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The Presidents: 1836-1936 - An Interactive US AAR

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I'd like to take a moment and thank all those who've endorsed my campaign recently. It's good to see the Grand Old Party has such strong support.

I believe Mr Gallatin has hit the nail on the head in his comparison between President Emerson's platform and my own; despite the concerns of several prominent politicians about what a Jarvis Administration would do to the economy, preparing for war against and adversary like the Soviet Union would certainly draw resources that would best be used domestically to build schools, fund infrastructure projects, reduce taxes, or generally improve the state of every American citizen. Shall we fund new bombers, or will we help build new hospitals across the nation to help the soldiers who lost a limb in the last war? Shall we engage in military campaigns across the far reaches of the planet, slaughtering hundreds, even thousands, or will we build new roads and make this nation more connected?

That is not so if elected President, I will neglect the military; I have a military background that extends past the First World War, and I could not bring myself to harm the Armed Forces of this great nation. However, I will not gorge the military budget with funds that would best be used to promote growth and expansion here at home.

((I'd thank you all by name, but I've forgotten... Etranger is Sullivan? Maybe?))
 
I'm going to call it:

The Polls Are Closed.

With the score 4 to 3 in favor of Jarvis-Gallatin.

Richard Jarvis will become the next President of the Republic.
 
((Glorious victory! So, what all do you need again, BBB; cabinet members, plans for this administration, etc? So... anyone want to be Secretary of Somethin-or-other?PM or catch me on IRC to request a post or make a suggestion :D ))

I want to thank all those who endorsed my campaign and took the time and effort to barnstorm for me across this great nation; their support was invaluable and I hope that they will continue to be loyal friends of the Jarvis Administration. Furthermore, I want to thank Mr Gallatin, whose eloquence was much welcome; I have full faith that he will perform admirably in reprising his role as Vice President. Lastly, I want to thank the American people for their support in this election; without them, none of this would have been possible. You have my sincere thanks.

This election is a referendum on the failures of the Emerson Administration and his predecessors, and a mandate from the American people, call for peace and freedom! Over the course of the next four years at the helm of this great nation, I will do my absolute best to keep this nation at peace and promote democracy and freedom across the world; I hope the Soviet Premier, in the aftermath of the brutal war against the Nazis, is as desirous of peace and prosperity as I am.

~ President-Elect Richard A. Jarvis
 
I would like to congratulate President-Elect Jarvis on his recent victory. My tenure as Attorney General under the Emerson Administration was efficent but unexciting. However a cordial with the USSR must be established to guarantee peace in our time.

Attorney General Samuel Éccosais
 
I must congratulate the President-Elect on his victory at the polls, a historic win that puts the Republicans back in power after a very long drought. I have no doubt that they will serve their country admirably, just as many Republicans did along side me in those long eight years. I am actually very pleased from an international point of view that Mr Jarvis has won this race, and, much as I am skeptical of the economic sense of deregulation and the inherent instability it will cause, I would be honoured to continue serving the government at the United Nations or assist at the Department of State or otherwise help this government achieve the cordial relations I enjoyed with the Russians during my tenure at the White House.

Once again, my congratulations,

~President Philip JJ McCahill, US Representative at the UN
 
Jarvis has made this election about foreign policy, and I can understand why people who've just fought a bloody and long war would want to see and end to conflict and confrontation. I won't stand against Jarvis on that as he holds a clear mandate. What I fear, what I'm sure many Americans even among those who voted for Jarvis will fear, is the systematic destruction of the state safety net that had to be built up after the merciless campaign of deregulation that caused the great depression. I would ask our President elect not to leave the men and women of this nation to go uneducated, hungry and sick. To not repeat the mistakes of his predecessors in the Republican Party and stick only to the economic changes neccesary to transition from a war to a peacetime economy, not from a compassionate to an unsustainable one.
 
