((Science damn you 
Oh well, there is always our first female congressman left to achieve))
Oh well, there is always our first female congressman left to achieve
))-
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((Science damn you
Oh well, there is always our first female congressman left to achieve
((Nay, my science is superior.
Maybe Marshawn is a female black congressman
))
((Nay, my science is superior.
Maybe Marshawn is a female black congressman
((Yes... That's why the pic is a male, and your description has all those hes...
))
((First black bearded lady member of congress perhaps?
Well, I might as well introduce my new character now. ))
Alicia Vallejo, Senator from California ((the seat is vacant of player characters now, right?))
Born: 1858
Party: Federal/Democratic (She votes and endorses Federal candidates in Californian elections, but often votes Democratic for the Presidential elections and non-Californian candidates. This is an increasing trend as the geographically split East and West coasts of the Federal Party do not always agree.)
The fourth child of Ignacio and Ida Vallejo, Alicia was adept at managing the family estates and properties. She was well versed in politics as well, and began to become more involved in each campaign on the issues that she was passionate about.
With the economic downturn in the early 90’s, California experienced a wave of reformist sentiments. This trend and the Vallejo name and influence (the other Vallejo children being more interested in business, aside from Daniel Vallejo who was involved in national politics and the military) lead the Federal Party to nominate her for governor - hoping to keep the Socialist and Democratic parties from appearing to be the only reforming and “progressive” parties. With Federal support solidified in the state by these moves, and having the backing of several popular statesmen, Alicia Vallejo became the first female member of congress when she was elected to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate.
Major issues: Labor reform, free trade, minimum wage, limited foreign intervention (but not isolationism), women’s rights.
Well, I might as well introduce my new character now. ))
Alicia Vallejo, Senator from California ((the seat is vacant of player characters now, right?))
Born: 1858
Party: Federal/Democratic (She votes and endorses Federal candidates in Californian elections, but often votes Democratic for the Presidential elections and non-Californian candidates. This is an increasing trend as the geographically split East and West coasts of the Federal Party do not always agree.)
The fourth child of Ignacio and Ida Vallejo, Alicia was adept at managing the family estates and properties. She was well versed in politics as well, and began to become more involved in each campaign on the issues that she was passionate about.
With the economic downturn in the early 90’s, California experienced a wave of reformist sentiments. This trend and the Vallejo name and influence (the other Vallejo children being more interested in business, aside from Daniel Vallejo who was involved in national politics and the military) lead the Federal Party to nominate her for governor - hoping to keep the Socialist and Democratic parties from appearing to be the only reforming and “progressive” parties. With Federal support solidified in the state by these moves, and having the backing of several popular statesmen, Alicia Vallejo became the first female member of congress when she was elected to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate.
Major issues: Labor reform, free trade, minimum wage, limited foreign intervention (but not isolationism), women’s rights.
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((Some appointments which I have decided:
Secretary of State: Roderick Khur (King50000)
Secretary of War: Charles Harper (komisha)
Secretary of Industry: Thomas Collins (mrmikhail)
Secretary of Agriculture: Algernon Russell (Lyly)
Postmaster General: Floyd Weaver (Rogov)
...and that's it.
Oh, and I'd just like to point out that this is the first time that the winning candidate hasn't been congratulated and in which the winning candidate has been called dangerous. Seriously, you guys have turned your characters into online versions of you, instead of simulating the actual eras and actual politics. My character is nothing like me in RL.))
Secretary of State: Roderick Khur (King50000)
Secretary of War: Charles Harper (komisha)
Secretary of Industry: Thomas Collins (mrmikhail)
Secretary of Agriculture: Algernon Russell (Lyly)
Postmaster General: Floyd Weaver (Rogov)
...and that's it.
Oh, and I'd just like to point out that this is the first time that the winning candidate hasn't been congratulated and in which the winning candidate has been called dangerous. Seriously, you guys have turned your characters into online versions of you, instead of simulating the actual eras and actual politics. My character is nothing like me in RL.))
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((Actually, multiple people have congratulated you, including me -- I wouldn't take the lukewarm support personally
Part of me is interested to see what happens with a bonafide socialist as President.))
((Sorry I haven't been posting much recently, of course its been Christmas and I've been doing a lot of modding. I'll get re-involved next election. Also my character is nothing like me, and I try to make sure all my characters are different.))
