I won't pretend to be an expert on Latin American history, but I heard it mentioned earlier in the thread that an earlier American women's rights movement may provide Dom Pedro II with incentive to allow his daughter to take the throne. IIRC Argentina did rather well in Latin American history for a while, with the 1930 Coup undoing much of that and paving the way for Peron. Perhaps some Latin American countries doing better could assist the region as a whole?
Brazil is possible the country where the most interesting butterflies could be found, given how it's bound to just have more Confederados and it still being a slaveholding nation. I would like to maintain the Empire and keep the nation stable. I'm not sure what would be done for Argentina.
I mean TBF most of that was due to disease and famine that was already ongoing since the revolution started. Even without the war unless you had massive relief efforts you're still looking at a massive death toll anyways. Also what's interesting is a lot of the anti-war protests against annexation were due to racism. With a more tolerant US you might actually see the war prosecuted with a goal of eventual statehood which in turn would likely make things even nastier. Personally I just want the US to recognize the 1st Republic and make some perpetual basing deals. Maybe turn Zambales into an American Hong Kong since that's where the Subic Bay Naval Base was OTL.
That's true, but surely the American war of conquest significantly aggravated the famine. And I've heard the US was pretty brutal to partisans. And I still don't wish to see the US add any territories, so I'd try to bend US radicalism towards establishing some sort of sister republics or something like that. I rather agree with your idea of a Republic under American influence and with American ports.
I think what I was trying to ask was what was life like under Soviet-backed regimes, as well as express my extreme disdain for Kissinger and his role (or at least my perception of it) in encouraging the U.S. to tolerate some of the worst leaders ever because "they're bastards, but they're our bastards". To be clear, no, the U.S. was not less bad*, and while I'm emotionally detached/disassociated from the shit U.S. imperialism has caused, I'm still ashamed of it.
*Meaningfully. Another person who made the analogy that U.S. imperialism being "better" is like saying that one parent only physically abused you, while the other physically and emotionally abused you. Which is technically better, but it's still fucking child abuse that's going to leave you emotionally and perhaps literally scarred for the rest of your life.
(Literally the only reason I have any patience for the numerous times people have discussed U.S. imperialism and its nature in this timeline is because the scale of human suffering associated means that a U.S. doing imperialism but also, like, building a couple hospitals or whatever does mean the negligible, drop-in-the-bucket difference means hundreds or thousands of people who now have an appreciable improvement. I think.)
Surely you understand how, even though this comparison it's true on its face, I still find it odious since I'm
not emotionally detached from the consequences of US imperialism.
I’m not sure if Red_Galiray has any plans for a women’s suffrage movement, but I’m honestly of the impression that women’s right to vote is much easier than one would think.
If you can get TTL’s drafters of the 14th and 15th amendments to use more ambiguous language, and get the Supreme Court stacked in the right way by the right people, the OTL Minor v. Happersett could go quite differently.
While there may be concerns of women’s suffrage being “too early” for the public to approve, such a turn of events wouldn’t be too dissimilar to Loving v. Virginia giving interracial couples the right to marry roughly 30 years before the majority approved of it.
As long as the opposition fails to secure a constitutional amendment nullifying the ruling (harder than one would expect) within around a decade, it could be accepted as reality until the next generation grows up not knowing a world in which it was forbidden.
There are plans indeed. An especially interesting possibility is Southerners becoming pro-women's suffrage just to get more White voters, given how the war disproportionately affected Southern White males while losses among the Black community are more even, so to speak. There is also the intersection between the abolitionist and suffragette movements in the US, with them being allies in the antebellum but fracturing over the 14th and 15th amendments to the point that many feminists, most notable Elizabeth Cady Stanton, became virulent racists. Preventing that, or at least getting the still pro-civil rights factions to dominate, would lend strength to Reconstruction. And your idea is very, very interesting! I rather like it because that's actually how my country, Ecuador, got female suffrage - the constitution only said citizens had a right to vote, not male citizens, so a woman sued and the highest court decided that women could vote.
As I’ve mentioned previously, southern whites have a very large incentive to push women’s suffrage as the civil war disproportionately killed southern white men compared to African American men and southern women. If women are allowed to vote, only around 2 states are majority black by eligible voters. If women aren’t allowed, I would imagine it is more like 5.
