This further compounded Hearst's second problem, which was his pitch of a triumphant return emphasized that he was very much a figure of the past, that the 1918 election in New York - which Democrats were supremely confident they would win due to the unprecedented unpopularity of Elihu Root in his home state - would be an exercise in nostalgia rather than one about the future.
The problems for the former President that he had not thought through continued from there. Some thought that the whole run was a vanity project spearheaded from a man declining in relevance and credibility, with several Assemblymembers themselves (privately, of course) stating that the Hearst campaign was about Hearst and not about New York Democrats or New York state. Others were chagrined at the thought that Hearst would be nominated, very likely win over whatever sacrificial lamb the Liberals tapped the next weekend in Rochester, and then proceed to invest all his time and energy elevating his dwindling list of personal allies and a handful of cronies into positions of influence across New York in an effort to secure the nomination for President in 1920. Still more were put off by the salacious tabloid columns about him living almost openly with Davies, suspected of being his mistress, with the well-liked former First Lady nowhere in sight for months at a time. The ambition and hubris on display, after having been unable to escape Hearst's shadow for nearly ten years, rankled, and it would come back to bite Hearst in Schenectady that weekend, hard.
The biggest issue, however, was Hearst's relative lack of institutional investment. He had assumed, perhaps not without reason, that he would waltz into Hudson Hall, the assembled delegates who were opposed to him would slowly fall in line after a ballot or two, and that his personality and oratory was a sufficient whip operation in a pre-primary era when grassroots organizing mattered very little, especially in machine-run New York politics. Especially after the debacle of 1917, this was most certainly not the case; Charlie Murphy's cachet had entirely collapsed even within Tammany Hall after that, and "Silent Charlie" swore off any unilateral decisions, instead electing to "go with the wind." Hearst had, again reasonably, understood this to mean that when the wind blew in his direction, Murphy would follow.
The wind however was about to blow in a new direction, in large part due to the efforts of two younger, fresher figures in New York politics - Robert Wagner, of course, but also James Farley, who made his presence and impact felt immediately upon New York Democratic circles as he would for the next half-century. [3] Wagner had emerged as the star of New York City working class politics ever since his commitment to the workers affected by the Triangle fire, and he had a crucial advantage in being German-born but Lutheran in being able to straddle a number of ethnic and religious divides in the city. By 1918, he was the Majority Leader of the New York Senate and a key (if unofficial) figure in Tammany Hall's rising generation, helping continue the effort of Murphy to detach it from corruption and instead be a vehicle for the organizing of progressive endeavors. Wagner would never be Tammany's "boss" by being a state politician, but he was amongst the most powerful men in Albany, and in some ways as the lone gubernatorial term of James Gerard drew to a close, he was the "governor in the shadows." He was also Smith's closest friend, personally and politically.
Farley for his part was just coming up, having only a few months earlier been elected the chairman of the Rockland County Democrats - thus making him an "up-stater," as it were, even if proximity via railroad would soon make Rockland a region of commuter-based bedroom communities. Even before the growth of the suburbs, Rockland was already a Liberal stronghold, especially in gubernatorial races where no Democrat since Horatio Seymour had carried it, not even Hearst in 1898; but it was outside of the city, and thus Farley was seen as speaking for the thousands of Democrats who resided north of the city, either in the Hudson Valley or stretching west to Buffalo. While he was often caricatured as a New York Irishman, Farley had an astute understanding of rural voters, what made them tick, and most importantly, how to get them to the polls.
Wagner and Farley often disagreed, sometimes pointedly, but they shared one thing in common: a genuine belief that Al Smith was the better candidate than Hearst, and a sense that in 1920, after New Yorkers had headed the Democratic ticket four straight times, that the delegates who gathered somewhere other than Schenectady would not nominate a New Yorker again, at least not so soon. With this in mind, they wanted instead to look ahead to 1924 or 1928, when the war generation and those after would be even older and less attached to memories of Hearst, and for that they needed a new figure, a figure of the future, not a man of the past.
The final showdown between Hearst and Smith had been predicted for years, going back to 1914; assumptions that Hearst would slap away the new generation and reimpose the old guard was based on fault assumptions, grounded in inertia. Farley's whip operation as Schenectady opened up revealed dozens of county chairmen who were uncommitted and, critically, a Buffalo delegation that had already internally voted to support Smith. Wagner spent all morning of Saturday, August 3rd at the Mohawk Hotel, confusing many delegates; it turned out that he had been called into a meeting by Bill Sulzer, who was already known to support Smith against Hearst, and when Wagner arrived at the meeting it was Theodore Roosevelt, the famed newspaperman whose son's wedding had just been the event of the season, ready to jockey. Wagner told him plainly that his ask was taking out Hearst by the third ballot, and if Roosevelt committed his faction of the party to that, then Roosevelt could have whatever he wanted. Roosevelt already had a considerable list waiting, quickly and without hesitating elaborating that he wanted former Hearst attorney and current state judge Clarence Shearn out of the running for Attorney General, a factional candidate of his choosing for Lieutenant Governor, and then the big - and fateful - price: the Senate nomination in 1920 for his cousin, the Naval war hero Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a former state Senator who had quit the Legislature just as his career grew promising to go off and fight the war, and who had been considered a dark horse nominee for Governor were it not for Hearst.
