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@ Duke of Awesome: Maybe yes, maybe no.
@ Soviet Amerika: Yeah, the Krauts have been stalled outside Bruges since late November 1914.
@ Undead-Hippie. These are the only real fronts, but I could do a short update on the African and Pacific fronts later.


The Inquiry Caper, Part One

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"Colonel" Edward M. House​


On January Fourteenth, Wilson met with his foreign policy adviser "Colonel" Edward M. House, a man who in many ways had a much more important role in determining American foreign policy than Secretary of State Wheeler. House and Wilson had already discussed the possibility of creating a body to study Europe in preparation for the eventual settlement of a permanent peace treaty. The meeting at the White House would crystallize this informal talk into a concrete policy. Wilson authorized House to create a commission to study Europe in preparation for the eventual peace settlement. The hope was that the settlement could be made just if it was determined by objective experts armed with reams of factual data, in many ways the Inquiry was a direct outgrowth of the Efficiency Movement and the principles of scientific management. House immediately set about gathering his team of intellectuals and other experts. As head of the project he chose the philosopher Sidney Edward Mezes.

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Sidney Edward Mezes, official head of the Inquiry​

But soon, another figure came to dominate the staffing choices, the head of research, a precocious 28 year-old Harvard graduate, Walter Lippmann. Lippmann, Menzes and House began meeting in a discreet office at 155th Street and Broadway in New York City, which would become the home of the Inquiry. In these first few meetings, the staffing of the Inquiry was decided, the members included Isiah Bowman, President of the American Geographical Society, James T. Shotwell, a lawyer well versed in international law, Archibald Cary Coolidge, historian and director of the Harvard library and Daniel Hunter Miller, another lawyer specializing in treaty law.

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Walter Lippmann, Head of Research for the Inquiry​

But this activity did not go unnoticed by the Secretary of State, Burton K. Wheeler. Wheeler was certain that House was plotting to overthrow him and have Wilson appoint him as Secretary of State in his stead. When Wheeler was informed of the Inquiry's existence, he became almost purple with rage screaming that "That sonuvabitch House is trying to screw me out of this job!" and he immediately embarked on a quest to make himself invaluable to the president and to destroy House at the same time.



So I've done some more reading about Burton Wheeler and I have some very interesting things planned out for our beloved Secretary of State. He'll be with us for a while, but maybe not in the administration.
 

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Just found this. Quite an AAR! Will certainly be following this.
 
Bad news readers, there was a mishap with today's update so for tomorrow we have a special treat, two updates! And maybe edits to earlier updates too...
 
So I've done some more reading about Burton Wheeler and I have some very interesting things planned out for our beloved Secretary of State. He'll be with us for a while, but maybe not in the administration.

I am looking forward to it.
 
Bloody Hell, Appleby. Why the heck you didn't told me about this AAR?
 
Burton Wheeler: The Road to D.C.​

Burton Wheeler was one of the most fascinating politicians of the twentieth century, but his story is also one of the most implausible. Burton Wheeler was born in Massachusetts to a reasonably prosperous family and attended Law School at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1905. But after this his story changes dramatically, he decided to take a train out west to Seattle to practice law in the rapidly growing Pacific Northwest. Wheeler stepped off a train in the town of Butte, Montana where according to Wheeler; he proceeded to lose all of his money in a poker game. Without any cash to speak of, Wheeler was forced to settle in the state which he would come to love. In 1910 Wheeler was elected to the Montana State Legislature, where he made a name for himself as a staunch defender of the working man against the monopolistic Anaconda Copper Corporation.

By 1916, Wheeler had made a name for himself in the Western States as a fiery progressive leader and as an indefatigable campaigner for Wilson. Having recently lost his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryant due to his bellicose response to the sinking of the Lusitania, Wilson needed a new cabinet member. Although he had already privately committed to American entry to the war, Wilson needed an isolationist in the Cabinet to help bolster his isolationist chops. Wheeler seemed like a perfect candidate for the post, he was staunchly isolationist, progressive, popular in the West, where Wilson thought his support was weak and he was a political non-entity who could be sidelined while he and House ran the nation’s foreign policy. But Wheeler was never consulted about this plan, and indeed he quickly became convinced that House was trying to sabotage him and get himself appointed Secretary of State. House and Wilson soon realized that as House would later state “We wanted a puppet and got a pit viper.” House (at Wilson’s urging) quickly began a campaign to isolate Wheeler from the White House. House managed to keep Wheeler in the dark about the actions of the FSRPG, more colloquially known as the “War Committee.” But Wheeler managed to learn about the existence of the Inquiry from a sympathetic White House secretary who acted as a mole for Wheeler and Wheeler resolved to create a State Department body to counter it, hoping that this would prove himself worthy to Wilson and hopefully discredit House.