A plausible yet ironic outcome.
On that note, one could make an argument that the Confederacy would be viewed by "neutral" historians through the perspective of a country which personified the sunk cost fallacy, particulalry with the Junta's response to Breck deciding enough was enough was to coup and execute him.
And having the Union treat Commerce Raider crews as pirates could lead to a situation in which TTL’s Hague Conventions view attacking merchant ships as a war crime (not that it matters much, but still).
I don't think they'd go that far still, especially since the Confederacy wasn't recognized as a legit nation by the US and was considered a rebellion. So the US trials of the raiders would be trying them as pirates because the US never considered them anything but as a US citizen. I don't think you'll be able to get banning of unprovoked attacks by merchants as a war crime from that.
I agree with
@Steelers94. But one thing I could see was some convention on rules for supplying insurgents with ships - an alternate Alabama claims case with bigger international repercussions.
Well he's definately capabale of getting a national following, his main fault seems to be he didn't have an easy time playing nice with established politicians. Now the Democrats being basically out of the picture helps with this but he definately needs someone on his team who can do party building, a good Mark Hanna basically. He'd probably also need to get the Silverites/ bimetalism crowd on board. Also if the French do have an easier time establishing a Republic, they were pretty big on bimetalism and a more stable Third Republic could pull close to ITTL United States to be the major powers backing a bimetal standard.
I'll have George in my mind then! Also, very interesting point in regards to France. Especially if we assume a more antagonistic relationship with Britain and France's own attempts to establish a Latin Union, we could see the US and France allying to establish a kind of "bimetal" union.
@Red_Galiray What do you think ended up happening to
David Rice Atchison ITTL?
From his Wikipedia page, in case you want to know what kind of man he was like:
Huh, for some reason I had been convinced Atchinson died during the war. I find him a particularly detestable figure for his work as a Border Ruffian. Given how much more they are hated due to actually succeeding in making Kansas a slave state and the harsher guerrilla war, and how he had occupied a high position in the US government, Atchinson actually could end up hanged if caught. Yet, given that he escaped IOTL to Texas after failing at a military career in Missouri, he probably has escaped the US and has had his properties confiscated.
Guess the question is what the town would be renamed ITTL.
Geary!
I was wondering if the anti-anti-miscegenation laws of the New England states, such as Massachusetts, would have stayed in place with a more radical progressive national mood, or if they would have been repealed when white supremacy reasserted its hold over America in the proceeding decade of the nadir of race relation like in otl?
Well, the plan is for White supremacy to never reassert as firm a hold over the US ever again and for race relations to never reach such a nadir in the first place.
Oh, I'm sorry. I was just trying to draw a comparison between the US in this timeline and in the original timeline (OTL), where the US also experienced a period of transformation after a destructive war. However, over time, the nation returned to a more conservative and white supremacist direction. In this timeline, the Republican Reconstruction is much more radical and lasting, but this is still the US, not a Marxist state. So I think the pendulum theory will eventually apply and there will be some form of a conservative backlash, like in the 1970s. What I am wondering is whether anti-miscegenation laws would be part of that backlash. Capisce?
It is true that eventually the revolution will exhaust itself and we'll see a retreat from the activist state in certain respects. But a much deeper and radical revolutionary tide is bound to leave more lasting, profound changes that could not be rolled back. Think of how, for example, the situation after the collapse of Reconstruction, though terrible, was still never as bad as the Black Codes Southerners had once envisioned. Or how even the 70's conservative backlash you describe never resulted in the Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Act being repealed. I think I can say with some certainty that we won't see legal segregation or anti-miscegenation laws.
(Also... capisce?)
Regardless, even if, for whatever reason, it's still a job extremely strongly associated with African Americans (The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is and always shall be the undisputed union GOAT), at least we won't ever have that practice of Pullman Porters being called "George." (Before sometime in the 20th century—somewhere between 1900 and 1920 or 25, I'm not really sure—Pullman Porters did not have name tags, and instead of, I dunno, fucking asking them for their name, the common practice was to refer to the Porter as "George," regardless of their name, short for "George Pullman's boy," which is a practice that can be easily and directly tied back to slavery. ANYWAY. Enough of me rambling about railroads, Pullman Porters,—although I'm hoping you're taking notes, Red_Galiray!—and the various other railroad-related things.