Wagner was hesitant, even though he knew "Cousin Frank" decently well, and Farley had even helped organize voters for him in one of his campaigns. Ill memories of the jockeying for slots on the 1914 tickets were fresh and indeed part of Smith's handicap now; to promise the nomination against the bete noire in James Wadsworth in two years was a very, very steep ask. He took a lunch privately with Smith and Farley a few blocks away soon thereafter to explain to him what Roosevelt had proposed, and Smith asked Farley for his thoughts. Farley remarked that "Commander Roosevelt" was a talented politician who had been able to turn his reputation as a rich dilettante on its head in his first campaigns, especially in years that were not favorable for Democratic candidates nationwide, and that he would be a formidable Senate nominee, particularly after his conduct at Hilton Head which had left one his legs permanently crippled. He was not opposed to it as a political matter, and noted further that Theodore Roosevelt had already tipped his hand somewhat by not inviting any of Smith, Wagner or Sulzer to his son's gala wedding, while Hearst was a guest of honor and family friend, and pointed out that Roosevelt's vengeful personality and clashes with state leaders during his brief Mayoralty of New York had proven what he was capable of if insulted or snubbed. Wagner concurred, remarking that just the fact that Roosevelt - friends with Hearst for decades and whose newspapers were the backbone of Democratic messaging in the state - took the meeting at all was fairly incredible, having assumed that Roosevelt was in the Hearst camp until the end, and Smith then added that of course Roosevelt's price was so high: he was not going to betray his good friend for nothing. With that realization reached, Smith told Wagner to accept the deal while it was still in the offing. As they did, Farley took Smith aside and noted to him that Commander Roosevelt had something of a reputation in the Hudson Valley political scene of being a philanderer, and while that was not uncommon at all amongst politicians in an age where the media considered such matters strictly private, the fact that that Franklin was already known as such early in his career was worth raising eyebrows. Smith expressed confidence that the Roosevelt empire of Journal papers could effectively paper that over in the rare case it became an issue, but Farley in later years would admit that he felt the conversation darkly and ironically tempting fate, even then.
The trap was thus largely set - on the second ballot, Hearst and Smith were suddenly tied, and James Gerard came on stage for the third ballot to put Smith's name into nomination personally; on the fourth ballot, Smith prevailed, narrowly clearing the fifty-percent mark needed to clinch by just two votes. It was, by any objective measure, a shocking result. Hearst described it is a "bloody betrayal, a plot by the Brutuses and Judases of our time!" [4] President Root, stunned by the news while at the Presidential coastal retreat in Long Branch, referred to it more succinctly as a "putsch." Hearst was not beaten in a floor fight between delegates, or on dozens of ballots as his enemies gradually built up strength; he was decapitated, clean and simple, his defeat arranged well in advance and executed. The spectacular showdown, the battle of Hearst vs. Smith in Hudson Hall, never materialized, nor did the coronation that Hearst had dreamt of.
Al Smith was, thus, the Democratic nominee for Governor of New York, concluding his meteoric rise from the ashes of the Triangle factory fire; come November, he would dispatch Liberal nominee Charles Whitman, the former Attorney General of New York who had narrowly lost to Gerard four years earlier, in a landslide, winning well over sixty percent of the vote in what was usually a closely-divided state. The election made Smith a national figure, the first Democrat who had ever faced off with Hearst and defeated him, even though the list of men who had chosen to turn on Hearst in an act of collective, surprising defiance stretched from Schenectady to Tammany Hall. The events of August 1918 also marked the definitive closing chapter of Hearst's political career; the furtherance of his affair with Davies and the embarrassment of his spoiled coronation foreclosed on any potential return to the Presidency, even as he offered his name as a compromise unity candidate at the multi-ballot 1920 Democratic National Convention. The fourth act had transition for him to the fifth, a well-earned retirement for one of America's most mercurial and Jupiterian statesmen; for Al Smith, the path ahead was only just now truly beginning..." [5]
- The Happy Warrior
[1] Which play I know not, for he is no Hamlet, but he is also no Macbeth
[2] Don't read this footnote until you've read the whole entry, but keep in mind that a big reason Hughes stood aside was machinations by party bosses against him that he just didn't want to deal with, and here Hearst's return is deep-sixed by similar figures. A parallel outcome, for two New Yorkers, in different circumstances.
[3] Apropos of nothing, but when I saw I have an aesthetic appreciation for ethnic urban machine Democrats, its people like Jim Farley I'm thinking of. Honestly one of the most interesting figures in American political history, and an extremely important one.
[4] I guess we have our Shakespeare play!
[5] This was a monster update, but closing the door on Hearst and setting up Smith's machinations required such - these New York political updates always get a bit out of hand!
The 1918 New York state Democratic convention in Schnectady was, in many ways, about the Shakespearean play [1] that was William Randolph Hearst's personal and political life; Robert Wagner would remark at Hearst's 1951 funeral that Hearst's life was in some ways "an opera, in five acts:" his first decades of life culminating with his graduation from Harvard and his layabout years in San Francisco and managing his father's mining empire; his rise to power in New York as one of the most talked-about eligible young bachelors of the time in the mid-1890s and then his populist campaign for Governor in 1898 and meteoric rise to national pre-eminence; his Presidency as the climactic action of the third act; and then the 1910s as something of a falling action, in which the Democratic Party both nationally but especially in New York lived in his long shadow, followed by the time after 1918, in which he absconded into a semi-exile of denouement in Beverly Hills and his lavish coastal estate in California with his mistress and true love, Marion Davies. It is critical to think of 1918 as the time between those fourth and fifth acts of a man who defined the first two decades of American politics in the 20th century, and very much the endpoint of his influence.
Hearst had in many ways been impossible for Democrats to escape, especially in his adoptive home state, and for good reason. He was the first President since Andrew Jackson, who ranked among his many idols, to have served two full, consecutive terms. After two decades of haplessness in the face of an organized, well-funded Liberal machine, the Democrats had roared back after the turn of the century and governed under Hearst with supermajorities in both Houses of Congress, passing the ambitious Fair Deal agenda that dramatically expanded the role of the state and ushered in a progressive revolution in national, state and local governance whose echoes were growing louder in the postwar economic calamity of 1917-20. For an entire generation of Americans, he was in many was the definitive President, one who defined a decade as Jackson had the 1830s and ushered in a time of prosperity and national confidence. He was, honestly, truly and for good reason, still popular with the American people, particularly in the postwar, when his administration came to be seen as a time of peace and stability, even as it had ended in recession and deteriorating relations with the Confederacy in its final year. This wave of soft-glow Hearst nostalgia was strongly apparent by the summer of 1918, and had of course not gone unnoticed by the man himself, who had never quite gotten over his defeat in 1912 and had worked diligently to maintain his relevancy in New York Democratic circles and carefully plotted a way back to prominence, with this year being identified as the likeliest time to make his move. 1914 had been too soon to come back after the Presidency, and Hearst had deduced correctly that 1916 was likely the poisoned chalice even as the war was wrapping up and the popular Hughes chose to stand down [2]. 1918 was the time of promise, the first step in his grand comeback, first to Albany, then on to Philadelphia.
