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The Presidents: 1836-1936 - An Interactive US AAR

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((So what are we going to start with?))
I would like to thank Mr.Jarvis for my appointement as the Secretary of State, i hope that your election will be fruitful for America
-Maurice Horshington, Secretary of State
 
Thank you Mr. Jarvis....I have no words, today marks the first strides towards Racial Equality. I had misjudged your Mr. Jarvis I apologize, this administration has my full support.
 
Thank you all, and I hope your expectiations, and my dearest wishes, come true. And Mr. Little, I am especially happy at your words, and I hope this moderate, but progressive solution, will become a model for future presidents that we can accomplish much, without expanding government needlessly and without disenfranchising people.
 
Okay, I started up the update machine, but don't expect anything until Tue-Wed, because I seem to have booked the first days of my summer pretty thoroughly.
 
I'm working on the update, but here's two badly made graphs to tide you over till it's done.

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Jarvis (1st Term): The Man on the Hill​

The election of 1917 marked the end of a long increase the United States’ activity on the international stage. Jarvis had promised to rebuild the wall that had kept American soldiers form dying in European conflicts, and to a population that had not seen bloodshed on a scale similar to the Great War since the end of the 1850s, this promise was the clincher. 1917 was supposed to be the victorious culmination of the Jarvis family’s long path to the presidency.
For the most part, it was, but for the destruction of the Solid South by Jarvis’ opposition to Jim Crow [1]. With mounting opposition in the South to both candidates for their stated intent of overturning Jim Crow, Taylor Caulfield, an independent senator from South Carolina, announced himself to be running for president on December 29th. With their pro-Jim Crow stance, Caulfield and his running mate, Senator Nathan Lee of Alabama, secured over four million votes and three states come Election Day.

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1. Election Results for 1917.​

Caulfield’s upset victories in the South affected Jarvis deeply, and forced his party into a mad scramble to prevent the Solid South from shattering completely. The Republican Party now altered its stance on Jim Crow to one of implied support, while the Federal Party spoke less in opposition to it. All sides had entered into a wordless pact, agreeing to keep the issue buried. Taylor Caulfield had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams [2].
The great question on everyone’s minds however, was still that of Europe, where the situation continued to deteriorate at a rapid pace. On January 23rd 1917, the Hungarian Government voted to officially sever its ties to Austria. Vienna refused to recognize the independence of Hungary, but, just as with the rest of its collapsed empire, could do little to oppose the breakaway state.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Jarvis held his first meeting with the British and French ambassadors as President of the United States. In this meeting, he made it clear that American troops would leave Europe as soon as possible, and would not return for any reason. Ambassadors Roxbury and Petain initially attempted to oppose the president’s decision, but by the end of the meeting had seemingly grudgingly accepted that the United States would play a minimal role in enforcing the peace treaty.
As primacy was slowly returned to the British and French in the Allied camp, the former Tripartite Powers slipped deeper into chaos. The first great battle of the Russian Civil War was fought between February 2nd and 21st by the Soviets and Alexandrists near Smolensk. Brought on by the Alexandrist 3rd Army’s advance toward the city, the 1st Battle of Smolensk cost the lives of some 150,000 Russian soldiers and civilians. The near constant fighting that engulfed the area for most of the year then ensured that the winter would become one of the deadliest in recorded history, as starvation and the cold killed nearly 600,000 people before April 1918.

