Bridgeworthy: A Golden Age
The election of 1881 turned on Cuba. The Democratic Party had expected a relatively easy win for their victorious president, but instead lost to the Federal Party’s Josaiah Bridgeworthy. Bridgeworthy’s victory is often attributed to low voter turnout, but in reality, it seems that Cuba doomed Callahan. The newspapers of the country turned against the President’s Government-in-Exile, and so did enough of the people. On Election Day, the Republican Party received the least support, finalizing a long fall from grace that had begun after Williams’ term, while Josaiah Bridgeworthy coasted to victory by a comfortable enough margin.
1. Election results for 1881.
Bridgeworthy, unlike Callahan, entered office at a time when the multiple factors had converged massively in the United States’ favor. While Callahan had taken advantage of a less-than-ideal situation as best as he could, Bridgeworthy’s situation was geared for success from the beginning. Industry was benefiting from a new post-war boom and would soon receive a further boost from Europe. The West was beginning to have a chance of being tamed, and culture was about to receive a boost from more than one place.
In Europe, the oncoming “American Invasion” went unnoticed by most, as the continent’s attention stayed fixed on the fallout of the French Empire’s collapse. In January 1881, the 3rd Republic officially signed a peace treaty with the alliance that Otto Von Bismarck had arrayed against it. As the delegates wrestled over the terms of the treaty, Otto Von Bismarck entered the final phase of negotiations with the German states to the south of his country.
Bismarck managed to convince the kings of Wurttemberg and Baden to join the North German Confederation, which would officially be reformed as the German Empire. Ludwig the Second of Bavaria declined to join the new Federation, and thus set his country on a course for war with Bismarck, who now had more clout in the German nation than Kaiser Wilhelm himself. The French were forced to cede Alsace-Lorraine to this new nation, proclaimed on January 29th, as collateral to ensure that France would not be in a position to challenge Germany for the foreseeable future.
2. The German Empire following the Treaty of Paris.
In the aftermath of the war, Europe experienced a boom, with the industrial bases of other nations growing at the expense of increasingly sluggish recovery in France. The boom also meant more demand for foreign goods, a demand that would increasingly be met by American industry. Not that the United States needed any further fuel for growth, as US GDP increased by 27.8% between 1881 and 1885. In early 1883, the per capita income of the average American surpassed that of his British equivalent, making it the highest in the world.
The 1880s also experienced an explosion in American literature. The driving forces behind this explosion were the growth of industry and the “Lost Cause”. The Lost Cause was the sudden upsurge of Southern literature about the war that came about in 1882. In that year, three books were published that showed a Southern view of the civil war. The first was The Alabamian by J. Gidderson, which told the story of a young soldier from Alabama. The other two were not fictional, being The Posthumous Memoirs of Thomas J. L. Davis by Anderson Halleck, and The Rise and Fall of the SRCSA written by Adelbert Johnson during his time in jail before the trials of the Confederate Government.
All three books presented the antebellum South as the last bastion of chivalry, and slavery as an institution that everyone, including the slaves, was happy with. The civil war was presented as a hopeless grasp at freedom by the gallant people of the South, which was snuffed out by a cruel and uncaring north through sheer weight of numbers. The memoir of Davis also created a cult of character for the deceased general, which presented him as infallible, with all his mistakes being the fault of his subordinates, like Lee and Jackson [1].
3. Robert E. Lee faced especially heavy criticism from the Lost Cause for his post-war friendship with Union Generals Young and Mandrake.
The northern reaction came in 1883, with both Mandrake and Young publishing memoirs of the war. Their tone was not as abrasive toward the South as it often seems to those who read the books today, being relatively subdued compared to other northern writers, but it was undoubtedly negative. That same year, two books, written almost in parallel, became rallying symbols for both sides of the argument.
Henry Fender’s A Southern Man was published in July 1883. It told the story of an aristocratic Southern family from Charleston, South Carolina that is destroyed by the war. It was told from the point of view of the family’s youngest son, the title’s “Southern Man”.
Three months later, William Hollingsworth’s A Good Man was published. It told the story of a group of young men who take part in the war in the Army of the Cumberland, experiencing the battles of Cincinnati and Staunton, and witnessing the horror of slavery and hypocrisy of the Southern people during the final campaigns. The title comes from the group’s constant discussion of what defines a Good Man, which is eventually deemed to be something “at least very different from what we have seen in this wretched land” [2].
