Did you mean to write House in the title rather than Hosue?
I do believe the more things change ...
I do believe the more things change ...
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Hey @volksmarschall, I have a question: when you started using terms like "elites", "heartlands", and "populism", why did I think, "I don't care what happens to these people"?
I've used the term "elites" since the first formal post of the AAR going back to explanation of the origins of American factionalism; and have constantly used that term in describing the dialectic of American politics which is simply the visible case when you study and know American history -- I've even published an academic article (rooted in my undergraduate American history studies) on Jefferson and Hamilton and the antagonism of their vision for the country and the dialectical politics enshrined into America's fabric ever since (though it goes further back as I've indicated with the Puritans and Cavaliers).
Of course, being a native from Ohio, who just completed an M.A. at Yale, I know from first hand experience the eastern vitriol to those in the "heartlands." Perhaps it speaks volumes about yourself that you have such a reaction to those terms?
Perhaps... then again, I lived in Florida for most of my life. And I would’ve never had such a visceral reaction until two or three years ago. Signs of the times, I guess?I've used the term "elites" since the first formal post of the AAR going back to explanation of the origins of American factionalism; and have constantly used that term in describing the dialectic of American politics which is simply the visible case when you study and know American history -- I've even published an academic article (rooted in my undergraduate American history studies) on Jefferson and Hamilton and the antagonism of their vision for the country and the dialectical politics enshrined into America's fabric ever since (though it goes further back as I've indicated with the Puritans and Cavaliers).
Of course, being a native from Ohio, who just completed an M.A. at Yale, I know from first hand experience the eastern vitriol to those in the "heartlands." Perhaps it speaks volumes about yourself that you have such a reaction to those terms?
Probably. The point of this AAR is to highlight the factional divisions that are well-attested to in American history, as well as the long history of the various nationalisms that have underscored America's understanding of itself. The language isn't particularly new either. Many 1800s papers used much harsher language than even the radio commentators and talking heads on Fox News or MSNBC use. Perhaps it went unnoticed if you've been reading since the beginning when I started this right after the 2016 election, and has become more pronounced as I'm detailing the long history of abuses to the labor, farming, and working-class movements that historically dominated "Flyover Country" in American history? A history that few Americans know much about.
I do hope you'll enjoying the AAR!
I know that, and I respect it. I’m a history student myself. There’s just something about those terms that just screams of things like the Southern Big Mules using those defenses to cover their own hides. Either that, or I half-expect it all to be followed by, “turning the frogs gay!”Probably. The point of this AAR is to highlight the factional divisions that are well-attested to in American history, as well as the long history of the various nationalisms that have underscored America's understanding of itself. The language isn't particularly new either. Many 1800s papers used much harsher language than even the radio commentators and talking heads on Fox News or MSNBC use. Perhaps it went unnoticed if you've been reading since the beginning when I started this right after the 2016 election, and has become more pronounced as I'm detailing the long history of abuses to the labor, farming, and working-class movements that historically dominated "Flyover Country" in American history? A history that few Americans know much about.
I do hope you'll enjoying the AAR!
CHAPTER XIII: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LABOR
The Labor Blues
The Labor Blues
If 1877 was marred by violence and the Great Railroad Strikes, the suppression of the workers’ movement by political authorities in the Democratic and Republican parties alike, and the continued assault on the rural way of life only furthered divisions and animosity from the interior parts of the country to the coastal imperium. The hope of some heartland Democrats and Republicans to build upon the frustrations and aspirations of the farmer and laboring classes west of the Appalachian Mounts were all but destroyed due to the parties’ hardline stances against the workers’ and farmers’ strikes. Democrats who had run on platforms advocating on behalf of the farmer and laborer who suddenly found themselves pressured to deploying state militias and police forces to quell the disruptive strikes.
The perceived betrayal by the established parties in the 1870s led to the spectacular rise of the Greenback Party. In the coming 1878 Congressional election, the Greenbacks secured 13 seats in the House of the Representatives, 10 of them from Midwestern and Southern states; two being from Iowa and two being from the Appalachian regions of Pennsylvania being the largest representative bases. But the rise of the Greenbacks was not so much a thunderous cannon shot at the walls of moneyed elites from New England as it was a cry of desperation from a dispossessed and downtrodden people at the hands of the structural forces and powers that be.