On paper, Hearst's plan was sound, and indeed as the New York Democratic county and precinct chairmen, ward bosses, and other delegates arrived at Hudson Hall, the general sentiment was that while Hearst's vision of a glorious coronation was probably over-optimistic, it was still his race to lose purely thanks to the prestige of his name and his cachet in the party as the winningest Democrat of the last eight decades, who had only lost one election and that was by virtue of a "curse" in 1912 via breaking the Washington precedent. But elections are not won by paper, they are won by people, and here Hearst had significant limitations.
The first was that the New York Democrats were hungry for a win. Since 1915 the state party had been starved of the federal patronage it had grown fat on with Hearst and Bill Sulzer in charge in Washington, with both Senators being Liberals, and the loss of the New York mayoralty in 1917 had stung, badly. Through that lens, there was a great deal of recency bias; Hearst had lost the Presidency in 1912, factional party infighting had contributed to losing a Senate seat in 1914 to what was then considered a weak Liberal opponent in James Wadsworth, his close ally George B. McClellan, Jr. had lost the election in 1916 (though made it closer than another perhaps may have, considering the context of the race), and then in indulging his vindictiveness had denied Al Smith the mayoral nomination the next year and led to a Socialist sitting in Gracie Mansion dissembling the patronage machine Tammany Hall had spent two decades building, oiling, and fine-tuning. Seen from such a perspective, Hearst seemed less like a sure thing, and more like a liability, and the man had done little to nothing to combat this perception amongst his co-partisans. This further compounded Hearst's second problem, which was his pitch of a triumphant return emphasized that he was very much a figure of the past, that the 1918 election in New York - which Democrats were supremely confident they would win due to the unprecedented unpopularity of Elihu Root in his home state - would be an exercise in nostalgia rather than one about the future.
The problems for the former President that he had not thought through continued from there. Some thought that the whole run was a vanity project spearheaded from a man declining in relevance and credibility, with several Assemblymembers themselves (privately, of course) stating that the Hearst campaign was about Hearst and not about New York Democrats or New York state. Others were chagrined at the thought that Hearst would be nominated, very likely win over whatever sacrificial lamb the Liberals tapped the next weekend in Rochester, and then proceed to invest all his time and energy elevating his dwindling list of personal allies and a handful of cronies into positions of influence across New York in an effort to secure the nomination for President in 1920. Still more were put off by the salacious tabloid columns about him living almost openly with Davies, suspected of being his mistress, with the well-liked former First Lady nowhere in sight for months at a time. The ambition and hubris on display, after having been unable to escape Hearst's shadow for nearly ten years, rankled, and it would come back to bite Hearst in Schenectady that weekend, hard.
The biggest issue, however, was Hearst's relative lack of institutional investment. He had assumed, perhaps not without reason, that he would waltz into Hudson Hall, the assembled delegates who were opposed to him would slowly fall in line after a ballot or two, and that his personality and oratory was a sufficient whip operation in a pre-primary era when grassroots organizing mattered very little, especially in machine-run New York politics. Especially after the debacle of 1917, this was most certainly not the case; Charlie Murphy's cachet had entirely collapsed even within Tammany Hall after that, and "Silent Charlie" swore off any unilateral decisions, instead electing to "go with the wind." Hearst had, again reasonably, understood this to mean that when the wind blew in his direction, Murphy would follow.
The wind however was about to blow in a new direction, in large part due to the efforts of two younger, fresher figures in New York politics - Robert Wagner, of course, but also James Farley, who made his presence and impact felt immediately upon New York Democratic circles as he would for the next half-century. [3] Wagner had emerged as the star of New York City working class politics ever since his commitment to the workers affected by the Triangle fire, and he had a crucial advantage in being German-born but Lutheran in being able to straddle a number of ethnic and religious divides in the city. By 1918, he was the Majority Leader of the New York Senate and a key (if unofficial) figure in Tammany Hall's rising generation, helping continue the effort of Murphy to detach it from corruption and instead be a vehicle for the organizing of progressive endeavors. Wagner would never be Tammany's "boss" by being a state politician, but he was amongst the most powerful men in Albany, and in some ways as the lone gubernatorial term of James Gerard drew to a close, he was the "governor in the shadows." He was also Smith's closest friend, personally and politically.
Farley for his part was just coming up, having only a few months earlier been elected the chairman of the Rockland County Democrats - thus making him an "up-stater," as it were, even if proximity via railroad would soon make Rockland a region of commuter-based bedroom communities. Even before the growth of the suburbs, Rockland was already a Liberal stronghold, especially in gubernatorial races where no Democrat since Horatio Seymour had carried it, not even Hearst in 1898; but it was outside of the city, and thus Farley was seen as speaking for the thousands of Democrats who resided north of the city, either in the Hudson Valley or stretching west to Buffalo. While he was often caricatured as a New York Irishman, Farley had an astute understanding of rural voters, what made them tick, and most importantly, how to get them to the polls.
Wagner and Farley often disagreed, sometimes pointedly, but they shared one thing in common: a genuine belief that Al Smith was the better candidate than Hearst, and a sense that in 1920, after New Yorkers had headed the Democratic ticket four straight times, that the delegates who gathered somewhere other than Schenectady would not nominate a New Yorker again, at least not so soon. With this in mind, they wanted instead to look ahead to 1924 or 1928, when the war generation and those after would be even older and less attached to memories of Hearst, and for that they needed a new figure, a figure of the future, not a man of the past.
The final showdown between Hearst and Smith had been predicted for years, going back to 1914; assumptions that Hearst would slap away the new generation and reimpose the old guard was based on fault assumptions, grounded in inertia. Farley's whip operation as Schenectady opened up revealed dozens of county chairmen who were uncommitted and, critically, a Buffalo delegation that had already internally voted to support Smith. Wagner spent all morning of Saturday, August 3rd at the Mohawk Hotel, confusing many delegates; it turned out that he had been called into a meeting by Bill Sulzer, who was already known to support Smith against Hearst, and when Wagner arrived at the meeting it was Theodore Roosevelt, the famed newspaperman whose son's wedding had just been the event of the season, ready to jockey. Wagner told him plainly that his ask was taking out Hearst by the third ballot, and if Roosevelt committed his faction of the party to that, then Roosevelt could have whatever he wanted. Roosevelt already had a considerable list waiting, quickly and without hesitating elaborating that he wanted former Hearst attorney and current state judge Clarence Shearn out of the running for Attorney General, a factional candidate of his choosing for Lieutenant Governor, and then the big - and fateful - price: the Senate nomination in 1920 for his cousin, the Naval war hero Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a former state Senator who had quit the Legislature just as his career grew promising to go off and fight the war, and who had been considered a dark horse nominee for Governor were it not for Hearst.