With the victory of a socialist I can assure you all, we shall sink deeper into reccession.
With the victory of a socialist I can assure you all, we shall sink deeper into reccession.
((I know I am...))
...Congratulations... Mr.... Hay.... Hay... Hay... den...... *starts crying*...
*Calms* *ahem*... I hope this will be a strong four years for this... glorious *sniffle*... Repub....liiiicccc.... *weeps uncontrollably*
((Four years...))
((Carr's a reactionary and has been this whole time, so can you honestly expect him not to attack a socialist president? ))
))
The following update is pretty sprawling. It may not be the best, and I'm pretty sure you'll all hate me for what Harrison gets to do. I apologize thus in advance.
Hayden (1st Term): The Best Government Money Can Buy
Joe Hayden won by a smaller margin than expected. Even then, his victory was far from clean. Many of the votes that had led Hayden to victory in states such as California and Oregon would not translate into Democratic dominance in congress. These votes were cast by Federal supporters who were disillusioned about Walker’s chance at the presidency, so they decided to get an interventionist candidate into office by voting for Garrett’s competition.
The ACP proved to be a much more formidable opponent than the Democrats thought it would be. They had fully expected the American people to denounce laissez faire policies after the stock market crash, but instead the South and Mid-West continued to vote for Garrett. Halfway through the presidential campaign, the Democratic Party was thus forced to divert its attention from snagging back Pennsylvania and New York, and to winning the South. Though he failed to ultimately sway them away from the ACP, Hayden did manage to make some Southern states a battleground between Garrett and the slight interventionism supported by Walker, thus claiming the margin he needed to take the White House.
1. Results for the Presidential Election of 1893
Hayden immediately set about with his plan to restore the economy, but before things could get better, they invariably got worse. The Southern economy had recovered from the Civil War almost miraculously, but in the wake of the recession, the hidden weakness of this recovery’s foundations was exposed. The industrialists of the Northern states had swept into the South in the 1860s and 70s, investing wherever they went and creating jobs for millions of Southerners. When Wall Street crashed, these industrialists suddenly withdrew funding from their more distant and vulnerable Southern ventures.
The economy of the states south of the Potomac took a sharp turn for the worse when the wells of money keeping it up dried for good in June 1893. Bankruptcies spread like wildfire through the most Northern-dependent Southern companies, and others closed down factories at an alarming rate to balance budgets. The result was 20% unemployment in some states of the former Confederacy [1]. The ACP, once fervently opposed to Hayden, now proposed numerous programs of aid to the South from the Hayden administration in order to guarantee the recovery of their most central powerbase.
2. A group of Georgia Congressmen at an improvised meeting in 1894.
For the South, the crisis would eventually prove to be a blessing in disguise, as it forced the region to go cold turkey on the Northern investment that it had been hooked on since the war. In 1894 however, the recession was still in full swing, and was affecting the rest of the country too. In New England, the Federals came across a huge stroke of political luck when Governor Harrison’s New York and Pennsylvania Volunteer Services turned out to have grown just enough to absorb the small spike in unemployment that characterized 1894 for the area [2].
In the Mid-West, the contraction of the New England investment that had lubricated much of the country’s economic growth caused problems that, while nowhere near as severe as those in the South, prompted the Federal Government to use the area as a testing ground for Hayden’s recovery policies. Industries were subsidized by state governments, and public works projects, ranging from minor road improvements to renovations and rebuilding of entire city blocks, initiated by the Federal. The Mid-West experienced a fast recovery, outpaced only by New England.
In the West, where industry had not fired people, but simply stopped expanding, public works projects, supported by the Federal-Democratic coalition, restored some semblance of economic growth. The state legislatures and congressional representatives however, remained largely static, with the Federals managing to cement their position in California in the wake of the election of the nation’s first female senator, Alicia Vallejo. Thus the situation in the South remained the only one that the ACP could use as evidence against Hayden’s policies.
The President’s major headache though, was not the sluggish recovery in the South, but the opposition to his attempts to reform the system itself. His attempt to introduce silver into the monetary system was slowly compromised out of existence by the ACP and Federals, who both refused to accept the fall in the value of the dollar that would follow. The legislation concerning banks however was passed by a thin margin with the establishment of a federal insurance for bank deposits, although banks could still operate without federal approval.