Name: Jubal Byrd
Age: 46
Occupation: Governor of Virginia
Party: Republican

Bio: Scion of an old Virginia family that briefly fled to Cuba during the War Between the States; Jubal was elected on a platform of Southern segregation and conservatism despite being a Republican. Virginia and the South are his chiefest concerns, anti-communism close behind.

((This AAR needs a little George Wallace...))
 
My sincere congratulations go to Mister Jarvis. I am sure he will lead America to further glory, both internally and externally. While I disagree completely with his view over the Red Plague called Communism, his stance is understandable, given the ever-present memories of war.

God Bless Jarvis, and God Bless the United States of America

- Governor L. Berg
 
Name: Henry Kissinger
Date of Birth: May 27th, 1913 [36]
Position: Diplomat
Political Affiliation: Republican
Personal Biography: After fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany, Kissinger's family moved to Connecticut, where it flourished. Henry served in the Army in the Second World War, before retiring as a sergeant, and entering the 'Diplomatic Corps.' He has served in the Office of the Secretary of State, and is one of the youngest ambassadors in the secretariat. He is a proponent of Realpolitik, peace through strength, and while he supports a firm stance towards the Soviet Union, he also is supportive of a possible Détente.
 
barry_goldwater_1960.jpg


Name: Calvin C. Hendrikson
Age: 35 (born 1909)
Party: Republican
Named after the famous Civil War veteran and one-term president Calvin Carr, Calvin Hendrikson was born in Arizona to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother whom owned a department store. After graduating from Stauton Military Academy and attending the University of Arizona for a year, he took over his parents' department store. During the Second World War, he received a comission in the United States Airforce, spending most of the war flying between the United States and India. After the war, he went on to contest Ernest McFarland's re-election to the Senate, narrowly beating him out and becoming the second Republican elected to the Senate from Arizona.

Known for his controversial anti-New Deal views and his desire to see a rollback of communism, Hendrikson will not hesitate to speak out in favor of what he believes to be the true American ideals of liberty and self-government, nor will he fear speaking his mind in regards to what he believes to be attacks on the free market system.

((I'm baaaaaaaaaack...))
 
Welcome Mr Hendrickson, Mr Kissinger, Governor Byrd, and Governor Berg; I welcome all to the national stage and to the Republican Party, save Mr Berg, though I hope he sees fit to caucus with us.
 
Name: William Steveston
Date of Birth: 1910
Senator from Washington, Steveston supports deregulation of the economy and less US involvement in world affairs. He opposes the Soviets but does not want the US involved in more war.

I give my congratulations to the President Elect and hope to work closely with him.
 
My thanks for President-Elect Jarvis' recognition. I stick by my independence, but I look forward to working alongside all those of varying parties.

- Governor L. Berg
 
R. A. Jarvis: A Cool Silence​

The election of 1949 broke 20 straight years of victories for American progressivism. Richard RAJ, who would soon become known as RAJ to differentiate from his father who had held the office after the First World War, and William Gallatin, by focusing on the American people’s desire for a cooling down of relations with the Soviet Union managed to beat out Emerson handily. The Electoral College made it close though, but Gallatin and RAJ, scions of California’s two First Families, took the state with a 10% margin of victory, bringing the final total to 277-263 in their favor.

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1. Results for the Election of 1949.​

The Republican Party was still far from its heyday of the 1920s, and even farther from control of the federal government. The Liberal Party managed to wrest plurality back in the House, leaving the score of Liberals and Republicans as 282-253, and in the Senate as 48 Liberals, 8 Independents and 44 Republicans. He was thus faced with the reality that his mandate from the American people was largely in the realm of foreign policy.
This mandate though, he set upon following as soon as possible. He had UN Ambassador McCahill offer an olive branch to the USSR in the form of a mutual relaxation of border controls in Germany the day he took office. Similarly, he cut off aid to Chinese warlords, and made its continuation conditional to reintegrating into the Republic of China, for which aid had become conditional on attempts to negotiate with Mao's People's Republic. He offered a similar deal to the Republic of Korea, which had somewhat consolidated its hold on the peninsula, and then initiated a brutal, but indecisive, invasion of the rival Korean People's Republic.
This half-way point of conditional, smaller aid that had been reached during long debates with his cabinet, left RAJ with his hand in three civil wars at the beginning of 1949. Luckily, the most politically dangerous one was already coming to an end as he took office, and would hopefully remove the festering wound it had become in the European theater of the Cold War. The final communist leaders surrendered in Greece on March 3rd 1949, bringing an end to the last of the many wars fought in Europe during the 1940s.
Unfortunately, the Republican victory also made Stalin more insecure, and threatened to undo all of Ambassador McCahill's work with the German Border Control Agreement. Only RAJ's willingness to let McCahill acquiesce to Soviet demands for the tabling of UN Resolutions against the continued crackdowns in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The denouement in the Old World had come at the cost of abandoning Freedom and Democracy in Eastern Europe.

