Steffie being this timeline's Roman von Ungern-Sternberg would certainly be a twist we never saw coming! Of course, being Steffie he'd probably be assassinated when he was high on opium at a whorehouse as opposed to trying to rally Whites in the Russian Far East.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Truly, he died as he lived - high as a kite and thinking with his smaller head.
On a related question - does Steffie have any children at all? One would kinda assume he has to have; whether they be recognized or no.
The Little Welshman: Billy Hughes and the Founding of Australia's Labor Dynasty
"...among the most important pieces of legislation passed by an Australian government; indeed, almost unamended today, the Commonwealth Electoral Act served to fundamentally reshape Australian governance for good.
Beyond the small and obvious tweak of extending a parliamentary term from three years to four - inviting the beginning of an eighty-four year, uninterrupted cadence of quadrennial elections beginning in the fall of 1921 until the "election that came early" of 2008 - what Hughes did that was truly revolutionary was his shifting Australia to the process of single-transferable vote, known at that time as the alternate vote, which was intended to smooth out some of the problems inherent with a system that at that time used first-past-the-post in the nature of other Westminster democracies. This was sold as an egalitarian change - in a "FPTP" system with three major parties, it was thought to produce more stable majorities without wasting votes - but in many ways was intended to solidify Labor, a result that between the act's passage in 1919 and the watershed elections of 1989 the system produced much more often than not.
Key to this "Hughes system," as it came to be known before long, was the Prime Minister's keen sense of what divided Reform and Liberal. There were a great many members of Reform who were socially conservative but economically interventionist to support agricultural prices, and they were gettable as a second vote to keep the "party of bankers" out of power; conversely, many Labor voters in marginal seats were just as hostile to Liberal economic orthodoxy that they would second-preference Reform if necessary. The alternative vote, thus, quickly served to relegate the Liberals to near-permanent third-party status; they would not lead a government again until 1981, and saw their role primarily as one propping up either Labor or Reform (or after 1926, National) governments in return for policy concessions. At the same time, many Liberals - urban and socially moderate - were turned off by Reform's ardent agrarianism and voted for moderate Labor candidates in marginal seats, preventing Reform from building an appeal to the Australian city at a time when they could have otherwise likely absorbed Liberals wholesale.
Thus the vote splitting of before became a more subtle triangulation by Labor against her two rivals, locking in a considerable advantage in both the Commons and the Senate, and allowing Hughes to take the next step of building an ever-more sophisticated electoral machine through which to deliver patronage to loyal Labor divisions and fine-tune his operation into one of the most dominant in the democratic, industrial world..."
- The Little Welshman: Billy Hughes and the Founding of Australia's Labor Dynasty
Beyond the small and obvious tweak of extending a parliamentary term from three years to four - inviting the beginning of an eighty-four year, uninterrupted cadence of quadrennial elections beginning in the fall of 1921 until the "election that came early" of 2008 - what Hughes did that was truly revolutionary was his shifting Australia to the process of single-transferable vote, known at that time as the alternate vote, which was intended to smooth out some of the problems inherent with a system that at that time used first-past-the-post in the nature of other Westminster democracies. This was sold as an egalitarian change - in a "FPTP" system with three major parties, it was thought to produce more stable majorities without wasting votes - but in many ways was intended to solidify Labor, a result that between the act's passage in 1919 and the watershed elections of 1989 the system produced much more often than not.
Key to this "Hughes system," as it came to be known before long, was the Prime Minister's keen sense of what divided Reform and Liberal. There were a great many members of Reform who were socially conservative but economically interventionist to support agricultural prices, and they were gettable as a second vote to keep the "party of bankers" out of power; conversely, many Labor voters in marginal seats were just as hostile to Liberal economic orthodoxy that they would second-preference Reform if necessary. The alternative vote, thus, quickly served to relegate the Liberals to near-permanent third-party status; they would not lead a government again until 1981, and saw their role primarily as one propping up either Labor or Reform (or after 1926, National) governments in return for policy concessions. At the same time, many Liberals - urban and socially moderate - were turned off by Reform's ardent agrarianism and voted for moderate Labor candidates in marginal seats, preventing Reform from building an appeal to the Australian city at a time when they could have otherwise likely absorbed Liberals wholesale.