Wagner was hesitant, even though he knew "Cousin Frank" decently well, and Farley had even helped organize voters for him in one of his campaigns. Ill memories of the jockeying for slots on the 1914 tickets were fresh and indeed part of Smith's handicap now; to promise the nomination against the bete noire in James Wadsworth in two years was a very, very steep ask. He took a lunch privately with Smith and Farley a few blocks away soon thereafter to explain to him what Roosevelt had proposed, and Smith asked Farley for his thoughts. Farley remarked that "Commander Roosevelt" was a talented politician who had been able to turn his reputation as a rich dilettante on its head in his first campaigns, especially in years that were not favorable for Democratic candidates nationwide, and that he would be a formidable Senate nominee, particularly after his conduct at Hilton Head which had left one his legs permanently crippled. He was not opposed to it as a political matter, and noted further that Theodore Roosevelt had already tipped his hand somewhat by not inviting any of Smith, Wagner or Sulzer to his son's gala wedding, while Hearst was a guest of honor and family friend, and pointed out that Roosevelt's vengeful personality and clashes with state leaders during his brief Mayoralty of New York had proven what he was capable of if insulted or snubbed. Wagner concurred, remarking that just the fact that Roosevelt - friends with Hearst for decades and whose newspapers were the backbone of Democratic messaging in the state - took the meeting at all was fairly incredible, having assumed that Roosevelt was in the Hearst camp until the end, and Smith then added that of course Roosevelt's price was so high: he was not going to betray his good friend for nothing. With that realization reached, Smith told Wagner to accept the deal while it was still in the offing. As they did, Farley took Smith aside and noted to him that Commander Roosevelt had something of a reputation in the Hudson Valley political scene of being a philanderer, and while that was not uncommon at all amongst politicians in an age where the media considered such matters strictly private, the fact that that Franklin was already known as such early in his career was worth raising eyebrows. Smith expressed confidence that the Roosevelt empire of Journal papers could effectively paper that over in the rare case it became an issue, but Farley in later years would admit that he felt the conversation darkly and ironically tempting fate, even then.
The trap was thus largely set - on the second ballot, Hearst and Smith were suddenly tied, and James Gerard came on stage for the third ballot to put Smith's name into nomination personally; on the fourth ballot, Smith prevailed, narrowly clearing the fifty-percent mark needed to clinch by just two votes. It was, by any objective measure, a shocking result. Hearst described it is a "bloody betrayal, a plot by the Brutuses and Judases of our time!" [4] President Root, stunned by the news while at the Presidential coastal retreat in Long Branch, referred to it more succinctly as a "putsch." Hearst was not beaten in a floor fight between delegates, or on dozens of ballots as his enemies gradually built up strength; he was decapitated, clean and simple, his defeat arranged well in advance and executed. The spectacular showdown, the battle of Hearst vs. Smith in Hudson Hall, never materialized, nor did the coronation that Hearst had dreamt of.
Al Smith was, thus, the Democratic nominee for Governor of New York, concluding his meteoric rise from the ashes of the Triangle factory fire; come November, he would dispatch Liberal nominee Charles Whitman, the former Attorney General of New York who had narrowly lost to Gerard four years earlier, in a landslide, winning well over sixty percent of the vote in what was usually a closely-divided state. The election made Smith a national figure, the first Democrat who had ever faced off with Hearst and defeated him, even though the list of men who had chosen to turn on Hearst in an act of collective, surprising defiance stretched from Schenectady to Tammany Hall. The events of August 1918 also marked the definitive closing chapter of Hearst's political career; the furtherance of his affair with Davies and the embarrassment of his spoiled coronation foreclosed on any potential return to the Presidency, even as he offered his name as a compromise unity candidate at the multi-ballot 1920 Democratic National Convention. The fourth act had transition for him to the fifth, a well-earned retirement for one of America's most mercurial and Jupiterian statesmen; for Al Smith, the path ahead was only just now truly beginning..." [5]
- The Happy Warrior
[1] Which play I know not, for he is no Hamlet, but he is also no Macbeth
[2] Don't read this footnote until you've read the whole entry, but keep in mind that a big reason Hughes stood aside was machinations by party bosses against him that he just didn't want to deal with, and here Hearst's return is deep-sixed by similar figures. A parallel outcome, for two New Yorkers, in different circumstances.
[3] Apropos of nothing, but when I saw I have an aesthetic appreciation for ethnic urban machine Democrats, its people like Jim Farley I'm thinking of. Honestly one of the most interesting figures in American political history, and an extremely important one.
[4] I guess we have our Shakespeare play!
[5] This was a monster update, but closing the door on Hearst and setting up Smith's machinations required such - these New York political updates always get a bit out of hand!
Weird racial hygiene conspiracy theories don't do it for ya?
This is a good point.
It's still going on ITTL, but to your point its not really going well/working effectively
Whatever you have been doing to keep churning out multiple high-quality updates a day please keep it up.
I'm much more of a Hearst Democrat than a Smith/Roosevelt Democrat. Bittersweet to see the man himself get rocked like that but his time as the central figure of the party is up. Time to let the new generation sink or swim on their own merits and without Hearst hanging over the scene.
Richard II. Smith, Roosevelt, Farley, Wagner, and everyone else in this new breed of New York Democrats are sitting on the ground and telling sad stories of the death of king Hearst.
I'm much more of a Hearst Democrat than a Smith/Roosevelt Democrat. Bittersweet to see the man himself get rocked like that but his time as the central figure of the party is up. Time to let the new generation sink or swim on their own merits and without Hearst hanging over the scene.
Lol, dirty secret... I'm housesitting out of town for my folks while they're on vacation, which means I'm "working remotely" all week. Shhhhh!