@Arya: Thanks! I appreciate the compliment.
@Nathan: Hope you like this then
@Kurt_Steiner: It's in my sig and I'm so excited to have almost all of my favorite AARthours reading this. Now to get Prufrock back on the forum...
 
Thanks for all the feedback, but I just have one question, how do you link to specific posts?

Silly me, I forgot to answer this:

It's quite easy.

You click on the number of the post (to the right) and get it open in a new window. Copy the link; then go to your index and do that

1917

And you got the post indexed :D

Bit by bit

It's url= + the link + plus the title of the chapter plus /url. Don't forget the brackets or it doesn't work ;)

Any furhter question, old boy? ;)
 
@Kurty: No further questions Mi'lord!

[video=youtube;dLplQWB2S_8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLplQWB2S_8[/video]
 
The Inquiry Caper, Part 2​

On January 23rd, the Secretary of State and a few of his closest confidantes inaugurated the American Committee for Arbitration, the State Department’s secret counter to the Inquiry. The committee was much smaller, consisting of a few State Department officials who were Wheeler allies and a large number of young research assistants who pored through resources from the Library of Congress and the State Department’s Archives to assemble data on Europe and the Middle East to provide factual basis for the settlement. Wheeler assumed that Wilson wanted to replicate the feats of his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt who had negotiated peace in the Russo-Japanese war acting as an impartial mediator between the powers. The committee was therefore focused on producing solutions which might be acceptable to all powers and, as it did not work under the assumption of American intervention, the peace attempted to be as evenhanded as possible. One of the young research aides on the project the twenty-one year old, Clarence Manion, a Notre Dame graduate, produced a report on the Austro-Hungarian Empire which recommended that the Empire be encouraged to move towards a more federalized system, with more autonomy given to Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia and Bohemia. According to Manion and the other collaborators on the project, this devolution of powers was necessary for the survival of the Dual Monarchy, which Manion saw as the only way to maintain peace in Central Europe. This report was the only one delivered before Wilson’s Declaration of War and the Crisis but it would prove to be influential only a few years later. Still the creation of the Committee for Arbitration helped to bring together a conclave of anti-Interventionist intellectuals and helped to crystallize what would come to be called the Wheeler school of international relations, which saw the United States as the impartial mediator in world affairs, non-interventionist and deciding the problems of international relations based on republican virtues and moral law. House and Wilson's interventionism had a formidable enemy, albeit an embryonic one and American foreign policy would never be the same.
 
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I'm afraid that Austria is beyond any hope by that stage of the war.
 
Finally got some time to sit down and read this AAR; looks great!
 
Finally got some time to sit down and read this AAR; looks great!

Thanks, it's a little text heavy, which means that lots of people like myself won't read it, but I hope that some people enjoy.
 
The Secretary of State...a somewhat useless job in my writing experience. Then again, I never made Wheeler one. :laugh:

Thanks, it's a little text heavy, which means that lots of people like myself won't read it, but I hope that some people enjoy.

I think your writing style is quite good. A hearty chunk of information in a bite size.
 
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The Secretary of State...a somewhat useless job in my writing experience. Then again, I never made Wheeler one. :laugh:

Oh believe me, this job will get interesting.

Speaking of which, can somebody help me with some events?
 
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The Russian Revolution​


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David Rowland Francis, American Ambassador in St. Petersberg​

At about 10pm on the evening of January 24th, 1917 a single Packard car sped up Pennsylvania Avenue, coming directly from Foggy Bottom. Inside the car sat the Secretary of State Burton K. Wheeler, Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips and a young twenty-one year old research aide, Clarence Manion. They carried grim news, a few minutes earlier; a long telegram had arrived from the American Ambassador in Petrograd, David Rowland Francis. The cable detailed the most momentous political development of the year and possibly of the century, the rise of the Soviet Union. In the early morning hours of the twenty-fourth, cadres of die-hard Bolshevik partisans took over the major government buildings in Petrograd. In one of the more comedic episodes of the day, a group of illiterate peasants broke into the Winter Palace and got lost in its cavernous interior, they eventually found a few members of Kerensky’s Provisional Government sitting around the former Tsar and Tsarina’s breakfast table, the poorly educated mob forced these hapless politicos to write their own arrest warrants. By the end of the day, Vladimir Illyich Lenin and his Bolsheviks had taken control of the apparatus of state and established the world’s first officially communist state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.