Thus the vote splitting of before became a more subtle triangulation by Labor against her two rivals, locking in a considerable advantage in both the Commons and the Senate, and allowing Hughes to take the next step of building an ever-more sophisticated electoral machine through which to deliver patronage to loyal Labor divisions and fine-tune his operation into one of the most dominant in the democratic, industrial world..."
- The Little Welshman: Billy Hughes and the Founding of Australia's Labor Dynasty
I hadn't planned to, but offhand mentions isn't a bad idea.
We're gonna get to that - in the context of the trial, but also how triggered Vienna is by all this landing in her lap at once.
Some strong Heart of Darkness vibes here haha
He does, though I've never sat down and assigned them names. I believe he married the daughter of the King of Spain.
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Republic Reborn
"...formal protest by Texan Secretary of State Andrew Jackson Houston, whom it was lost on few was making moves to burnish his own credentials ahead of the 1919 Presidential election to succeed Gore. With one of the state's most golden surnames thanks to his father Sam's legacy, Houston saw little downside and a considerable opening for himself within the Republican Party to "seize the ring" ahead of September's polls, especially with a fair deal of skepticism that either Sheppard or Garner would be willing to leave their plum positions in Congress to serve in the fairly weak Presidency. The gambit worked for Houston, who would indeed be selected by the Republican "presidential caucus" that July and win a landslide in September against minimal organized opposition as Texas' path towards a single-party democracy became clearer, but it did not necessarily work for Texas writ large.
The Second Republic's severance from the Confederacy through bloodshed had left its economy in tatters, and the Texas dollar, understandably, lacked much of anything to back it; the years after the war were characterized both by a huge speculative run on land by Americans, Canadians and a great many Confederates as well as hyper-inflation as Texas printed huge amounts of fiat currency, which only served to exacerbate the land run due to concerns that prices would not stay the same for long. Accordingly, many of the brave young Texans who had fought in the Republican Army to drive Ferguson's Loyalists across the Sabine were now unemployed or unable to make much of what little work they had, and a drop in the price of oil, beef and timber in 1918 as the North American economic depression worsened only served to further gut the Texan economy. Food riots were common, "outlanders" were lynched with some frequency, and by mid-1919 Gore, in one of his last major acts as President, was forced to suspend the issuance of the near-worthless Texas dollar and introduce a new currency, the Texas credit, which was on the gold standard, instantly depressing the country further. (The dollar would of course be re-issued again as early as 1923).
As tens of thousands of people, mostly single men and a great many of them Black freedmen fleeing the Confederacy or Mexican seasonal workers returning to prewar employment patterns, streamed into Texas, tens of thousands streamed out, in particular across the Red River into Sequoyah. In sharp contrast to the Texas of the late 1910s and early 1920s which was undergoing a crippling series of economic crises, Sequoyah on the other hand had begun to enjoy the dividends of peace by the turn of the decade, with the oilfields of Tulasah making the Osage and Cherokee tribes in its vicinity among the richest people per capita on earth, a wealth they distributed throughout their tribe via the indigenous precepts of communal land ownership and rights. The Tulasah of 1919, the "oil capital of the world," was a shimmering city undeterred by the sharp drop in oil prices in 1917-18, with new buildings and streets popping up every day to support the waves of men arriving there on six-month, typically non-renewable contracts to work, be paid in American money, and then go home; the practical knowledge of these "Sequoyah Boys" from Texas during the Texas oil boom of the 1920s would be invaluable.