Ah, a good call! Richard II is an excellent choice.
Can't deny I'm a bit sad to see him slump off into the sunset but Marion Davies was quite the looker and he's got Hearst Castle and his coterie to enjoy for the next three decades. WR Hearst was certainly a fun character to write, and hopefully I did the American Yrigoyen some justice.
I guess he's going to be the NY Governor from 1919-1927 and then run for President in 1928
I remember in the previous thread that the Liberal Senator James (I forgot his surname) is going to survive the 1920 Democratic landslide. You can make it into a reverse mirror of FDR OTL winning the NY Governorship in 1928 by a tiny margin. ITTL, I guess after losing the race. The newly elected democrat adminstration will offer him a job (Navy Secretary perhaps?)
Hm.
So FDR blows the NY Senate seat for the Dems in 1920. To me, the question is: does he divorce Eleanor ITTL? And if he does, what happens to her?
Every Man a Kingfish: The Life and Rise to Power of Huey Long
"...found a small basement room for let at Fourth Street, in Faubourg Livaudais; when it rained, and in those years it seemed to rain more often than before in some kind of divine judgement upon the city of New Orleans, the basement flooded, and so Huey and Rose had to learn, through experience and great care, to keep their valuables elevated in expectation that before long they'd be walking through their quarters with cloth boots wrapped over their shoes again.
Huey was not a New Orleans man, much as he came to like many of his neighbors on Fourth Street, though from the time of his amnesty from Yankee hands in September 1917 until his return to Winnfield in early 1919 he was living in the city during probably its most tense and uncertain hour. The Fourth Street room was perfect for a young couple recently reunited after all the years of war with no children, in part because it was immediately adjacent to St. Charles Boulevard, the main southern thoroughfare that marked the faubourg's boundary and also the arterial on which New Orleans' oldest streetcar line ran down the center. The St. Charles line took Huey to the Tulane School of Law every day, where he studied diligently deep into the early night, and Rose to her odd jobs as a seamstress across much of uptown; but their home also placed them close to a new boundary, one imposed upon New Orleans the year before - that of the new "American Concession," also coming to be known as Yankeetown or simply the Cession.
The Cession, which in the Creole dialect of New Orleans French rolled off the tongue as Say-shon, was a roughly square mile segment of New Orleans just upriver from Canal Street; its boundaries had been picked by nobody in the city but rather by cartographers at Mount Vernon, in what would soon cease to be Virginia, in the late winter of 1917. Faubourg Livoudais ran right up to its eastern boundary of Jackson Street, and from there it stretched to the river as its lower boundary, and Dryades and Rampart as the upper limit. It ended downriver at Julia Street, mere blocks from grand, bustling Poydras and beyond it Canal Street, the beating heart of the Confederate banking and commercial world; cleaving the city in two, the Cession placed Yankee soldiers not just at the edge of river docks but also within steps of the great cotton brokerages, auction houses, and hotels of Dixie's last great city, and quite crucially, the St. Charles Line passed through the Cession, usually unmolested but often subject to inspections, en route to its terminus at Canal.
And inspections were, not to put too fine a point on it, just the tip of an iceberg of humiliation. The occupation of Dixie from 1917 to 1921 - a momentous subject far beyond the scope of this book, but which colored and colors the lives of every Confederate man and women then and now, both white and black - wore only a facade of the rule of law, but even a facade was better than nothing at all. In theory, across the "Military Districts" that the Confederacy had been separated into with Kentucky's administration a civilian-military hybrid, Yankee soldiers were purely peacekeepers, intended to make sure food distribution went through, violence was low, and society began some modicum of function once again. While this occurred in fits and starts - the Red Summer of 1917, July massacres of 1918, and the spread of the Dixie flu far and wide were notable interruptions - by late 1918 the Military Districts had created pillarized, delineated parallel societies of whites and freedmen that strictly segregated themselves, armed to the teeth, and self-sustaining. The Cession, on the other hand, was to be a continuous source of American power in Louisiana. Within its boundaries the administration of the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana did not apply; it was governed by a military commander, and Yankee soldiers enjoyed extraterritoriality, and it quickly became a hub of freed Negroes flocking to its boundaries for safety within the city, particularly after the violent race riots across the city that coincided with the passage of the Third Amendment in September. Yankee soldiers were also, at least in practice, expected to be tried by military courts inside the Cession if they got into trouble outside of its borders, which they frequently took advantage of when they wandered to the madams of Storyville late at night.
In all, New Orleans was a stewing pot of resentment even though it had escaped any physical damage from the war, and with the Mississippi reopened to American freight unhindered by tariff or river tolls it sometimes seemed as if the war had never happened, were one to simply walk around the city and take in a surface-level view. Hundreds of American businessmen, merchants, bankers, adventurers and prostitutes flooded in to the city every month, at the same time that refugees from the rural combat of the same years streamed to the city, swelling its population to close to half a million. While the swamps and forests of Louisiana were teeming with well-armed hillboys, in New Orleans the more genteel Knights of the White Camellia was reestablished and reinvigorated, with men in Mardi Gras masques carrying out hit-and-run slayings almost every night; as many as three thousand people, a third of them women, were murdered in New Orleans from both criminal disputes and the urban insurgency, including in a Cession that increasingly resembled a fortress, in 1918 alone.
This experience in New Orleans tried Huey and Rose's marriage, and them personally; Rose was nearly assaulted several times, and Huey was robbed at knifepoint twice returning from Tulane late at night during one of his lonely sessions reading over the copious volumes he needed to study law. The time was formative for him, though; having come from one of Louisiana's most poverty-stricken parishes in Winnfield, he was no stranger to seeing destitution and desperation, but even what he encountered in many of the city's faubourgs and outer wards shocked him. The Dixie flu hit New Orleans perhaps harder than anywhere else due to its malarial climate and the close quarters in its sprawling shantytowns in the east and west of the city; Huey observed one family of Negroes, with eight children, all living out of a single lean-to, with them taking turns sleeping inside in shifts. At the same time, on Canal Street, many of the men who materially benefitted directly from trade with the United States and the outside world via the reopened Gulf of Mexico routes were acting as if the war had been but a hiccup, breaking bread with their Yankee counterparts who were increasingly streaming into the city as if it were their Chinese colony of Chusan while they financed the hooded kill squads that rained terror on the city at night.