The Lost Cause would continue to gain momentum until the 1960s, when the fall of the final Jim Crow laws kicked off a massive re-evaluation of the war in the South. However, for Americans in the decades around the turn of the century, the civil war was far from the dominant issue. For many, the more interesting and provocative literature was that produced in the new home of the average American, the cities and their factories. The most long-lasting examples of “Industrial Literature” are the big three of 1884.
Te first to be published, in February, was Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, which has become his most famous book, beside Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, both published in the 1880s. The Gilded Age was a collection of vignettes, showing mainly the factory worker and the factory owner, with farmers and the homeless getting small stories. It was not as overtly socialist as the other two, and perhaps for this reason is more commonly cited as inspiration by politicians today.
4. Mark Twain, c. 1907.
The second of the big three, published in June, was The Man on the Hill, by David Steinman [3]. It told the story of a young factory worker, who spends much of his nights gazing longingly at the house of the factory’s owner, who lives on the nearby hill. Eventually, after an accident leaves one of his friends paralyzed from the waist down, the young man gets to see the hours from the inside when he visits with his friend to talk about compensation. More than half of the book takes place during the visit, in which the young man is revealed slowly, through dialogue and the sights he sees in the house, just how selfish and morally bankrupt the factory owner is. The Man on the Hill prompted a resurgence of socialist attitudes, which was cemented and given further fuel by The Titans, published in November.
The Titans, Ambrose Holloway’s first novel, was the story of two men who own large companies. The first half of the book focuses on the obscenely luxurious life they live, and slowly reveals the cost to the workers, and their own souls, at which they get it. The second half is kicked off by the second man’s visit to one of his factories, where he is convinced that more must be done to protect the workers, and not just in his company. He begins a campaign for further safety measures, destroying his friendship with the first man, which is the main plot thread, and eventually his career and company.
5. The drawing included on the first page of both The Man on the Hill, and The Titans in prints after 1887 [4].
On the national stage, Bridgeworthy managed to pass a constitutional amendment that allowed recall elections for congressmen, providing more than 50% of the state or federal legislature approved a vote of no-confidence. He passed it at the cost of having to give up on decentralizing the FBI in return for the support of Roderick Khur and his allies within the party. Bridgeworthy also managed to hold the Cuban and Philippine plebiscites in 1882. Both voted for independence, and both had their first elections in January 1883, overseen by US troops.
Another victory for Bridgeworthy was the strengthening of the Commonwealth. He gained British support for the American Purchase of the Danish Virgin Islands, in return for official US recognition of the German Empire’s sovereignty in Bavaria. He justified this to congress as the Bavarian government being much more oppressive than Bismarck/Wilhelm’s, and thus having lost its right to govern its citizens. When pressed on the continuation of this logic to regimes such as Russia and Austria-Hungary, Bridgeworthy replied that as long as there was a better alternative, which he deemed there wasn’t, he would consider the governments of both illegal.
The only real setback for Bridgeworthy and his Commonwealth Platform was the United Kingdom’s complete refusal to recognize the US demands for French decolonization. In the opinion of the British, the French were not enough of a threat to “American Liberty”, meaning the balance of power in the Americas, to warrant decolonization. Thus Bridgeworthy entered the 1884 Primary season with the largest economy on earth, but frustrations in foreign policy and the Commonwealth.
[1] – Davis’ youngest son, Samuel Lee Davis, Bridgeworthy’s Secretary of the Interior, fervently denied this view of his father. In Davis’ opinion, the general should have been seen as a human being, instead of “some perverted idol of a lost cause”.
[2] – By “wretched land”, Hollingsworth meant the South, and his book is still used as basic material for Literature 101 in colleges around the United States, including increasingly the Southern states as the war becomes ever more distant.
[3] – In 1931, John Hasselbeck would change his name to Steinbeck in honor of Steinman, and go on to become even more famous than his inspiration.
[4] – The story goes that Holloway was visiting Steinman when they found it in the local newspaper, and demanded it be included.
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Exceptional Situation(s):
If anyone wants to take on the role of one of the authors mentioned in this update, feel free to write a “Little Something Extra”, being an excerpt from the books mentioned, or a similar product of the era.
Otherwise, Primary Time. Parties are: Federal, Democratic, Republican.
Remember, socialism’s back in style.
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