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2. Soviet and American delegations convene at UN headquarters in late 1949.​

Internationally, RAJ's first year was considered a success by both the press and the opinion polls, as the new administration's policy of reaching out to the USSR seemed to have worked to cool tensions, although opinion was decidedly more mixed on the compromises made for the GBCA [1]. Domestically, the focus on foreign policy and Liberal opposition to proposed legislation had created an uneventful year, but one in which the president's seeming lack of action saw 78% of Americans approving of his “handling”of the economy, which grew by 4.8%.
This silence would end in 1950, as the relative silence on the international front allowed RAJ to truly push his domestic agenda. He began with something uncontroversial in the form of the Educational Assistance Act. The simple bill, which would set in place a system of government vouchers and government-sponsored grants for poorer students, sailed through congress and allowed RAJ a buffer with which to deflect criticism from Progressive sources when he began his deregulatory push in the spring of 1950.
The ensuing battle between the executive and the Liberal majority in Congress was intense enough to be called by one newspaper as “more brutal entertainment than the Heavyweight Championship.” The final result was the Industrial Regulations Act of 1950, which ended subsidies to numerous large companies and slightly cut down restrictions on inter-company dealings [2]. The President called it “the biggest pile of nothing I ever fought for.”
The Liberal Party considered it a victory that, according to Speaker of the House Johnson, “put the new president in his place.” They followed up this proof of their superiority in economic policy by launching three separate anti-trust cases under the Harrison Act, the first of their kind since the early 1920s. Exhausted, and with the mid-term elections coming up, RAJ put his guns down temporarily.

bfrd.jpg

3. Congressman Eugene Lovey, c. 1951.​

The mid-term elections proved to be largely inconsequential, with the balance of power shifting only slightly more in favor of the Republican Party. It's main impact was the election of Eugene Lovey as Senator for California. The most hawkish of Liberals, enough to have even the majority of the party wary of him, Lovey tapped into the side of Americans that distrusted and feared communism and its sudden rise on a deeper level. Over the next two years, he would be a constant thorn in the administration's side, spouting daily about how the President was soft on Communism, and thus national security.
That was what he would largely stay for that two years though; a thorn. As “international communism”'s advance seemed stalled in Europe and Asia, and the economy boomed, there was little need for RAJ to worry about “fringe discontent” with his foreign policy. Indeed, in the latter half of the term, he had very little to worry about as America flourished.
There was however, a bubbling undercurrent of some kind, manifested in the arts. The secured peace had brought with it a societal conformity quite unlike anything seen before. Author Paul Embry described it as follows; “the vast majority of our generation had seen unimaginable poverty, and then unimaginable violence. It was all we knew. And yet, unlike the Lost Generation that had experienced the Great War, ours decided not to contemplate the ordeal.
“Perhaps it was precisely because instability was all we knew that static, unmoving stability was the dream of most. They went and bought their white bread picket fence dream, and they were happy. But the few of us who could not summon obliviousness. Who could not find our place in that white bread picket fence dream, were left to float, even more Lost than a generation that was called so, for we were alone in our confusion.
“And in our confusion, we raged against the white bread picket fence dream that we could not see. We rejected it with all our might.” The disillusionment of a specific cohort of the Greatest Generation resulted in art like Embry's first classic novel “A Cool Silence” and Joseph Heller's “Catch .22” It also began the rise of Rock and Roll to the main stream as bands, spearheaded by Comrade Joe and the Trust Busters, took notes in the style from the African-American community.