Huey was a man of Winnfield Parish, a lifelong admirer of the NFLP and an avowed enemy of the planter and banker class, even if they did not know it yet; he had come to respect Yankee soldiers as individuals but reserved a similar resentment for the callous occupation authorities and the foreign capitalists from New York, Philadelphia and Chicago whom he was convinced were coming to plunder and economically rape Louisiana, particularly the oilmen. But here his faith interceded; there was evil in the hearts of every man, but also weakness before such greed, and thus the true fault lay with the men who lied through their teeth to the people of Dixie about the Yankee threat while they made peace with their new economic overlords. It was not enough to simply drive the Yankee from the country, as so many claimed; Huey was convinced utterly that what needed to follow was the upending of the whole economic order that had led to the war, profited from it as Dixie bled near to death, and now pretended to be offended by Yankee imperialism that would before long come to inevitably view the whole of the Confederacy as little more than a resource colony that had to be put in her place. [1]
And New Orleans was, at least in 1918, unlikely to be the place from where he could do that. As the year drew to a close, he petitioned - having studied so copiously the whole year - to sit for the bar exam without finishing his degree, and with the state bar association's younger generation having been emptied out across the fields of Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia, his request was granted. Huey passed the bar in January 1919, earning exemplary marks, and was with that formally an attorney, mostly self-taught. Wasting little time, just a week later he and Rose were packing up there fairly meager belongings - he had been sworn wearing the only suit he owned, which was covered in patches - to leave the city behind, for Winnfield beckoned."
- Every Man a Kingfish: The Life and Rise to Power of Huey Long
[1] Yes, Huey, let the Latin American strongman flow through you...
Huey was not a New Orleans man, much as he came to like many of his neighbors on Fourth Street, though from the time of his amnesty from Yankee hands in September 1917 until his return to Winnfield in early 1919 he was living in the city during probably its most tense and uncertain hour. The Fourth Street room was perfect for a young couple recently reunited after all the years of war with no children, in part because it was immediately adjacent to St. Charles Boulevard, the main southern thoroughfare that marked the faubourg's boundary and also the arterial on which New Orleans' oldest streetcar line ran down the center. The St. Charles line took Huey to the Tulane School of Law every day, where he studied diligently deep into the early night, and Rose to her odd jobs as a seamstress across much of uptown; but their home also placed them close to a new boundary, one imposed upon New Orleans the year before - that of the new "American Concession," also coming to be known as Yankeetown or simply the Cession.
The Cession, which in the Creole dialect of New Orleans French rolled off the tongue as Say-shon, was a roughly square mile segment of New Orleans just upriver from Canal Street; its boundaries had been picked by nobody in the city but rather by cartographers at Mount Vernon, in what would soon cease to be Virginia, in the late winter of 1917. Faubourg Livoudais ran right up to its eastern boundary of Jackson Street, and from there it stretched to the river as its lower boundary, and Dryades and Rampart as the upper limit. It ended downriver at Julia Street, mere blocks from grand, bustling Poydras and beyond it Canal Street, the beating heart of the Confederate banking and commercial world; cleaving the city in two, the Cession placed Yankee soldiers not just at the edge of river docks but also within steps of the great cotton brokerages, auction houses, and hotels of Dixie's last great city, and quite crucially, the St. Charles Line passed through the Cession, usually unmolested but often subject to inspections, en route to its terminus at Canal.
And inspections were, not to put too fine a point on it, just the tip of an iceberg of humiliation. The occupation of Dixie from 1917 to 1921 - a momentous subject far beyond the scope of this book, but which colored and colors the lives of every Confederate man and women then and now, both white and black - wore only a facade of the rule of law, but even a facade was better than nothing at all. In theory, across the "Military Districts" that the Confederacy had been separated into with Kentucky's administration a civilian-military hybrid, Yankee soldiers were purely peacekeepers, intended to make sure food distribution went through, violence was low, and society began some modicum of function once again. While this occurred in fits and starts - the Red Summer of 1917, July massacres of 1918, and the spread of the Dixie flu far and wide were notable interruptions - by late 1918 the Military Districts had created pillarized, delineated parallel societies of whites and freedmen that strictly segregated themselves, armed to the teeth, and self-sustaining. The Cession, on the other hand, was to be a continuous source of American power in Louisiana. Within its boundaries the administration of the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana did not apply; it was governed by a military commander, and Yankee soldiers enjoyed extraterritoriality, and it quickly became a hub of freed Negroes flocking to its boundaries for safety within the city, particularly after the violent race riots across the city that coincided with the passage of the Third Amendment in September. Yankee soldiers were also, at least in practice, expected to be tried by military courts inside the Cession if they got into trouble outside of its borders, which they frequently took advantage of when they wandered to the madams of Storyville late at night.
In all, New Orleans was a stewing pot of resentment even though it had escaped any physical damage from the war, and with the Mississippi reopened to American freight unhindered by tariff or river tolls it sometimes seemed as if the war had never happened, were one to simply walk around the city and take in a surface-level view. Hundreds of American businessmen, merchants, bankers, adventurers and prostitutes flooded in to the city every month, at the same time that refugees from the rural combat of the same years streamed to the city, swelling its population to close to half a million. While the swamps and forests of Louisiana were teeming with well-armed hillboys, in New Orleans the more genteel Knights of the White Camellia was reestablished and reinvigorated, with men in Mardi Gras masques carrying out hit-and-run slayings almost every night; as many as three thousand people, a third of them women, were murdered in New Orleans from both criminal disputes and the urban insurgency, including in a Cession that increasingly resembled a fortress, in 1918 alone.
This experience in New Orleans tried Huey and Rose's marriage, and them personally; Rose was nearly assaulted several times, and Huey was robbed at knifepoint twice returning from Tulane late at night during one of his lonely sessions reading over the copious volumes he needed to study law. The time was formative for him, though; having come from one of Louisiana's most poverty-stricken parishes in Winnfield, he was no stranger to seeing destitution and desperation, but even what he encountered in many of the city's faubourgs and outer wards shocked him. The Dixie flu hit New Orleans perhaps harder than anywhere else due to its malarial climate and the close quarters in its sprawling shantytowns in the east and west of the city; Huey observed one family of Negroes, with eight children, all living out of a single lean-to, with them taking turns sleeping inside in shifts. At the same time, on Canal Street, many of the men who materially benefitted directly from trade with the United States and the outside world via the reopened Gulf of Mexico routes were acting as if the war had been but a hiccup, breaking bread with their Yankee counterparts who were increasingly streaming into the city as if it were their Chinese colony of Chusan while they financed the hooded kill squads that rained terror on the city at night.
