Sakura_F: Yeah, I had a sinking suspicion the moment I typed that it was from there...
Kaiser_Mobius: Heh, but the question is, where and in what dosage?
Onni_Manni: The maps aren't that different, actually, with the exception of Longwy from France. Most of the rest of the changes to the Kaiserreich timeline occurred later, when France/Britain collapsed. As for Finland, their independence was guaranteed under Brest-Litovsk, but German troops never got that far, so the Finns largely got to where they are through their own efforts. For now, they're independent.
casual: Welcome!
Tommy4ever: The Russian civil war is still going, and likely will continue for some time. I'll touch on that subject a little bit in the future.
GulMacet: Belgium only lost Congo in the war. Anything more would likely have been seen as too punitive, since Germany pretty much did invade them with absolutely no justification.
Viden: DH's 1914 scenario gives only three treaty options. None of them include taking Indochina, sadly.
-----
Chapter II - Hail to Thee in Victor's Crown - Part III
The end of the Great War was an epochal moment in the history of not just Europe but also the wider world. The war itself, more so than the peace treaty that followed the conflict, irreversibly altered the political, military, and social fabric of Western civilization. Over 17 million people, civilian and soldier alike, were killed as a result of the conflict, a staggering total for a world accustomed to wars that barely reached quadruple digits, and more than 20 million wounded. An entire generation of people had been devastated. These men and women, growing up in an age of “civilization” and optimism for the future that science and progress could bring, were thrown without mercy into an inferno of death and destruction made possible by the industrial power that made their society possible. Those who escaped death were left deeply disillusioned, not just with the politicians and generals who allowed this catastrophe, but with the basic principles of the 19th Century and the Victorian Age as well.
The Treaty of Versailles silenced the guns across Europe, but it did not bring peace by any measure. In Russia, the civil war between Whites and Reds continued, though with the reactionaries in the north contained to Murmansk and Archangelsk and their armies in the south holding a line running from Rostov-Tsaritsyn-Astrakhan, the peril to the Bolshevik regime was largely passed. In China, though General Li Yuanhong had succeeded in overcoming the imperial pretensions of Yuan Shikai, discontent, embodied by Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s ‘Constitutional Protection Movement’ in Guangzhou, remained widespread. Mexico too remained embroiled in chaos, despite, or indeed because of, American intervention. Even Latin America was restless; in September 1918, Chilean officers backed by Argentina overthrew the elected government. Elsewhere, in the colonies and closer to home, nationalist movements, socialist agitators, and ambitious generals plotted their actions. The old methods of political action were rapidly being replaced by extremism and a willingness to employ violence against the status quo, fueled by economic uncertainty and an underlying anger for the system that had allowed the Great War to happen. For many years to come, instability and radicalism became acceptable and expected.
President Wilson returned home from Europe to an unwelcoming political situation. Though he had succeeded in achieving his stated goal of preventing the dismemberment of France, Wilson faced a strong backlash from members of both parties who questioned the effectiveness of his negotiating strategy and of his conduct in foreign affairs in general. Spearheaded by former President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, many Republicans accused Wilson of having kept America out of the war – an easy accusation, since it was Wilson’s slogan in the 1916 election – and consequently being responsible for the Entente defeat. At the very least, Wilson’s policy had been weak, ineffectual, and vacillating. In hindsight, few Americans could avoid noticing the contradiction between Wilson’s high-flown rhetoric and the United States’ negligible contribution to the war.
For the President’s perceived failings, the Democrats paid a heavy price in the midterm elections. Nor did Roosevelt and Lodge, themselves the effective architects of America’s prewar foreign policy, relent in their attacks. Foreign policy troubles continued to hound Wilson’s administration, even as the Treaty of Versailles was ratified by the Senate by a wide margin. In large part, it was to do with the Mexican intervention, which ended on September 19, 1919 after a ceasefire was brokered with the pro-republican forces. U.S. troops had been committed for many months to an invasion across the southern border, leaving the United States in possession of Baja California. Yet the intervention had been carried out seemingly without direction or any clear goal in mind.
Matters grew no better when Wilson suffered a stroke in the summer of 1919, leaving him paralyzed and his administration effectively decapitated while Wilson’s wife headed a sort of regency council in the White House. But matters had already slipped out of the President’s hands by then. The economy was already showing worrying signs of a slowdown, owing to uncertainty and fears of further instability in Russia and France, and there was already talk of who would succeed Wilson after the 1920 election.
The field of candidates was wide open in both major parties as election season rolled in, but it rapidly narrowed as time went on. The economy had not yet declined to such a point that it could be made a campaign issue, and the Progressive reforms Wilson had enacted enjoyed wide support, thus foreign policy was the key issue in Republican minds. The field was reduced to two major contendors for the nomination: Leonard Wood and Frank Lowden. Wood, a former Rough Rider, Army general, and friend of Teddy Roosevelt, boasted solid credentials for the sort of ‘touch’ foreign policy many Republicans were now demanding, though he was handicapped in many respects by his harsh anti-socialist stance. In contrast, Lowden, Governor of Illinois, was the more Progressive of the two, while still being able to promise the sort of coherent world policy lacking in Wilson.