3. John Pierpont Morgan, owner of JP Morgan & Co., was one of the few bankers who supported federal insurance from the get-go [3].
It was the commission to oversee Wall Street that met the most resistance. The ACP resisted it on principle, and most of Federals resisted it because their most valuable state, New York, was home to the biggest stock exchange in the world. Thus, with a vote of 243-157, the commission failed in the House. Hayden however, was satisfied with the result, as the debate on the commission diverted attention from his pet project, the “national board through which all industrial relations may be conducted”.
Though the mid-term elections left Hayden with fewer gains than his presidential election numbers promised, he was happy with the result [4]. Federals supported the United States Industrial Board, which gave Hayden the majority he needed. The Bill passed with ease, and Hayden “danced like a mad man around the Resolute Desk”.
In international affairs, Hayden proved less successful. With the ongoing recovery from recession, and still very much alive crisis in the South, Hayden could not concentrate much on foreign policy. He tried to get the Commonwealth to make barriers of entry based on democracy, but the British and Cubans went the other way, and continued to advocate a barring of entry to any nation that did not “confer to Anglo-American standards”. In other words, the club was still as exclusive as it had been in 1880 [5].
The UPCA continued its Anti-American Campaign in Mexico, but it was South America Proper that experienced the real shakeup. Peru had always had a weak government, and in 1896, that government finally fell to a new kind of revolutionary. The August Uprising in Lima by workers from Peru’s quickly industrializing capital ended in the formation of a People’s Republic of Peru. It was based on Karl Marx’s ideals, and it scared other industrialized nations.
4. General Alejandro Batista proclaims the People’s Republic after his Army’s defection to the revolution.
In the United States, no “Red Scare” emerged, but in Europe, there were massive crackdowns. The British were eventually convinced to refrain from such action at the 19th Commonwealth Conference in Toronto, but on the continent, some 100,000 people are estimated to have perished in Russian and German “Restorations of Order” that amounted to little more than mass executions of suspected communist sympathizers. News of such events convinced Americans further that disengagement from the world could only benefit them.
The American economy eventually picked up for good in 1896. This pick-up also revealed the “hidden growth” that had happened during the drop in demand. Companies had indeed expanded, but the Great Monopolies had expanded more. John D. Rockefeller now held almost complete control of the oil market. With the advent of the airplane, created by the Wright Brothers in 1892 on the cusp of a recession, the value of this market could only increase as cars and planes began to take up more and more of the country’s transportation share.
Similarly, Howard Industries held an inordinate amount of market share in the Steel Industry. He was paid handsomely for his goods by Cornelius Vanderbilt’s American Railroad Company. Richard Orleans’ United Fruit dominated the Caribbean and foreign foods market. Andrew Jamous of Jamous-Khur Works reigned supreme over much of the recovering South, and held arms and tools manufacture at its fingers. Together, these men would soon embark upon a crusade in the words of Rockefeller “to get ourselves the best government money can buy”.
5. Henry Howard, Andrew Jamous, Cornelius Vanderbilt and JP Morgan, some of the “Titans of Industry” [6].
In New York however, circumstance had allowed James Harrison to strike the first blow in the oncoming battle between capitalism and democracy. Harrison was among those who had been convinced in 1894 by Wall Street Mogul and celebrated economist Jonathan Howard Smith, during his tour of the United States, that the monopolies that were now grabbing for power would be bad for the economy in the long-run, driving up prices and stagnating growth by eliminating competition. Of the numerous state governors that Smith talked to, Harrison was lucky enough to be in the best position to challenge them, as his state had suffered so little in the recession.
Harrison stormed into 1896 with a plan to bust the monopolies in New York. He hurried through legislation that would make such domination of markets illegal in the State of New York. Before Rockefeller or Howard could react, they were being summoned to court to answer for “blatantly breaking the trust of the American Consumer and the Free Market”. Caught completely off-guard by the legislation, any company that “accounted for more than 45% of all goods of a certain type sold in the state of New York” had its organization cut into smaller parts.