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4. Johnny Cash during one of the Trust Busters' first recording sessions.​

This all had little to do with politics though, unlike the event that finally allowed RAJ to push on civil rights, which had been silenced as a subject for three decades. The controversy was over segregated schools in Kansas, which had gone to the Supreme Court after the NAACP had sued over the rejection of twenty African-American children to by law white-only schools. The President immediately threw his weight behind the plaintiffs.
After a brutal legal battle, which at its height had seen the President prepare an executive order banning segregated schools if the Supreme Court seemed likely to uphold them, the NAACP and the plaintiffs won. The Supreme Court unanimously declared segregation of public schools unconstitutional. The Republican Party though, experienced a crisis of sorts as they realized that, for a second time, a President Jarvis was placing their Southern power base in jeopardy.
The fundamentals however, were still in RAJ's favor as the election of 1953 approached, despite an angered Southern political establishment and seemingly increasing support for a harder line on communism like the one espouse by Eugene Lovey. The economy was still booming, and the United States still seemed secure on the international stage.

[1] – According to a TIME poll in November 1949, 48% of Americans felt that the United States could have done more for Eastern Europe, 40% were satisfied with the agreement, and the remaining 12% had no opinion either way.

[2] – Sections of the bill that had been defeated included any and all tax proposals, and the entirety of the president's financial regulations agenda.

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

Exceptional Situation(s):

I know, it seems like we're still on the tracks. But don't worry; Korea and China are still open, unlike OTL, and they, the rest of Asia, the newly independent Indian subcontinent and the Middle-East have just been using this time to build and ferment a huge pile of shit that's pretty ready to get thrown at the fan.

In other news, primary time.

Parties are: Liberal, Republican and Independent.
 
((Just realized that Sam Écossais has been attorney general for 9 years. Does he get an award for longest civil servant or something XD?))
 
The past four years have seen victories for the Liberal Party. The Industrial Regulations Act of 1950 passed due to the Liberals strong hold on Congress and the Senate. It stopped President Jarvis from getting too cocky. But, I do applaud Mr. Jarvis on his efforts in my home state of Kansas to end segregated schools, and I would support further civil rights initiatives.

On foreign policy. I never want advocate for war, but we need to be harder on communism. Supporting anti-communist rebels around the world, being tougher on the U.S.S.R, and ensure communist rebels aren't on the rise in other nations. President Jarvis has been soft on communism, we need an administration that won't let the Soviets walk all over them.

~ Christina Blancharde-Fredrick, Congresswoman
 
Mr. Jarvis, it is an honor to see you ascend the presidency. (Woops, slightly late)

Daniel (Danny) Dagher, Mayor of New York City

Descendent of Turkish/ Armenian immigrants into New York City following tensions in Asia Minor at the beginning of the 20th century. Son of the Police Commissioner of New York, and would end up rising through the ranks of the police himself to Commissioner. He earned his monicker, "Danny", from his fellow policemen of mostly Irish descent. Taking a liking to the young cop, he became an honorary Irishman (perhaps, though, his name was given slightly derisively). The name had stuck, however, and the damage was done. From commissioner, and from a superb record of keeping crime rates low in New York with unyielding policies, successfully ran for the Mayorship of New York City. At the youthful age of 31, Mr. Dagher hopes to return New York to the forefront of economic dominance in American cities, and continue to keep its cities safe.

Ideologies: Currently, follows a critical eye towards the major parties. Considers himself above politics as the Mayor of a City, which narrows his focus towards a smaller electorate. That being said, his focus shifts nationally as he looks to make a name for himself and a mark on American politics.

dr-oz-muffin-top-melt.jpg


(Yeah... Hows it going?)
 
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