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2. Starving Russian peasants near Smolensk, January 1918.​

While the stalemate at Smolensk made the British and French consider intervention in Russia, the idea of intervention in Austria-Hungary and the Balkans was roundly rejected by all the Allied Powers at a meeting on April 12th 1917. The situation in the area was, as stated by Vice-President Ritter in his announcement to the press, “too complicated at the present time to even entertain the concept of our being able to impose order”. Three days later, secure in the knowledge that the Allies would not intervene, Greece declared war on Bulgaria, intending to force the young nation to accept Greek sovereignty in southern territories claimed by both countries.
The Thracian War was the first of a series of conflicts during the end of the 1910s and early 1920s that engulfed the Balkans, collectively known as the Balkan Wars. Centering on Bulgaria, the series of short wars managed to cost the lives of some 710,000 people through starvation and combat between the opening of the Thracian War and the signing of Peace of Sofia on October 22nd 1920. The negotiations at Sofia would end with Bulgaria finalizing the recognition of Greek sovereignty in Thrace handed in preliminary negotiations a year earlier, and the northern sections of the country a demilitarized zone, but for the 30,000 Serbian soldiers stationed there.
To Jarvis, the defining feature of the Balkan Wars was the irreparable damage done to his plan of a Yugoslavian state. Negotiations between Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Slovenia had reached a stalemate by January 1918, and were completely broken off, despite Jarvis’ protests, after the Serbian declaration of war on Bulgaria in May of that same year. For the foreseeable future, Balkan stability relied on a weaker-than-expected Serbian Federation still itching to fulfill its dream of Balkan unification by any means necessary.

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3. King Peter I of the Serbian Federation.​

For the British and French though, and thus to the United States to the extent that it cared to include itself, the fates of Germany and Russia were of much more import than the mess of the Balkan Wars. And Germany and Russia were indeed in a mess, as the former desperately attempted to erase the monarchy from its government without destroying the system, and the latter’s civil war escalated to downright butchery on both borders of the Soviet-controlled zone. Faced with a situation in Europe that the American people seemed unwilling to stick their nose in any more, Jarvis decided to revise American goals for the peace negotiations to a simple insistence on the League of European States and lack of reparations payments.
The peace negotiations eventually got underway on June 21st 1917, at the Palace of Versailles. President Jarvis chose not to attend personally, sending “Ambassadors” McCahill and Carlsson instead. To Americans, it was a comforting sign that Europe was not the government’s primary concern. To the French, it was further justification of the necessity of imposing harsh terms on Germany. To the British, it was confirmation that the United States did not care enough about the Old World to oppose their next action.
On June 23rd, the “temporary occupation” of the Ottoman’s middle-eastern territories was formalized into an outright seizure of territory by the founding of the British Middle-Eastern Territories [3]. As expected, the Americans said nothing, merely expressing a wish that these territories someday achieve independence. The British gave them what McCahill considered “an answer similar to that given by a father to a child that has just asked a particularly stupid question”.

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4. The Palace of Versailles during the negotiations.​

In the end, the American delegation achieved all the goals laid out by the president. There would be no reparations, and a League of European States would be founded, although the French snatched away the Saarbrucken area by declaring it a “League-administrated Zone”. The peace treaty also secured German, Austrian and Czarist recognition of Poland, with the borders claimed by the government in Warsaw [4]. Controversially, this included “The Polish Corridor” that cut East Prussia off from the rest of Germany.
When the American delegation left Paris for the United States six days after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on November 11th 1917, they headed for a country that was about to experience one of the most vibrant periods of its entire existence so far. They left behind a continent that was about to sink into one of its most turbulent periods ever. Over the next four years, economic disaster, war and revolution would grip nations east of France, while the French and British attempted to impose a semblance of order to the chaos, even as their own economies teetered between recovery and relapse.
Across the Atlantic however, the next four years saw a slow build-up to what would become known as “The Roaring Twenties”. The economy would grow by 18%, seemingly a decrease from the 26% growth during the war, but in reality this growth showed itself more in the life of the average American. War-time growth had been beneficial mostly to those who made arms, and the rest of the economy grew at a, for American standards, measly 10%. In the prelude to the Jazz Age on the other hand, the average American suddenly saw his pay increase at a seemingly exponential rate.