Huey was a man of Winnfield Parish, a lifelong admirer of the NFLP and an avowed enemy of the planter and banker class, even if they did not know it yet; he had come to respect Yankee soldiers as individuals but reserved a similar resentment for the callous occupation authorities and the foreign capitalists from New York, Philadelphia and Chicago whom he was convinced were coming to plunder and economically rape Louisiana, particularly the oilmen. But here his faith interceded; there was evil in the hearts of every man, but also weakness before such greed, and thus the true fault lay with the men who lied through their teeth to the people of Dixie about the Yankee threat while they made peace with their new economic overlords. It was not enough to simply drive the Yankee from the country, as so many claimed; Huey was convinced utterly that what needed to follow was the upending of the whole economic order that had led to the war, profited from it as Dixie bled near to death, and now pretended to be offended by Yankee imperialism that would before long come to inevitably view the whole of the Confederacy as little more than a resource colony that had to be put in her place. [1]
And New Orleans was, at least in 1918, unlikely to be the place from where he could do that. As the year drew to a close, he petitioned - having studied so copiously the whole year - to sit for the bar exam without finishing his degree, and with the state bar association's younger generation having been emptied out across the fields of Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia, his request was granted. Huey passed the bar in January 1919, earning exemplary marks, and was with that formally an attorney, mostly self-taught. Wasting little time, just a week later he and Rose were packing up there fairly meager belongings - he had been sworn wearing the only suit he owned, which was covered in patches - to leave the city behind, for Winnfield beckoned."
- Every Man a Kingfish: The Life and Rise to Power of Huey Long
[1] Yes, Huey, let the Latin American strongman flow through you...
New Orleans as a Shanghai in miniature, with the racial divide mixed in, now that's a pressure cooker if there ever was one.
It is going to be an end of an era with New York's total domination of Presidential tickets and rosters coming to a close, though the Indian Summer of Al Smith eventual ascension to the Oval will help ease things.
It is going to be an end of an era with New York's total domination of Presidential tickets and rosters coming to a close, though the Indian Summer of Al Smith eventual ascension to the Oval will help ease things.
The Yellow Peril
"...sharp contrast between how Americans treated the Chinese in the United States, vs. how they interacted with the Chinese in China. The politics of the Yellow Peril, while rooted deeply in longstanding European dismissiveness of "the Oriental race," little more than demographic anxiety in the American West. In Asia, on the other hand, American missionaries found themselves in a strange land where they quickly had to adapt to local customs, and despite the legacy of the Boxer War nearly twenty years earlier, found the Chinese people to be largely welcoming and not nearly the pliant half-barbarians they had expected to encounter coming off the ships in San Francisco or Seattle.
Nowhere was this dichotomy more plain than the Territory of the Chusan Islands, an archipelago located at a strategic point near the major port of Ningpo and just south of Shanghai and the Yangtze River's mouth into the East China Sea, and with possession of its outlying islands whoever held it controlled the approaches from east and south to both. That the Chusans were American at all was thus both a major geopolitical coup and also something of an accident of history; the islands had been the most prized goal of Britain to attain in the First Opium War for its proximity to Shanghai, and indeed that London wound up with Hongkong instead in the final peace treaty was a matter of great controversy. It was only once Hongkong, thanks to its position near the open treaty port of Canton and short sail to Singapore, became the Empire's chief entrepot in the East that Chusan declined in its potential value and became an afterthought until its 1901 transfer to American possession under a 99-year lease, all while other European states were earning permanent concessions.
The 99-year lease had been an American insistence, rather than a Chinese one; the United States had an uncomfortable relationship with imperialism, indulging it freely in its policy of unilateral intervention in the Western Hemisphere while being highly reluctant to pursue massive direct colonies overseas. The idea of permanently seizing a group of islands home to tens of thousands of Chinese thus opened up questions that many Americans were loathe to answer, but they were also not going to turn down the chance to establish a foothold so close to the burgeoning Oriental pearl of Shanghai. And so Chusan became an overseas territory of the United States just as the United States was enforcing its Ingalls Act and then, in 1918, banned Chinese immigration to the United States entirely - meaning that Chusan was not, and would not be, considered entirely American.
A visitor to Chusan in late 1918 described it thus: "One does not think of authentically Chinese metropolises like Canton here, for it is no metropolis. Nor does it have that unique aura of where East and West meet, such as Shanghai or Hongkong. Rather one sees in Chusan two harbors, one filled with junks and fishing boats lined by shacks and lean-tos, with bent-over old women pulling rickshaws about, and adjacent to it another, this one lined by a high wall, populated by military barracks and filled with American destroyers." The island was small, but it was very cleanly two worlds.
This was by design, and intended initially to be benevolent towards the Chinese. Though the Liberal Party was of course somewhat more amenable to economic expansionism by force overseas than the more empire-skeptical Democrats, even the muscular foreign policy instincts of then-President Joseph Foraker in 1901 was unwilling to invest the time, energy and considerable expense to forge a "Yankee Hongkong" off the coast of Chekiang. Purely by its size and location, Chusan was a much better harbor than Port Hamilton near Korea was, and so it would be built up over the next decade to become the main port of the United States Navy Far East Squadron with Port Hamilton relegated to a secondary status by 1914, but that was all it was intended initially to be. Chusan Naval Station was built in the excellent harbor on the main island of Chusan itself, designed to allow two dreadnoughts and their destroyer complements to moor there simultaneously, and the station was given the flag command of not a squadron but rather the new "Far East Fleet," which would come fully into effect with the close of the war.
