The Presidential Election of 1917
The National Conventions of 1916 were all about the post-war world, but most importantly the United States’ role in it. In the Republican Primary, there were no doubts about the identity of the party’s nominee. In two ballots it was decided that Joseph Jarvis, the heart and soul of the isolationist movement, would challenge the Federal nominee. That nominee though, would not be the president Jarvis had acted as opposition to for the last four years.
Kevin McCahill entered the Federal National Convention without too many expectations, treating the race as essentially a way to raise support for his nomination in the next election cycle. However, when the first ballot came up as a minor victory, McCahill threw himself headfirst into the race. Presenting himself as the harbinger of the League of Nations, and figurehead of a new post-war Federal Party, McCahill secured the nomination on the nineteenth ballot.
1. Kevin McCahill, Federal Party Presidential Candidate of 1917.
Both McCahill and Jarvis faced the same problem in their campaigns; the American people’s thirst for a crueler peace treaty than that proposed by either candidate. As the campaign season continued, such demands became more and more vocal with the increasing rate of soldiers returning home on long leave or for good. Both candidates’ peace plans however, were overtaken by events in Europe.
Eastern Europe imploded in the winter of 1916-17, beginning with the Ottoman Empire. On December 3rd, with the Austro-Hungarian army in shambles, making Austrian intervention an impossibility for the first time in history, Serbian troops marched across the Ottoman border into Bosnia. Three days later, in Sarajevo, these troops presided over Bosnian nationalists’ creation of a government for the Province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbo-Bosnian Act of Union 1916 laid the foundation for the Serbian Federation, later known as Yugoslavia.
The Ottoman Empire, still reeling from the absolute devastation wreaked on its army and economy by its short but brutal war against Russia [1], failed to react, thus de facto recognizing the Bosnian secession. Emboldened by the victory, Serbian troops headed southward, intending to oversee similar acts of secession in Southern Serbia and Macedonia, while the tiny Montenegrin army moved out of its borders, intending to gain land with which to strengthen their position in the inevitable negotiations over a Serbian offer to join the Federation. Meanwhile, Albanian and Bulgarian nationalists began to take action as Greek troops crossed the Empire’s southern European border at Larissa.
2. Serbian troops enter Sarajevo.
The Albanian and Bulgarian declarations of independence, on December 17th and 18th respectively, proved to be the last encouragement needed by nationalists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Croatia left first, declaring its independence on December 21st, intending to back the declaration up with previously promised Serbian support, which came with the Serbian occupation of parts of Southern Hungary in early January. By then however, the Czechs and Slovaks had already declared their independence, intending to up the chances for survival by forming a federal government between the two upstart nations.
The most significant development in 1916 for the Austro-Hungarian collapse though, was the Italian spurning of the Peace of Trieste. King Emmanuel’s army marched into Venice on December 17th, intending to secure Italian control of all the territories claimed in 1905, and eventually even the western coast of the Adriatic. Vienna, preoccupied with increasing unrest in the core territories of Austria and Hungary themselves, responded with a similar shrug as that of the Ottomans to what was happening in the Balkans.
The collapse of the Balkan situation, which accelerated on December 25th with eastern Romania’s declaration of independence, as the Republic of Siebenburgen, however, was nothing compared to the storm brewing in Russia. The descent into madness began properly the day after the armistice was announced, as one of the many protests against the Czar’s regime, which had been mounting in size and frequency since the end of the Battle of Besancon, turned violent. The crowd, egged on by Vladimir I. Lenin, head of the revolutionary movement known as the Bolsheviks, began to throw rocks at the soldiers guarding the gates to the Winter Palace.
3. Lenin, at a rally in February 1917.
The guards failed to respond to orders to shoot at the protesters, instead choosing to go with the crowd and open the doors to the palace. This began the Battle of the Winter Palace, where loyal guardsmen clashed with the protesters and revolting guards inside the palace in an attempt to buy time for the royal family to escape form the Palace, and eventually St. Petersburg. The guardsmen, though killed to the last man, were successful in delaying the revolutionaries, and in doing so gave a rallying beacon to the reaction that formed against the revolution the battle had started.
The capture of the Winter Palace was indeed followed by a revolution, as military units in major cities joined protesters in the overthrow of the Czar’s government. In the countryside however, and in military units close to the Empire’s borders, loyalty to the Czar proved to be more common. Likely this would have killed the revolution in its crib, as the latter group counted for a much larger portion of the people and military, but more than half the “loyalists” proved to reject the Czar too.
Their reasoning was that Nicholas III was too weak a Czar, and his cousin, Alexander of Muscovy, deserved the throne more. Seeing the revolution as definitive proof of Nicholas’ unworthiness, the “Alexandrists” declared the Duke of Muscovy Czar on January 2nd 1917. There was now a three-way civil war in Russia, between the Czarists, based in Nizhny, the Alexandrists, based in Minsk, and the Soviets, based in Moscow and St. Petersburg [2]. This in turn prompted nationalist movements in Russia to seek independence, most notably in Ukraine and Poland.
Finland was the first to go, declaring independence as soon as December 6th. Of the three factions, only the Soviets had recognized Finnish independence by January 1st of the following year. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Baltic States all followed suit on December 15th 1916. The Russians, embroiled in their burgeoning civil war, continued to do nothing.
Ukraine and Poland had tougher roads to independence, as their claims included land not part of the Russian Empire. Ukraine declared independence on December 23rd, and prepared to secure it through fire and blood, the new provisional government pulling out all the stops to create a militia force around the core of Ukrainian military defectors. The new Ukrainian Army’s first operation was to capture Austro-Hungarian eastern Ruthenia, cut off from the central government in Vienna by the new nation of Czechoslovakia.
An unintended consequence of Ukrainian independence was the Republic of Crimea, formed from the peninsula that had been cut off from Russia by Ukraine’s independence. The Republic only survived a short time, becoming the Kingdom of Crimea in 1920, after a Ukrainian invasion installed the cousin of Ukraine’s king, Symon I, as monarch of the Crimea. The former Republic then became essentially a federal province of Ukraine.
4. Symon Petliura, AKA Symon I of Ukraine.
Poland declared its independence on January 12th 1917, the declaration created by a committee in Warsaw a day earlier. Similar to Ukraine, the government drummed up a militia army over a core of defectors, but the Polish Army would actually have to fight for independence, as the new nation’s eastern borders were mere miles from Minsk, and its prospective western borders in eastern Germany. Poland’s declaration of independence was the last before Election Day in the US, and the question was no longer how to treat the nation’s vanquished enemies, but what to do about their collapse. Would the United States sit back and let Eastern Europe tear itself apart, or make its voice heard?
[1] – The Ottoman Empire had declared war on Russia in February 1915, on the insistence of the British. In the 18-month long war, 70% of the Ottoman Army was killed, captured or wounded. When the armistice was announced, including a promise to Russia of free access for its troops, British divisions from Egypt marched into, and occupied, Ottoman territory south of the “Dortyol-Silopi Line”. The British presented the occupation as a “temporary security measure”.
[2] – The name “Soviets” came from the Workers’ Soviets founded by revolutionaries to replace Czarist government, which would eventually create the base for the Soviet Union.
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Exceptional Situation(s):
Hope you got all that.
Voting time.