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5. “The Jazz Bandits” c. 1919.​

These newfound riches were spent on luxuries that had been a pipedream a mere three years earlier. One such luxury was the radio, which now found its way to more than a quarter of all American households by 1921, and four fifths before the new decade was done. Together, film and radio opened Americans up to entertainment that was available like never before, and the people embraced it with open arms.
Music and film both experienced their revolutions properly in the 1920s, and the end of the 1910s was merely setting the stage, but literature saw the full effect of returning veterans as early as 1918. This generation of writers, known as the “Lost Generation”, had gone through hell in Europe, and in attempting to come to terms with their experience of the war and the insane party of the decade that followed it created some of the most enduring works of American literature. First was Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”, and then C. Thomas Howell’s “Paris 1915”, both devastatingly intimate portrayals of the American experience in the Great War.

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6. Ernest Hemingway, picture taken the day he returned from France.​

John Dos Passos’ “Three Soldiers” in 1919 laid the groundwork for his greatest work; “The U.S.A. Trilogy”. Terrence Reitman’s monumental collection of war poetry, “Coming Home”, would inspire numerous other veterans to put down their thoughts of the war and peace. Civilians too joined in by 1920, making the literary revolution branch outward from the war with works like Mary Jameson’s “Central Park”. In the black community too, the “Harlem Renaissance” began as a reaction to Jarvis’ sidelining of the Jim Crow question, and would grow into a general flowering of African-American culture.
Yet this post-war explosion of activity was nothing compared to the decade that followed it. When asked near the National Conventions of 1920 about the “hard-partying attitude” that seemed to be taking over the country, President Jarvis replied that it was “wonderful that [the war] seems to have been put behind us”. While this was to an extent true, Jarvis had completely underestimated just how much of the following decade would be a continued, frenzied attempt to forget the war.

[1] – The Southern states had gained this moniker by going to first the ACP and then the Republican candidate almost without fail since 1889.

[2] – 36 years later, at age 78, Caulfield still considered the Presidential Election of 1917 his “proudest moment”.

[3] – These territories were defined as Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, the last of which received a relatively high degree of autonomy.

[4] – The Allies did not negotiate with the Soviets or Alexandrists at Versailles, as they deemed it best to negotiate with the government that they had declared war on. In doing so, all three Allied Powers also de facto recognized the Czarist government as legitimate, likely in the knowledge that Nicholas was the claimant to Russia’s rule most likely to compromise.

----------------------

Exceptional Situation(s):

None. Primary time.

Parties are: Republican, Federal, Independent.
 
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((finally so what are the peace terms to be propsed))
 
Kaisersohaib said:
((finally so what are the peace terms to be propsed))
Click to expand...

The most important ones were in the update: No reparations, recognition of Poland, League of European States.

Lesser ones not mentioned: German disarmament (although it had some unintended consequences that will become clear during the next four years), and an independent Schleswig.
 
I, Kevin McCahill, wish to run again for the nomination of the Federal Party

I will be campaigning on issues of social and political reform. I hope to establish funds for the creative arts, such as radio and film, expand spending on education and formalise what should be taught, provide healthcare free at the point of delivery and set up independent inspectorates for all government agencies, like the police force, education system and judicial systems to ensure that your tax dollars are not wasted and are put to good use. I wish to publish a list of representative's interests, regulate our representatives to prevent corruption and abolish the electoral college in favour of proportional representation to elect our president (my preferred system would be the contingent vote or a variant of this).

Regarding the situation in Europe, whilst I feel that much of the current chaos could have been lessened by a more muscular approach, I do not propose to change the course of foreign policy, and therefore would only support intervention if really necessary; however, I would open up more diplomatic channels to encourage free-trade, democracy and other favourable aims. On Jim Crow, I feel a pragmatic solution is best, and despite my opposition to the laws, I feel that there is very little that can be done until popular sentiment there changes; we have seen the strength of feeling there in the protest votes at the last election. Therefore, whilst I would continue federal pressure against all forms of discrimination, I would not enact any federal laws that impinge on the states rights.
 