The Americans and Chinese of Chusan lived separate lives in part because the Navy did not want to be responsible for the civilian governance of Chusan, thus creating a bizarre hybrid administration; a Chusan Police Service was established and staffed almost exclusively with locals but given American Naval policemen as their superiors, and the flag admiral of the Far East Fleet was simultaneously, by statute, the Military Governor of Chusan, whose remit extended to the whole archipelago but who rarely left the sprawling grounds of Chusan Station and relied on a local bureaucracy of Chinese who quickly learned English to enforce day-to-day control.
As such, Chusan was both a Western concession stripped from Chinese hands in the unequal treaties of 1901 but also a place that enjoyed a level of self-governance, even if purely by accident, that no other European concession did and many parts of China also lacked. But because no formal civilian administration would be established in Chusan until a damning report of conditions there in 1924, and it was neglected as anything other than a military port, it meant that a local rule had to be conjured on the fly by the Chinese and more enterprising American businessmen, which quickly turned into an alliance between local Chinese enforcers tied deeply to local familial networks similar to the West Coast's tongs, and the entrepreneurs who began using Chusan as their chief base of importing goods from China, including the trafficking of people after the Immigration Act of 1918 passed and Chinese who could pay a hefty price bought passage as stowaways on cargo vessels and, by the early 1930s, on Naval boats as officers and enlisted alike became amenable to looking the other way for a fee..." [1]
- The Yellow Peril [2]
[1] Now I know what you're all thinking, and that's "hey isn't this basically the plot of American Gangster and uh oh is Chusan going to be a huge drug and people smuggling hub under the Navy's tacit nose" and, yes, 100%
[2] I think "Scramble for Asia" is probably too focused on the 19th century to really use here, and "Our New Asia" wasn't quite the vibe I was going for here.
Nowhere was this dichotomy more plain than the Territory of the Chusan Islands, an archipelago located at a strategic point near the major port of Ningpo and just south of Shanghai and the Yangtze River's mouth into the East China Sea, and with possession of its outlying islands whoever held it controlled the approaches from east and south to both. That the Chusans were American at all was thus both a major geopolitical coup and also something of an accident of history; the islands had been the most prized goal of Britain to attain in the First Opium War for its proximity to Shanghai, and indeed that London wound up with Hongkong instead in the final peace treaty was a matter of great controversy. It was only once Hongkong, thanks to its position near the open treaty port of Canton and short sail to Singapore, became the Empire's chief entrepot in the East that Chusan declined in its potential value and became an afterthought until its 1901 transfer to American possession under a 99-year lease, all while other European states were earning permanent concessions.
The 99-year lease had been an American insistence, rather than a Chinese one; the United States had an uncomfortable relationship with imperialism, indulging it freely in its policy of unilateral intervention in the Western Hemisphere while being highly reluctant to pursue massive direct colonies overseas. The idea of permanently seizing a group of islands home to tens of thousands of Chinese thus opened up questions that many Americans were loathe to answer, but they were also not going to turn down the chance to establish a foothold so close to the burgeoning Oriental pearl of Shanghai. And so Chusan became an overseas territory of the United States just as the United States was enforcing its Ingalls Act and then, in 1918, banned Chinese immigration to the United States entirely - meaning that Chusan was not, and would not be, considered entirely American.
A visitor to Chusan in late 1918 described it thus: "One does not think of authentically Chinese metropolises like Canton here, for it is no metropolis. Nor does it have that unique aura of where East and West meet, such as Shanghai or Hongkong. Rather one sees in Chusan two harbors, one filled with junks and fishing boats lined by shacks and lean-tos, with bent-over old women pulling rickshaws about, and adjacent to it another, this one lined by a high wall, populated by military barracks and filled with American destroyers." The island was small, but it was very cleanly two worlds.
This was by design, and intended initially to be benevolent towards the Chinese. Though the Liberal Party was of course somewhat more amenable to economic expansionism by force overseas than the more empire-skeptical Democrats, even the muscular foreign policy instincts of then-President Joseph Foraker in 1901 was unwilling to invest the time, energy and considerable expense to forge a "Yankee Hongkong" off the coast of Chekiang. Purely by its size and location, Chusan was a much better harbor than Port Hamilton near Korea was, and so it would be built up over the next decade to become the main port of the United States Navy Far East Squadron with Port Hamilton relegated to a secondary status by 1914, but that was all it was intended initially to be. Chusan Naval Station was built in the excellent harbor on the main island of Chusan itself, designed to allow two dreadnoughts and their destroyer complements to moor there simultaneously, and the station was given the flag command of not a squadron but rather the new "Far East Fleet," which would come fully into effect with the close of the war.
The Americans and Chinese of Chusan lived separate lives in part because the Navy did not want to be responsible for the civilian governance of Chusan, thus creating a bizarre hybrid administration; a Chusan Police Service was established and staffed almost exclusively with locals but given American Naval policemen as their superiors, and the flag admiral of the Far East Fleet was simultaneously, by statute, the Military Governor of Chusan, whose remit extended to the whole archipelago but who rarely left the sprawling grounds of Chusan Station and relied on a local bureaucracy of Chinese who quickly learned English to enforce day-to-day control.
As such, Chusan was both a Western concession stripped from Chinese hands in the unequal treaties of 1901 but also a place that enjoyed a level of self-governance, even if purely by accident, that no other European concession did and many parts of China also lacked. But because no formal civilian administration would be established in Chusan until a damning report of conditions there in 1924, and it was neglected as anything other than a military port, it meant that a local rule had to be conjured on the fly by the Chinese and more enterprising American businessmen, which quickly turned into an alliance between local Chinese enforcers tied deeply to local familial networks similar to the West Coast's tongs, and the entrepreneurs who began using Chusan as their chief base of importing goods from China, including the trafficking of people after the Immigration Act of 1918 passed and Chinese who could pay a hefty price bought passage as stowaways on cargo vessels and, by the early 1930s, on Naval boats as officers and enlisted alike became amenable to looking the other way for a fee..." [1]
- The Yellow Peril [2]
[1] Now I know what you're all thinking, and that's "hey isn't this basically the plot of American Gangster and uh oh is Chusan going to be a huge drug and people smuggling hub under the Navy's tacit nose" and, yes, 100%
[2] I think "Scramble for Asia" is probably too focused on the 19th century to really use here, and "Our New Asia" wasn't quite the vibe I was going for here.