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William Phillips, Assistant Secretary of State

The car pulled up at the White House, where a recently awakened Wilson sat in the Oval Office looking disconsolate. Wheeler and Phillips entered the office, carrying Francis’s telegram as well as a few select papers which Manion had gathered; these included a report on subversive elements in Russia compiled by Embassy Staff and a memorandum about the return of Vladimir Lenin to Russia via sealed train to Finland Station in St. Petersburg. Wilson visibly paled when Wheeler informed him of the fall of the Provisional Government to Communists, especially since he knew that it would mean for the stability of every other government in the Western world. The specter of socialist revolution had haunted every government in the industrialized world since the previous century, but now a real socialist revolution had occurred, as Phillips would later write “…there was an inescapable sense that some vicious and much feared beast had finally escaped its cage and that things would never truly be the same again. There was a moment of silence and then Wheeler sighed and said ‘We’re in a new world Mr. President and we’ve got to think in a new way, whether we like it or not.’ “

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Vladimir Illyich Lenin, now the leader of Russia​

Worse than the specter of an impending workers revolt was the very real intelligence which Wheeler gave the president, Lenin was committed to making peace at any price, thereby depriving the Entente of their massive Russian front and allowing a concentrated German attack on the Western Front. Remembering House’s assessment that the Russian Front was probably the only thing keeping the French from enduring total collapse, Wilson realized that American entry into the war would need to occur as soon as possible. Though Wheeler, still unaware of Wilson’s plans to bring the United States into the conflict, thought that this added pressure would force both sides into a face-saving, American mediated peace agreement. As Wheeler left the meeting he turned to Manion and ordered him to call a full meeting of the Committee for Arbitration for the twenty-sixth so that they could discuss how to deal with the massive red elephant which had suddenly barged into the room. Meanwhile, Wilson telephoned House, and told him flatly that “The Russians [were] out.” House recalled sitting bolt upright at the news and promising to meet Wilson first thing the next morning to discuss their new strategy. As he wrote in his memoirs, “Although the collapse of Russian resistance was not shocking, the realization that a true Communist state now existed was both electrifying and terrifying. The landscape had shifted beneath our feet and we faced a new and alien regime, motives, members and power all but unknown and somehow we had to deal with them."
 
Now the United States have something to take care of... :p
 
The Russian Civil War: Backlash​


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The Three Chiefs of the Volunteers' Movement (left to right), Yudenich, Wrangel and Denikin.​

The day after the Bolsheviks seized power, General Anton Denikin declared the foundation of the “Volunteers’ Army” a group of anticommunist generals committed to destroying the Bolshevik regime. Along with Denikin in Rostov-on-Don, the Volunteers’ Movement was joined by Nikolai Yudenich in Gdov and Pytor Wrangel in Odessa. The Volunteers’ Army was in no way a unified movement, the supporters came from every end of the political spectrum, monarchists, pro-democrats, anti-Bolsheviks, Cossack and Ukrainian Nationalists, many of the generals were in conflict with each other, both due to political differences and personality conflicts. The only unifying factor holding these volatile Generals together was their shared hatred of the Bolsheviks.

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Russia, January 30th, 1917.​

Six days later, A member of the American Embassy Staff in Romania, Charles LeRoulle* one of the first full time spies employed by the United States in Eastern Europe, also known as “Bon Temps Charlie” or “Good Times Charlie” a member of a very old Cajun family and heir to a substantial fortune made from sugar speculation in New Orleans. LeRoulle met personally with Anton Denikin, the man who had placed himself in overall command of the Volunteers’ Army. Denikin was celebrated general in the Tsar’s army and although he led what was ostensibly a monarchist coalition he rejected proposals from some that Grand Duke Nikolai be placed in charge. Denikin’s politics might be best described as center-right, with a viciously anti-Semitic streak. LeRoulle had received a communique from his handlers in Washington at the orders of House and Wilson; he was to arrange material aid and possible American volunteer support. The meeting with Denikin went swimmingly; in exchange for American ammunition, rations, uniforms and weapons which LeRoulle promised would arrive shortly, Denikin agreed to slightly liberalize the business environment of Russia in order for American companies to better compete after the war. But LeRoulle was not content with his new post “Minister Plenipotentiary to the Provisional Government of the Kingdom of Russia”, he had big plans and was going to act on them.
 

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