The Republican Party met in Chicago on June 8, 1920 for the nominating convention. For the first several ballots, Wood and Lowden remained roughly equal, both enjoying large numbers of votes but nevertheless well short of a neccesary majority. The only two other contenders were Hiram Johnson of California and Warren Harding of Ohio. After the third inconclusive ballot, Wood, who had the most votes, began to lose ground as Harding gained on the assumption he could serve as an adequate compromise candidate to avoid an embarrassing deadlock. But it soon became evident that the Ohio Senator was virtually the least qualified man to be president, and by the sixth ballot, his support had dwindled down to nothing. Finally, Wood managed to secure the support of the bloc around Calvin Coolidge on the seventh ballot, unleashing a stampede of support for the New Hampshire general, By the eigth ballot, it was over and Leonard Wood was the Republic presidential nominee, and Coolidge his running mate.
The Democrats gathered in San Francisco three weeks later with no clear frontrunners. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo and son-in-law to the President, struggled to gain momentum, owing to an unexpected fued with the President. Party elders like William Jennings Bryan, meanwhile, remained aloof, hoping for the slim chance at a nomination. The balloting went on for days with no clear leader, but at last, on the thirty-seventh ballot, Governor James Cox of Ohio emerged the nominee, with Assisstant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt as his running mate. Cox, an internationalist, a progressive, and an Ohioan, was hardly a weak candidate, and by nearly all measures the race would be a close one, especially given the uncertainty raised by the prospect of the massive influx of women voters following the implementation of the 19th Amendment.
Ultimately, the handicap of Wood’s political inexperience was not enough to nullify the foreign policy debacle of the Wilson camp. Cox and Roosevelt simply could not detach themselves from the White House sufficiently. On November 2, the Republicans cruised to a comfortable, though hardly overwhelming, electoral victory. Cox swept the traditionally-Democratic South, but failed to make significant inroads elsewhere, with the notable exception of Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, and West Virginia. With a roughly 55-40 percentage split between Wood and Cox, Wood scored an impressive majority in the Electoral College and would enter the White House with the happy prospect of a friendly Congressional majority. Of greater concern for Wood, however, was the fact the nearly five percent of the votes, over one million, had gone to the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, the party’s best showing to date.
In Germany, electoral issues also took center stage. For much of the war, Germany had effectively been governed by a military dictatorship headed by Hindenburg and Ludendorff and administered by a loose coalition of military officers and civil service bureaucrats, leaving both the Reichstag and Kaiser marginalized. With the generals returning home victorious, the power of this dictatorship was at once stronger and weaker than before. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were national heroes largely credited with the triumph over the Entente, but they could not horde the victory laurels exclusively to themselves, nor was their extra-constitutional governance justifiable now that the war was over. The Kaiser, politically active for the first time in a decade, began cultivating the National People’s Party (DNVP), newly-formed out of the old conservative parties, as the ‘Party of the Kaiser’ and the bedrock for a rapprochement between the Reichstag and the Throne. It was Wilhelm’s hope that the sense of national unity and goodwill born in 1914 could be preserved, and that voters would flock to this new party out of renewed patriotism in the 1919 Reichstag elections.
The parliamentary elections, held on January 19, 1919, proved a bitter disappointment for Wilhelm’s political hopes and expectations. The new DNVP managed to secure barely fifteen percent of the vote, largely at the expense of the friendly National Liberals and Progressives. Meanwhile, the Bavarian Centre Party and the Social Democrats remained largely untouched, leaving them with a combined majority in the Reichstag. Socialist at heart and hardly sympathetic to the aims of the Kaiser, the Social Democrats would never consent to be a mouthpiece for the monarchy. A union of the conservatives and liberals was within Wilhelm’s grasp, but to have a Reichstag majority, the Bavarian Catholics were essential. After much careful negotiating, a deal was brokered, uniting the Centre, DNVP, and National Liberals into a unstable coalition and placing Constantin Fehrenbach, a leading Centre politician, into the Chancellery. Wilhelm II had his union of Kaiser and Reichstag, but as an instrument for long-term political action, the coalition was doomed almost from the start. Yet, in the interests of continued national unity and political stability, it was a price worth paying for the time being.
Britain, meanwhile, was gripped by a political crisis of a different and far older sort. The question of Irish Home Rule had preoccupied Parliament since before the outbreak of the Great War. For many, it was an issue worth fighting for. On the one side, Irish nationalists continued to hope for a repeal of the Act of Union that had merged Ireland into the United Kingdom, while others wished for complete independence. Against this was an energetic Conservative opposition, and the fears of the Protestant population of Northern Ireland of political marginalization and persecution at the hands of their southern brethren. In 1916, the issue had exploded violently with the Easter Rising, which saw Irish nationalists briefly seizing control of London, only to be bloodily repressed by British regular army units.
The failure of the Easter Rising did not end the violence. Indeed, with the rise of Bonar Law to the position of Prime Minister, the chance for a renewal of the Home Rule debate had all but evaporated, and violence was the only outlet the Irish had left. Their ranks filled by disgruntled Irishmen and supplied with money and weapons by their sympathetic American cousins, Irish rebel bands began springing up across the country, unleashing a wave of bombings, murders, and other violent acts against bastions of British authority. By the start of 1920, four army divisions had been sent to maintain order, but the violence showed no signs of abating.
British soldiers in Dublin, 1919.
‘Disorder and lawlessness,’ Law vowed in an address to Parliament, ‘shall not be permitted to spread from the Continent to Ireland.’ In this, he was referencing developments unfolding in France that had caught the attention of the whole globe. The Third Republic was facing a political crisis such as it had never endured since its birth a half century earlier. It was clear to all that France was on the verge of an explosive change, and by 1921, the fuse was ready to be lit.