It is difficult to characterize the populists, bimetallists, and reformists of the 1870s-1890s as “leftwing.” As Richard Hofstadter has said, and as I’ve stated, the populists embodied “provincial resentments, popular and democratic rebelliousness and suspiciousness, and nativism.” By the historical standard, if met with today’s anti-intellectual political dichotomy, the populists who arose in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and described by the historian Lawrence Goodwyn as the “largest democratic mass movement in American history,”[1] would like now be regarded as right-wing nativist. The “socialist” and labor tendencies of their economic vision was protectionist and anti-capitalist to be sure, but any student of political philosophy knows that capitalism has nothing to do with authentic brands of conservatism. The capitalism of the financiers was the logical consequence of America’s love of the modern philosophers: Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill. After all, the great progressive philosopher John Dewey called Francis Bacon – who argued that commerce, industry, and science had to be liberated and utilized to conquer nature – “the greatest philosopher.”[2]
An 1880s cartoon depicting anti-Chinese sentiment among the populists. Despite being labelled leftwing and democratic-socialist by many late 20th and early 21st century writers, American populism in the late 1800s was marred by deep xenophobia and nativism. Irish, Chinese, and Africans were all targets of populist rage alongside capitalists, industrialists, and “Yankees.”
The populists of the 1880s who formed in more cohesive organizations after the militant reactions by the state to the labor strikes of 1877 were ordinary people: farmers, craftsmen, laborers, and shop owners who saw their world transformed by the push to create the Transcontinental Railroad and the transformation of population centers, like Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Chicago, as well as St. Louis, into sprawling urban, industrialized, and corporate metropolises. The very landscape of the American Middle West was transformed literally overnight – or in the course of a few short years.
The battle raging in the center of the new American republic was nothing short of the battle between Jefferson and Jackson and Hamilton. As mentioned earlier, Jefferson envisioned the American Northwest Territories, which became the American Midwest, as the beacon of America’s democratic future. Jackson nationalized Jefferson’s dream, creating the populist nationalist tradition that long dominated the Democratic Party into the twentieth century. The lands formerly explored by Lewis and Clark were the pristine lands of Eden. Untouched by the sinful fires of industry and capital. Unexploited by usury and financiers. The land would be the basis of the communitarian and collective townships that Tocqueville saw as the true heart of American democracy. But Tocqueville also saw the millenarian religious fervor of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democratic tradition, writing in his preface to his famous work that it “has been written under the pressure of a kind of religious terror exercised upon the soul of the author by the sight of this irresistible revolution.”[3] Tocqueville’s timeless work on American democracy is not the analysis of American exceptionalism that contemporary “conservatives” who have never read the work make it out to be. Thus, the revolutionary and eschatological vision of American democratic zeal, most fervently ingrained in the American Middle West, is not easily describable as conservative despite the resistance to social and economic change that clearly animated much of the populist movement.
Jefferson had seen the interior of the North American continent as the repository of agrarian and ordinary virtue. Deep inside the heart of the ordinary American was the revolutionary desire for democratic zeal: liberty and equality as Tocqueville saw. This desire was not exceptionally American; Jefferson figured that all persons desired to be liberated into democracy. The point of Jeffersonian exceptionalism was that America would lead the world in its movement to democracy, freedom, and equality by example. Jefferson was, in his own unique way, the inheritor of the Puritan ideal of the City on the Hill – a nation of becoming.
Hamilton’s vision of America was that it would become the engine of Bacon’s dream, the consummation of Locke’s ideal commonwealth—the place where industry, commerce, capital and science would be liberated from the constrictions of old customs and ancient agrarian institutions and idealism where men would be able to pursue their self-interest and achieve the wealth due to each based on merit. The untapped resources of the American heartlands would prove indispensable for this project. Hamilton harbored a deep mistrust of the so-called “wisdom of the people.” Likewise, Hamilton saw the ancient agrarian ideals of Jefferson as the greatest barrier that would prevent America from being the nation of the future. Like Jefferson, Hamilton envisioned an America of perpetual becoming; a nation serving as the example to the world of what the world could be. But the world, and American nation, envisioned by the competing visions of Jefferson and Hamilton were two starkly different worlds.