I'm afraid that even though this is rather interesting I'm not terribly interested in railroads. But we could see indeed some changes in the kind of jobs African Americans are associated with. Hell, a funny consequence of this TL may be a US with no real tipping culture.
Ehh...
I am a little bit more pessimistic. While I try to look for optimism and hope in America's dark periods, a LOT of American history shows that the government seemed to go out of its way to make Black Americans miserable.
From slavery, to sharecropping, to Jim Crow, to sundown towns, to racist housing and urban planning, to the drug war, to judicial inequities, the ghost of racism still lingers in America in a lot of ways.
I imagine ITTL there could be progress, but it could be very fragile.
I ask you to approach this TL from an idealistic, even optimistic angle. To believe that a better US is possible, instead of it being
inherently racist. Otherwise, if you believe that is simply not possible, this TL may not be for you.
Yeah the breaking of the slave system and the repression of its former beneficiaries and controllers isn’t going to remove the legacy of two hundred or so years of slavery. Although it’s likely that universal suffrage, full civil rights and voting rights protections, and open racism becoming unacceptable will happen earlier
Certainly not, but we can lay foundations. The next generations, growing up in a nation where Black people are prosperous citizens with full rights and the popular and official narrative demonizes slaveholders and the old South, certainly will think very differently from previous generations.
The key question is this: how much more would white Americans be willing to defend black Americans TTL.
Remember, for all that the South gets bashed for its racism, racism itself found a home in many parts of America: from the sundown towns of the Midwest to racist redlining even in supposedly "left-leaning cities."
In the first few years after the OTL Civil War saw a flourishing of civil rights and expansion of the franchise, but this was a shaky progress that rested on treating the South like an occupied colony. After the 1870s, Republicans practically threw in the towel, and the positive elements of Reconstruction gradually wittled away. By 1910, every Southern state had some kind of exclusion of its black community, but some of the positive legacies of Reconstruction lingered well into the 1920s.
TTL, would the American army be more willing to stop shit like the Wilmington Riot, Red Shirt hooligans like Ben Tillman, and the Tulsa Massacre while also stopping the more implicit institutional forms of racism?
Something you must understand is that racism was a
self-reinforcing phenomenon during the era. The Republican ideology held that the US was a perfectly harmonious society unlike Europe with its class warfare, and that anyone was able to raise through life if only they worked hard enough. That was the Free Labor ideology that guided them. But then they saw Black Americans, who still suffered from poverty and oppression. Instead of accepting that this was a result of violent White supremacy, Republicans and Americans more broadly came to believe that Black Americans were inherently bad, lazy, immoral people - preferring this interpretation to accepting that socioeconomic factors may make it impossible for some to raise through hard work alone. So, they saw Black people suffering from oppression, decided it was their fault and withdrew their support, which in turn made that oppression deepen, which in turn justified withdrawing more support, and so on. Here we'll see the opposite - anti-racism as a self-reinforcing phenomenon, whereby Black success will convince Americans that they are good citizens worthy of the aid that will in turn secure further success. Add to this firmer foundations and a US government more willing and able to interfere, not just with the Army but through the National Guard and US Constabulary, and you've got the basis for a better United States. Not an egalitarian utopia, but much better than OTL.
In this TL, would we still see the segregation of sports, or would sports like baseball be something that ties all Americans together?
I'd like to see that.
I got distracted, but my other main problem is that I can't write dialogue, and I generally don't do creative writing, so I cannot emulate you and other by writing a cool side-story focusing on railroads or specific people important to railroads, and walls of text about them, while informative, don't have the same appeal.
My own updates, which form, of course, the bulk of the TL, are not really creative writing as such, but rather consciously imitate the style of a popular history book. I guess the writing is not too terrible to bear, but I must confess I'm somewhat insecure of my prose nontheless. But I digress. My point was merely that you're welcome to try to write or share anything even if it's just normal academic text rather than a side-story or dialogue.