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I cannot say I accomplished everything I wanted, or that I made Europe peaceful, but I can say I tried, putting my full effort in making America stronger, the world more peaceful, and the people more prosperous, and I believe I can say that the America is largely safe from war, that Europe will have peace one day (and I wish to continue diplomatic efforts towards that end), and that the people of this great nation are living better than ever.

I believe, with good reason, that my greatest failing is for the negro. While I soundly believe in civil rights, and have pushed for them in every occasion, it seems other elements of government and society wish to bar that progress. Nonetheless, I feel that my policies, and my appointment of the first black cabinet member, has started a long, slow process that will end this hyphenated Americanist society; there will be no African-American, no Anglo-American, no German-American... America will be American, safe, free, secure.

In economic matters, the slowing growth is worrisome, but expected from our long period of growth; the greater impact of our wealth on the people, however, is astounding. This new age of culture, in the literary, musical and artistic fields, will hopefully secure America's place as not only an economic and industrial powerhouse, but as a fount of new ideas, new methods, and cultural explorationism.

With that, I have done many things, and failed at quite a few; however, I brought peace to Europe without America being forced to stay there; I've kept America prosperous, and her people are living better than ever; and I've started the first steps towards equality, trying to bring both sides, Negro and Southerner, together. I hope that you will allow me to retain my post a President (remaining a Republican), so that we can continue onwards, to a better tomorrow.

My platform will largely remain the same, though I plan to be more forceful in my approach to civil rights, and to place a stronger emphasis on the economy, which sadly to a backseat to ending the war.
 
I, Maurice Horshington, Secretary of State and the president's favourite, elect the Republican Partyand Jarvis
I believe that Mr.Jarvis presidency will return the glory days of the U.S.A to us, he has started to make reform all over the country, and i think that he isn't kidding whilst doing these reforms for our beloved nation, as i speak, our peace ambassadors are negotiating the so-desired peace with the enemies, and return the brave soldiers totheir families and their homes
((BBB thanks for the quick reply))
 
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I thank President Jarvis for his faith in me to serve as his Minister of War, but feel it is time to throw my hat in the ring and try to bring some order to the chaos of Europe - not through intervention but through the democratization that was widely espoused that has been roundly left by the wayside. Therefore, I intend to be a candidate for President on the Independent ticket. I will post my platform possibly tomorrow, but maybe later. ((Please bear with me being slow or non-responsive for 3-4 days, I am demobilizing from Afghanistan and the return trip will see me largely without internet access))

In Service,
Walter Mandrake
 
I will run for the Federal Party nomination. I will strive to expand support for accessible and high quality public education, and the provision of affordable healthcare for all Americans. I will also support continued efforts to mediate fairly between workers and industry, at a level playing field, so negotiations can be made peacefully, efficiently, and democratically. Like my fellow candidate, Mr. McCahill, I will support the reform of the electoral system with further transparency of government actions and choices and the replacement of the electoral college for a more representative voting system.

In foreign affairs, I recognize the need to engage with our allies and former enemies in Europe diplomatically - supporting democracy and discouraging totalitarianism and imperialism. We can do this by the formalization of mediation and arbitration of international conflicts by international assemblies which can work toward common cooperative goals. It is important that we do not let the chaos of the old world again bring up governments who see nothing to gain from democracy and nothing to lose with war and totalitarianism.

((The recap has been updated to Jarvis' presidency. I also added in some links to this timeline's historical speeches (especially Inaugural Addresses for the presidents which had those - perhaps this will encourage their further usage) to provide context for the politics and national sentiment of past events. This was mostly just based on the already assembled speeches list, because I can't find that many other notable speeches/debates/letters just by wading through the thread.))
 
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I am running on the Republican platform.