One was agrarian, rural, communitarian, and virtuous. The other was urbanized, industrialized, individualist, and materially focused. One was democratic in the fullest extent of the word: the rule of the (ordinary) people—the hoi polloi. The other was managerial, technocratic, and scientific: the rule of the elites, educated, and meritorious.
Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s (d. 1817) portrait of Thomas Jefferson as the American Cicero. Thomas Jefferson was an international rock star among European radicals and nationalists. French and Polish revolutionaries were particularly fond of Jefferson, and Jefferson acknowledged that if he had to live anywhere besides the United States he would live in France. Jefferson remained an international hero among European revolutionaries and the preeminent Founding Father of the American populists. When Jefferson refused to condemn the Jacobin Terror in France, the partisans of Hamilton in the Federalist Party labelled Jefferson a Jacobin during the 1800 election.
If one of the side effects of the Civil War was the opening up of the South and West to capitalist industrialization and development, then it should not be surprising that the Democrats who controlled many of these places reacted apoplectically to the intrusion of Yankee, Republican, and “sinful” financiers and robber barons into these formerly walled off lands. What the lack of technology had prevented in the past—namely industrial expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains and natural waterways of the American republic—was now overcome with the Industrial Revolution hitting America. And what partisan politics had fought over since westward expansion—the vision of the interior of the country as the bastion of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian agrarian democracy or the mine of America’s future grandeur –was now in disarray given the reaction of the political establishment to the workers’ strikes of 1877.
A combination of Republican Party promotion of industrialization and crushing of the labor strikes in states like Pennsylvania and Illinois shattered the illusions of the populists that the Republicans would be on their side. But the timid reactions of Democrats was also a cause of heartbreak. In southern states the Democrats actively put down troublesome strikers, alienated the more radical elements to align with the Greenback Party and eventually form the Populist Party in 1891.
[1] Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, p. vii.
[2] Actual quote from Dewey.
[3] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 15 (Penguin Classics edition).
SUGGESTED READING:
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America
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Damn, steam washer's got legs man!
It's nice to see US labour struggles get its due. I'm not American and I'm not overly familiar with the subject matter, but I feel like it's something that gets swept under the rug. Of course now I'm going to believe what happens in this timeline happened IRL... it's all too convincing!
It's nice to see US labour struggles get its due. I'm not American and I'm not overly familiar with the subject matter, but I feel like it's something that gets swept under the rug. Of course now I'm going to believe what happens in this timeline happened IRL... it's all too convincing!
Mmm, in this timeline is a major re-alignment about to happen? The Democratic Party especially right now comes across as very enervated.
The history courses I took in college were all US history courses, and this time period was never so well explained. I knew some of the individual issues at hand in what's soon to come here, but the overall feelings of abuse that must have been felt were never expounded. Which is a shame, because being in a small agricultural town in central California, we all felt those same feelings in regards to the big cities of the state! In fact, the dialectic you're laying out is reflected in many events of recent years in my hometown!
So, uh, good job. I feel like I'm absorbing some political philosophy and history and it's making everything make sense.
So, uh, good job. I feel like I'm absorbing some political philosophy and history and it's making everything make sense.
And eyes and fancy face too.Damn, steam washer's got legs man!
Damn, steam washer's got legs man!
It's nice to see US labour struggles get its due. I'm not American and I'm not overly familiar with the subject matter, but I feel like it's something that gets swept under the rug. Of course now I'm going to believe what happens in this timeline happened IRL... it's all too convincing!
And eyes and fancy face too.
One of the best things about late 19th century American culture and politics are the political cartoons! We'll be seeing a lot more of them as we move on.
As for the labor history of the U.S., yes, a pity it is so quickly glossed though a many great number of scholarly tomes have been written on the subject -- a number I provide in the suggested reading portion at the end of a number of my posts. Much of the writing here is historical insofar as the content being utilized -- just often fitted to new timelines and some new developments in game!
The Great Strikes of 1877 was a real thing though - I didn't deviate and since I'm building RRs all over the country why not just keep it pretty closely tied to OTL? We'll soon find out. I have promised a William Jennings Bryan victory! Neither the Republicans, nor the Gold-Standard only Democrats, shall crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!
It wouldn't be a volksmarschall AAR if this wasn't the case would it?
