....Ah Lodge.
Wants a legacy so badly he power hungry for it.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Wants a legacy so badly he power hungry for it.
Our alt-March to the Sea is less about bringing troops ashore at Savannah and more about Black Jack simply burning Georgia to the ground.Unless the Germans are *very* picky in their annexations from Austria Hungary, I don't think the Danes would be the largest non-German speaking ethnicity if they were annexed.
That's something where the CSA reading the USA's mail would actually make a difference. If the CSA knew that there was a plan to render Savannah unusable on a specific date 6 weeks in advance, they *might* be able to do more damage. I'm not sure what resources that the CSA have that would help with preventing surprise attacks on ports, submarines may be able to help, but I'm not sure that aviation has reached that point. If a "make a harbor unusable" effort costs the USN one capital ship per attack, then they might find the strategy unusuable. Though it sort of puts a damper on a march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah if Savannah has been rendered so unusable that the Union troops can not get supplies there.
Le Affair Ballinger is coming up pretty soon, though we’ll keep the international focus again here for a while now that Long Branch was covered
And good catch… that’s all I’ll say.
We need somebody we love to hate in the US, after all
True.
Who is alive of the former Presidents and Vice Presidents at the moment?
not including Hughes, we have Hearst, Foraker and Hill, bit who else?
Hill is dead (passed away 1910). So only Foraker and Hearst are still around of the ex-Prez gang, and I believe Foraker goes in ‘17
For the Veeps, Frank Black (Foraker’s VP 1901-05) is dead too, so there are no living former Vice Presidents since Tom Johnson died in office
Good q.
Every former President, including Thomas Goode Jones, is gone. Only living former Veep is John Hoge Tyler (Jones’ VP)
Not a lot of elder statesmen, but that’s what happens when your whole political class was aging WoS vets…
How are both sides’ ex-presidents contributing to the war effort (if at all)?
I had some idea that Hearst was doing war bonds stuff, but Foraker is probably too old and infirm to do much more than make occasional appearances for stuff around Cincy
Ha! Im the opposite! I just found Bicentennial Man after following here!
Hmm. So, Sweden-Norway is going to be hit hard by Dutch Disease from the Norwegian Sea oil profits, as you've stated before, and appears like they will generally be a bit more conservative or even authoritarian than in OTL.
However, hints seem to indicate that Denmark is going to get hit hard by the CEW, and possibly be in a much worse position than OTL as well. I've never seen a timeline that screws, or intends to screw, all of Scandinavia, there's usually at least one of the three that do well for themselves. Keen to see where you go with this, but hoping at least one has a happy ending!
However, hints seem to indicate that Denmark is going to get hit hard by the CEW, and possibly be in a much worse position than OTL as well. I've never seen a timeline that screws, or intends to screw, all of Scandinavia, there's usually at least one of the three that do well for themselves. Keen to see where you go with this, but hoping at least one has a happy ending!
Saddest part is that this plan is far from Lodge's worst idea, both ITTL and ours.
To be fair, this idea is what should happen justice-wise to the Confederacy, even if it is a terrible idea from a strategic standpoint. But Lodge is certainly a fellow who likes to grandstand.
I am thinking the US would give the various freeman groups access to seized Confederate weapons or US Army surplus and basically point them towards the enemy.
I've been following this timeline for months now, and it's so well written and fascinating! I can't help but think that with the extremely prejudiced views of some of the Long Branch attendees, they wouldn't extract further territorial concessions from the Confederacy. At minimum, the annexation of:
Just articulating some thoughts after the last several updates!
- Kentucky
- NoVa (perhaps between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, as a buffer for DC and Maryland) and Virginia's portion of the Delmarva Peninsula
- Tennessee (either portions or the entirety to deprive the Confederacy of resources/industrial capacity)
- Indian Territory
- Texas (this could look like annexing western Texas and puppetizing the rest of the state, or annexing the entire state and dividing it into several territories)
- Arizona Territory
- Key West
Just articulating some thoughts after the last several updates!
The way that the last few updates implied, the whole state will be peeled off from the Confederacy as an independent state
somehow this tl has managed to produce a henry cabot lodge sr W, this needs to be moved to the asb forum
Ohhh yes!! I'm excited because I used this as exact PoD for one of my own TLs. I'm very interested to see how this plays out in comparison to OTL's affair, and what consequences it has.
Remind me what position Ballinger has in SdM? And will Mr Pinchot and Mr Glavis be involved ITTL's affair? If I'm remembering correctly, while some of the duo's concerns were valid, a lot of the attacks on Ballinger were determined by contemporary reports (by Secretary Ickes) to be entirely spite driven and not based in fact. Ballinger was pretty much innocent and Pinchot was seeking publicity as the egotisical man he was.
Long term Denmark will be fine, just not anywhere near OTL's definition of fine. Can't believe I as a Swede am allowing that to happen but, hey, it's certainly the most realistic path. Copenhagen's participation in the CEW will be measured in a very short increment of time, let's leave it at that.