Rockefeller and Howard were the most successful at defending themselves. They even managed to get an amendment through, with the support of a sufficiently vindicated Harrison, that they would own 30% of the shares in the new companies carved out of their monopoly. Standard Oil’s market share in New York oil dropped from 95% to 40%, Howard Industries suffered a similar drop in steel of 80% to 35%. Harrison was ecstatic. New York’s economic growth did indeed pick up even more, and prices fell. The problem was that, now that Harrison intended to take his campaign national, the Titans were prepared.
[1] – South Carolina and Georgia, which had experienced the most Northern investment as industrialists from Pennsylvania and New York filled the financial vacuum wrought by Mandrake’s March, suffered the worst. South Carolina had an unemployment rate of 30%, and Georgia of 26%.
[2] – The New York Volunteer Service was set up in 1886. Its initial purpose was to keep unemployment low and living conditions high by turning community service into an actual job for which people could volunteer and be paid for. Over the years, the NYSVS had expanded into public works projects, and in 1891, the Department of Labor-Employer Relations (DeaLER) was set up to act as an intermediary between companies and potential employees. The PASVS was set up in 1889, and served much the same purpose as its counterpart in New York. The downside to the SVS was that if economic growth failed to outpace the SVS’s growth, a budget deficit would become near inevitable.
[3] – Morgan supported the Federal Bank Insurance Act because he knew that JP Morgan & Co. had the necessary reserves to gain the insurance, and insured banks were more trustworthy and likely to get customers. Smaller banks derided the measure almost without exception.
[4] – The expected gains that never materialized were in the West. Hayden reportedly said to his aide once the elections were over that “I admire how well the Western states have taken to heart the concept of congress as a check on the president’s power, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t make my job that much harder”.
[5] – The British attitude can be attributed to the growing tensions in Europe, especially as Anglo-German relations soured after the early 1890s. The Anglo-French War in Africa also turned the British off to French membership. The Scramble for Africa, which now dominated European politics, thus pushed America deeper into its own hemisphere.
[6] – Morgan effectively controlled banking, and was as such counted among the great monopolists.
---------------------
Exceptional Situation(s):
I’m sorry.
Primary Time. Parties are: Federal, Democratic, ACP.
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((Not unrealistic at all. Although I wanted to get a bill to the President's desk to ban further land-grabbing in Oklahoma, but oh well. It probably would have ended up being repealed or worked around anyway.))
Thank you. As for that bill of yours, just propose it now, and we can vote on it during the primaries.
Also, I, James Harrison, declare my intent to run for the nomination of the Federal Party.
(( Well with me out of the way supporting the Democrat, and the Oliver Glynn character retired, I think there is certainly space in the federal level Federalist party for Harrison's presidential run ))
After four years of commendable service reinvigorating the economy, succeeding at preventing a massacre of innocent civilians in Britain, and creating the national board of labor relations; I urge all Democrats to support our president, Joe Hayden, unanimously and let the other parties have the contentious primaries.
Here is the the national labor relations board and four more years of President Joe!
After four years of commendable service reinvigorating the economy, succeeding at preventing a massacre of innocent civilians in Britain, and creating the national board of labor relations; I urge all Democrats to support our president, Joe Hayden, unanimously and let the other parties have the contentious primaries.
Here is the the national labor relations board and four more years of President Joe!
I shall wait and see who is running before I make an endorsement (I'm too interested in running California, so my candidacy is unlikely).
((*scans thread*... oh there, missed that post. >.< I had searched the thread a few times to check if anyone else had taken the position after Glynne left (and noticed the previous governors of California before him), but missed when Joseph Jarvis came around (my forum searches obviously didn't pick up that post). I thought you were a businessman.
So to check, the California senate seats are open, right? I guess we might have a first congresswoman after all. [so yeah, you'll need to make a slight edit in the description due to my mistake there, BBB]))
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((From what I understand, Henry J. Jarvis was Governor 1842-1854, Some guy, 1854-1860 (I assume assassinated by Southern radical), Oliver E. Glynne 1860-1868, other people 1868-1892, Joseph P. Jarvis 1892-. H. Jarvis had an extended term as territorial governor; Glynne served his full two terms and became involved in Washington in the 1870's, and other (probably switching between Republican and Federalist, held office until my new character.
And that's where we are now... any corrections, Mikeboy; you're involved in this, and I don't want to be presumptive about your characters!
And Joseph was a businessman, then a congressman... so, you were half right!
))