Though trained a historian and having a peer-reviewed article on U.S. History, History as an "intellectual" subject is undoubtedly the least intellectual. Philosophy is king since philosophy is the fundamental study of all facets of reality. Philosophy of History -- history as just knowledge of names, dates, events is dry and meaningless. Being able to understand what goes on is more important. When people wonder why things have unfolded the way they do, perhaps they need to dive deeper than they're often willing to or the consumerist news establishment permits.
MR. VOLKSMARSCHALL!!!! I presume that you haven't completely forgotten our grand General President, Sherman, and I trust that you'll somehow manage to seamlessly integrate him in your dissertations(or posts).
P.S. In the event that you actually start up another Victoria 2 AAR, beware the Pumicestone......
(In case you haven't figured it out, look up the History Forums for A Discussion on the Legacy of the Opium Wars.)
P.S. In the event that you actually start up another Victoria 2 AAR, beware the Pumicestone......
(In case you haven't figured it out, look up the History Forums for A Discussion on the Legacy of the Opium Wars.)
CHAPTER XIII: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF LABOR
Labor Nativism and the Revival and Demise of the Know Nothings
Labor Nativism and the Revival and Demise of the Know Nothings
The 1880s, which saw a swell in anti-Chinese sentiment, especially in Western states like California, Oregon, and Nevada, wrapped together a unique blend of American labor nationalism; it was also the beginning of the end of the radicalism of the labor movements of the 1870s which responded to the Long Depression and the monopolization of economic life by the railroad companies that culminated in the Great Strikes of 1877.
The American “Know Nothing” Party, which had its deal with the devil – the Republicans – in 1860 to ensure a united front during the Civil War, was all but expunged following the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction.[1] Nativism has always been characteristic of the Republican Party, along with elements of the Democratic Party (though Democrats, in wanting to break the power of the Republican Party, became tolerant of Catholic immigrants especially, and most especially in the north and Midwest). As such, many of the nativists in the American Party slowly folded into the Republican Party overtime.
However, the labor radicalism and general opposition to big city capitalism and industrialism, along with increased waves of Chinese immigration in the west, and a new wave of Eastern European and Southern European (Slavic, e.g. Polish, Slovak, and Croatian, and Italian) Catholics that swamped into New England led to nativist revivals. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants once again felt threatened by the “Papist Scourge” in New England about to overwhelm the Puritan ideal of the non-conformist shining city on the hill, and many other Protestants in the west of Yankee lineage felt threatened by the “Mongrelization” of their homesteads and cities by the Chinese.
An anti-Catholic cartoon by American cartoonist Thomas Nast, "The Promised Land as Seen from the Dome of Saint Peter's Rome." Nast is considered the godfather of the American cartoon, and the political cartoon especially. An anti-Catholic German émigré to the United States, Nast had a storied career as an editorialist and cartoonist with close ties to the Republican Party promoting nativist Protestant sentiment despite himself being an immigrant. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., has said anti-Catholicism is “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” and the more recent historian Philip Jenkins has described anti-Catholicism, even to this day, as the “last acceptable prejudice” in the United States.
At the same time the labor movements, which had been crushed by federal and private power in the 1870s, were making some effort at rapprochement with the established powers. While the more radical labor movements remained obstinate, many of the now mainstream labor organizations—like the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor—began to make peace with the Devil like Faust had done in Goethe’s greatest of poems. The labor unions which had their spectacular rise in the 1870s met a grizzly and sad demise in the 1880s and 1890s as they were neutered and divided over immigration. Western labor radicals who began accepting the changes of industrialization saw the Chinese as tools of the capitalists to take away jobs for American workers and to keep wages low. Catholics in the east, who strongly supposed the labor movements, found support from many of the Catholic bishops and the church leadership in Rome. The association of the labor movements with Catholicism was a cause of concern for many American Protestants who saw the labor movements as the corrupt and anti-American long arm of the Roman Pope.[2]
The Republicans used the Catholic labor issue to finally destroy the power of the American Power in New England. The Know Nothings had surged to a miniature revival in the 1884 Congressional election to elect 16 members of Congress, including 12 from New England and New York—mostly rural districts. Republicans in New England embraced nativism openly; campaigning that Catholics not only threatened the cultural and national fabric of the American experiment, but that they also threatened American economic development. The anti-Catholic sentiment in New England opened new rounds of violence and church destruction. But by 1886, the Know Nothings were pinned between its pro-labor anti-Chinese wing in California, Oregon, and Nevada, and its labor neutral anti-Catholic wing in the east. The Republicans sandwiched New England nativists associated with the Know Nothings that since the Know Nothings were pro-labor (in the west) this meant that they were not truly nativist and anti-Catholic enough as their association with the labor unions on the west coast would be the conduit of Catholic infiltration. After the 1886 elections only two Know Nothings survived the collapse of the party in New England, one in upstate New York and another in rural Massachusetts, before the two remaining members joined the Republicans for the 1888 election. The American Party was all but broken in the north; while candidates and chapters still ran and met, the party had lost all political capital north of New York City.