The thing with Scandinavia is that its development as the cuddly friendly "Nordic model" market capitalist society it enjoys today was extraordinarily fluky and based on a set of circumstances hyper-specific to OTL. My rules with butterflies are weak when it comes to people, because I don't just want to write "fictional people experiencing history" (if I wanted to do that I'd just have stuck to my novels), but with nation-states I try to really think through their development and how they arrive at their endpoint.
This isn't to say that Sweden is going to turn into Francoist Spain or anything, because simply culturally speaking it'd be very hard to make something like that happen (speaking from my position of knowledge as the son of Swedish immigrants). That being said, there is a certain latent conservatism to Scandinavia outsiders don't really see or know about and the idea of them as some kind of socialist paradise misses the forest for the trees... what's made Scandinavia, Sweden and Denmark in particular, so successful is vibrant and innovative knowledge economies achieved by successfully navigating deindustrialization in the late 1980s and especially a brutal early 1990s, backed by states providing a solid foundation of safety net and encouraging private sector competition where the state bargains with labor on behalf of business. I always tell people that Sweden is one of the most capitalist places on earth, it just doesn't have the cronyism, rent-seeking and red tape that creates all the distortions and issues we have in the US.
That's a long winded way of saying that a Scandinavia that just stays a much of frosty, conservative grumps holed up at their saunas in the woods suspicious of outsiders for way longer isn't hard to pull off, at least north of the Kattegat. Even IOTL, Sweden and Finland didn't really urbanize until the 1950s and 1960s.
Everybody sharing in my contempt for Henry Cabot Lodge is another good meme for the TL, come to think of it
Something along those lines, yes.
Part of me has debated attaching the El Paso area to Arizona to create a major bordering crossing into Mexico nearer the Midwest, but we'll see. I could also be persuaded that a "free city" around El Paso as a free trade corridor between the US, Texas and Mexico would be interesting, too.
What's outlined at Long Branch is not meant to be exhaustive, by any means, more of a rough outline that zeroes in on priorities.
I've struggled with what to do with the IT - while having the US just go "sorry, Cherokees, you chose... poorly" and annexing it and making it Not-Oklahoma as a state eventually would definitely be on brand with DC/Philly policy towards Natives both ITL and OTL, I feel like that's kind of boring compared to having a reactionary petrostate run by indigenous tribes in the middle of the continent, which to be would be fascinating and also kind of morbidly hilarious in its own way. This is the tension between realism and what's fun to read and write inherent in Alternate History; much as I'd like to poke around in what an Oklahoma with an even larger Native population that's more culturally like Kansas and Nebraska than Texas and Arkansas would be like (sort of like my dalliances with "what's a Baja that's the alt-US's Florida like?", the IT staying out seems more interesting to me.
It's an entirely different set of circumstances here, granted; Ballinger is Navy Secretary rather than at Interior, so Pinchot wouldn't get involved.
I've more or less been following this from the beginning and have been following comments by the Author outside the official story, it would be difficult to connect them all in once place, but I'll go through them from west to east... (I know he responded to a bunch of posts, but I still wanted to post it)
- Arizona Territory - The US is taking it. By far the least populated area of the Confederacy, easily accessible from the rest of the Union, etc. And even less objection because...
- Texas - In some of the Infoboxes, Texas is listed as an independent country and we've seen the author start the discontent from Texas toward Richmond, unclear whether keeps its state borders (which are OTL + OTL Oklahoma Panhandle)
- Indian Territory - The plan is apparently to keep it independent but completely politically/militarily dominated.
- Kentucky - We spent *weeks* discussing what happens to Kentucky post-war, I *think* at this point, the only things that the author has said (on the Col Sanders posting) that wouldn't require retconning is that a *large* number of years post-war, there will at least some part of Kentucky that will cheer his death. I'm curious to see where he lands.
- Tennessee - Too many people, too far into the Confederacy. If grabbing Kentucky was *difficult*, grabbing both would be a complete nightmare. And with both the OTL WWI lack of interest in reindustrializing Germany *and* the WWII level of destruction of Germany, the CSA is probably looking at 10-15 years of trying to bring its industrialization back to 1913 levels and another decade before catching up is possible.
- Key West, probably useful, middle of nowhere (almost as bad as Baja at this point). The US *might* even want part of the mainland, I don't know if the railroad goes all the way to Miami yet...
- Virginia. The Two Virginia counties on OTL Delmarva are almost as much of a given as Arizona Territory. Expect to see *very* large guns built by the US on the side facing Norfolk (and possibly in other directions), the question is not whether Northampton County, Virginia will become a US Naval Base, the question is how much of the current county will be *outside* the Naval Base*. The US will make as certain as it can (without taking the entire confederate coastline of the Chesapeake) that the Confederates can not keep them out of the Chesapeake again. (Could the D&C Canal be dug out to the point that it would take Capital ships???). Additionally, while the US probably will take everything inside the OTL US Beltway, it basically depends on whether Washington DC will ever be a living city again, or if it will basically become a Necropolis (and I'm not sure what the author has decided there.
For all of the comments on the Gallapagos, Wallops Island, Virginia is also part of what the US will grab, so that will probably be the launching facility at least at the beginning of the space race.