I plan to moderate the Jim Crow laws, as to prevent conflict with the southern states. I am a southerner myself, but I am proud of this union and I will stand by it. I will not allow extremist yankees to provoke conflict with their southern brothers. The southern peoples were defeated in their plight, but that doesn't mean they are the oppressed in the union! No, it means we are both equals in the constitution. Therefore I will not tolerate men from the northeast bursting into Alabama and Virginia telling everyone what to do. This is a federal state, therefore I find it contradictory that the executive power wants to break into the southern states and tell them what to do.

While I believe racial discrimination is wrong, I believe slavery has been outlawed and that the government should stop making these interventions because they will end badly. I do not want racial segregation, but I also do not want a second civil war. Let's moderate both our views and reach an agreement!
 
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I, Michael Sullivan, Governor of Illinois, hereby announce my candidacy for President as an Independent.

With the death of the Democratic-Labor Party and the co-opting of its ideals in much-diluted form by the Federal Party, there is no true progressive party remaining in the United States today, no clear voice to speak for the advancement of our common humanity. The Federal Party stands as the bastion of those who would compromise and parcel away our hopes and aspirations until nothing remained but the hollow shell of progress, an achievement solely for the wealthy and the privileged. The Republican Party does not even pretend to serve any but the elite, seeking to maintain the status quo and to oppress the laborer, the farmer, and the factory worker.

My fellow Americans, I am here today to warn you about the true danger that lays behind the facade of prosperity we have achieved -- the danger of speculation, of rampant, greed-fueled capitalism running full steam ahead without any concern for the future. There has been no great achievement following the war, no worldwide economic miracle or second Industrial Revolution, so why is our economy leaping forward as though we had discovered the Fountain of Youth? The world economy is staggeringly weak, poised on the edge of collapse, and yet we pop champagne corks as though nothing bad could ever happen again.

If I am elected President, I will not allow industrial tycoons, stock-market speculators, and elite neo-aristocrats to drive America into its own grave head-first. I will propose to Congress strict regulations on the industrial and financial sectors, imposing mandatory inspections and eliminating the culture of massive debt driving growth. We stand poised on the edge of oblivion, my friends, and though I suspect my words will go unheeded, I pray that you listen to these seemingly dire warnings as only a small measure of what could be if prompt action is not taken.

Furthermore, as President, I will move to decisively end the Jim Crow laws in place across the Southern states, as they are clear and egregious violations of the Constitutional protections granted to all citizens in the Fourteenth Amendment. If we are to allow blacks to be disenfranchised in the South, if we begin to ignore clauses of the Constitution inconvenient to political bosses and plantation owners, laborers and factory workers in the North open themselves to further encroachment by their owners and bosses. This is not a matter of race, but rather a matter of class. The black farmhand must stand with the white farmhand so that we might pull together and stem the tide of wealth being concentrated in the hands of the few. I have taken note of the unholy alliance forged between the Federalists and Republicans on this issue, and it disgusts me. Our fathers and grandfathers did not win the Civil War simply to allow slavery to continue by donning a simple disguise. Jim Crow must die so that America may truly be free.

Finally, it is my belief that we must impose a fair and just peace in Chile, reincorporating them into our natural sphere of influence and allowing them the right to self-determination that we so revere in America. Further military adventurism in Europe will only further weaken our network of alliances in South America, which must be considered paramount to our prosperity and self-defense.

If you want to see an America that protects and upholds the rights for the working man, vote Sullivan. If you want to see a foreign policy that rejects foreign wars and favors diplomacy, vote Sullivan. If you believe that America should move forward, that it should embrace progressive policies and equality for all, vote Sullivan.
 
((I thought "All sides had entered into a wordless pact, agreeing to keep the issue buried."....))
 
((And seeing the sudden drop-off of rhetoric and the issue being buried, my character is calling it an unholy alliance between the two major parties. It's his way of calling attention to the "wordless pact" and making it into a fight again.))
 
((Etranger notes Chile in his speech; it wasn't mentioned in the update, so what peace deals were made there, BBB?))
 
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