Westcoast nativism was a different matter altogether. Pro-labor sentiment in the West against the railroads ensured Democratic victories in California, Oregon, and Nevada in the early 1880s, but Chinese immigration broke the back of the Democratic Party as the Know Nothings mobilized and seized the labor and anti-Chinese issue away from the Democrats who balked on the China question, which also opened up the door for the Republicans as well to jump on the anti-Chinese bandwagon and wage its own internal civil war over its pro-labor and pro-agrarian wing against its pro-industrialization wing. As the Republicans became more the party of industrialization the farmers and laborite Republicans opted to throw in their lot with the Know Nothings. But the Know Nothings were quickly vanquished by the Republicans in the west on account of that labor rapprochement with capitalism.
Labor radicalism was tamed when it was redirected purely on anti-immigrant sentiment. Rather than having the labor unions threaten economic industrialization and industrialization, the labor leaders were pinched into seeing economic industrialization as something worthwhile and good—but immigrants became the problem to the labor movement as they threatened to take away jobs for union members and depress labor wages by exploiting cheap labor. Which is what the industrialists did.
An anti-Chinese cartoon depicting Uncle Sam, the personification of the U.S. Government, kicking out Chinese immigrants. A combination of economic and political power was brought together to stoke anti-Chinese sentiment and limit Chines immigration to the United States to keep the United States “not dirty” of foreign influence. The idea of America as a nation of immigrants was not popularized until the 1960s with John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign.
Labor power was broken twofold in the 1880s and 1890s which would leave bimetallism as the prevailing issue of the populist cause which William Jennings Bryan embraced wholeheartedly. In seeing immigrants as a source of economic drainage for American union members, that dynamic implied that economic industrialization and capitalization was something that could be accepted provided that the jobs of economic industrialization were left to the national labor market with the demands of labor unions occasionally met. The anti-industrialization and anti-capitalist sentiment of the 1870s was quickly subdued by the late 1880s as a result. The other manner by which the power of the labor unions was broken was by the influx of cheap labor in the form of immigrants to the United States. Industrialists bypassed the labor unions where they could and simply hired immigrants to do railroad construction and factory work for pennies compared to labor union demands. Further isolated as a result the labor unions were forced to the bargaining table with the capitalists rather than the capitalists forced to the bargaining table with the labor leaders.
This never took away the fact that American laborites remained suspicious to immigrants. They always did. But now it was kept in check. For the survival of the labor unions they had to accept capitalist demands and not the other way around. This is the great lie when labor activists praise the labor movements in America. It was not that labor agitation and radicalism forced the hands of the capitalist class. Rather, it was the divide and conquer strategy of the capitalists and labor’s desperate gamble of siding with anti-immigration sentiment that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act that ultimately did the labor unions in. The rapprochement between labor and capital in America as the labor unions coming to the tables and the capitalists accepting the subjugation of the labor unions which led to the New Deal dispensation and the troika of big government, big labor, and big business becoming the managerial template of American liberalism from the 1930s-1970s.
The labor unions may have now been tamed but the anti-immigrant sentiment of the supporters of labor—the ordinary person—had not. As the Marxist turned Anarchist-Libertarian theorist Murray Bookchin said, the end of the classical workers’ movement was because it was never had revolutionary potential that Marx had claimed. The function of the labor unions was adaption into the capitalist work ethic and hierarchy. The workers, Bookchin said, were fundamentally conservative because they cared about their well-being, their work, and their livelihood and nothing else.
[1] Historically, the Know Nothing Party dissolved after 1860. In this timeline the Know Nothings reached a de-facto unionist agreement with the Republicans to win the war, safeguarding the few New England districts that had not seen Know Nothing representatives switch to the Republican Party. This was last detailed in Chapter VIII. Historically many northern nativists in the American Party did join up with the Republican Party which kept nativism checked because of the need of Irish and German immigrants to help with the war effort during the Civil War.
[2] This was historically the case in our timeline as well. Many American anti-labor activists promoted the view that since the labor unions were dominated by Irish and German Catholics, and that Catholic clergy (especially American bishops) were supportive of the labor movements, the labor unions were a tool of encroaching Catholic tyranny. The Protestant-Catholic divide over labor essentially caused the Democrats (welcoming of Catholic voters to break the power of the Republicans) to become associated with the labor movements in the American North and thus also associated with foreign Catholicism while true-blooded American Protestants and anti-labor economism (and thus capitalism) firmly entrenched itself in the Republican Party. Democrats in the South remained Protestant as Catholic immigration was largely a Northern and Midwestern issue.
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You know, back in May of 2016, I had an essay published in Salon explaining, contrary to the #NeverTrumpers, why Trump wasn't a rejection of the Republican Party, but the fruition of its historical and still present base.
To that end I saw Trump coming a mile away. Not in the least since I'm also from Ohio where, as this AAR has sometimes alluded to in other ways, many of the Midwest Dems are not your ANTIFA or Hollywood Dems - and so it was not surprising that many either didn't care for Hillary or broke for Trump. The 1870s is a monumental moment in establishing our current political dynamics. Hopefully that is becoming clearer as well.
Do you have the links to your articles? I would read them because I want to know your reasoning more deeply and the subject you expounded upon.
IMAGE INTERLUDE
FIGURE 1: A political poster advocating for Thomas E. Watson, Populist Party candidate for President in 1904. Watson, a populist Democrat from Georgia, was also an early advocate of African-American (re)enfranchisement as part of his populist political philosophy. The underclasses, irrespective of their race, had to unite against the capitalist overlords. It was also a regional, as much as it was economic, struggle. Watson served as Vice President of the United States under William Jennings Bryan from 1897-1905, then ran on the Populist Party ticket in 1904 when pro-Gold and pro-Bryan (silver) Democrats broke apart after the unity of the two parties behind Bryan.
FIGURE 2: “The Yellow Terror in all his glory.” The Qing Empire fell into civil war in the late 1890s and Western European powers intervened in what was known as the Boxer Wars. The United States remained neutral owing to President Bryan’s anti-imperialist isolationism.
FIGURE 3: A Puck cartoon depicting William Jennings Bryan as the Paul Revere of the bimetallist movement. Lampooning figures whom one disagreed by depicting them as caricatures of the Founding Fathers was actually a very common practice in late nineteenth century America.
FIGURE 4: “Survival of the Fittest,” also a Puck cartoon, depicting the struggle between Gold (Aeneas) and Silver (Turnus). Classical literary and cultural references to Greece and Rome, as well as biblical overtures and references, were commonplace in American literary and cartoon circles. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were deep readers of Roman history and literature and frequently corresponded with one another discussing Roman history. Cicero was among their favorite historical figures.
FIGURE 5: An anti-populist cartoon depicting the populist cause with witch craft, and the boiling pot being fueled by sectionalism and resentment, among other things. Populism was derided by the political and literary establishment despite overwhelming support for the populist platform west of the Appalachian Mountains and south of the Mason Dixon Line.
FIGURE 6: “The Rhodes Colossus.” The Scramble for Africa from the 1870s-1890s was the height of the new imperialism. America engaged in the colonization of central West Africa during these decades and came into armed conflict with France as a result. Despite the tensions and fighting that resulted from the Franco-American West African War, U.S.-French relations were cemented by the turn of the 20th century.
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So! Good ol' Uncle Sam here decided he wanted to liberate his fellow slaves and expand Liberia to expand FREEEDOM!(Also, some of our fellow 'Americans' here need to pay up their taxes and goods)P.S. Why did William Bryan here decided to not intervene in the Boxer Uprising? Is it because it is home to those innumerable job-stealing Orients?
Subbed.
A very excellent AAR that I'm am enjoying tremendously! Keep up the excellent work.
A very excellent AAR that I'm am enjoying tremendously! Keep up the excellent work.