The contracts were generally non-renewable because, in order to preserve communal ownership (and tribal political hegemony), Sequoyah was fiercely (and considering the history of indigenous peoples of the Americas, understandably) opposed to temporary workers staying on their lands. Members of other Sequoyahn tribes were generally prohibited from personal land title within other nations; for foreigners, it was completely out of the question, especially in the oil-rich Osage Hills. The vast tenements of Tulasah were thus never considered to be anything other than transient. This was not necessarily the case, however, in central and western Sequoyah, territory where "reserved land" for freedmen and white men had been opened up in the Treaty of Kansas City, particularly in a patch of central Sequoyah that today is home to Sequoyah City, the country's largest (and most ethnically diverse) city. This was in part due to the disinterest of the Six Nations in this land itself, and also in part due to American pressure that anticipated a need for freedmen to have somewhere to go and not wanting that to be entirely within their own borders; it just so happened that one of the main territories "reserved" for white men was largely co-extant with "Greer Country," the territory between the North and South Forks of the Red River that had been disputed between Texas and the Indian Territory for generations, but which Richmond had, previously, never bothered to resolve, in part due to the land's remoteness from population centers in both.
By 1919, however, Greer Country was home to close to thirty thousand people, almost exclusively white and the vast majority born and raised either there or across the South Fork in Texas. They were not the remittance workers of Tulasah's tenement housing but rather farmers, ranchers, and homesteaders; they were families who had established local schools and, quite critically, believed very much that their land was Texan soil. The ability of Sequoyahn reserve settlements to execute their own laws was fundamental to the Sequoyah Constitution and the Treaty of Kansas City (a circumstance that would be critical upon the discovery of oil in Sequoyah City's vicinity in the late 1920s), and so the "Greerites" had a genuine grievance over the decision of the Chickasaw Rangers to pursue suspected horse rustlers into their territory and hang them extrajudicially on the side of the road.
The Greer Country Dispute may have had its immediate origin in that March 1919 incident in one of the most remote corners of the North American interior, but something else would have triggered it eventually; Texas had her claims, and just needed a reason to exercise them. In lodging such an angry protest, Houston made sure that Texas' voice was heard on a matter of foreign policy for the first time, acting as one of many of a concert of nations in North America. However, in being heard, one also earns a response, and the response from Tahlequah was a cold one. The Council of Chiefs was bitter enough about the extraterritoriality afforded to American citizens; they would hear nothing of the same for Texans, which was essentially how they understood the grievance of Greer Country. Furthermore, even had they wanted to cede Greer Country to Texas (which some were open to, if for no other reason than to shed themselves of a troublesome corner of Sequoyah), their foreign policy was dictated exclusively by the United States and they were forbidden from entering bilateral agreements with other sovereign states. Philadelphia was sympathetic to Greer Country's white settlers for purely racial reasons, but was unwilling to entertain border revisions so soon after the conclusion of the Great American War; though their peace treaty recognizing Texas had established diplomatic relations, it had not said anything about recognizing specific borders of Texas, whereas its protectorate with Sequoyah explicitly mentioned defending its territorial integrity. In the view of American policymakers, on which there was bipartisan consensus, those who settled in Greer Country enjoyed the privileges of a reserve land but they had settled in Sequoyah with eyes open and if they wanted to be Texans, they were welcome to return to Texas.
As such, Houston's lodged complaint and subsequent presidency marked the beginning of two important factors in Texan history - one, its dispute with Sequoyah over the exact border along the Red River, and downstream from that, its uneasy relationship with the United States, which would become increasingly complicated as its economic domination by American capital intensified over the decades to come..."
- Republic Reborn
The Second Republic's severance from the Confederacy through bloodshed had left its economy in tatters, and the Texas dollar, understandably, lacked much of anything to back it; the years after the war were characterized both by a huge speculative run on land by Americans, Canadians and a great many Confederates as well as hyper-inflation as Texas printed huge amounts of fiat currency, which only served to exacerbate the land run due to concerns that prices would not stay the same for long. Accordingly, many of the brave young Texans who had fought in the Republican Army to drive Ferguson's Loyalists across the Sabine were now unemployed or unable to make much of what little work they had, and a drop in the price of oil, beef and timber in 1918 as the North American economic depression worsened only served to further gut the Texan economy. Food riots were common, "outlanders" were lynched with some frequency, and by mid-1919 Gore, in one of his last major acts as President, was forced to suspend the issuance of the near-worthless Texas dollar and introduce a new currency, the Texas credit, which was on the gold standard, instantly depressing the country further. (The dollar would of course be re-issued again as early as 1923).
As tens of thousands of people, mostly single men and a great many of them Black freedmen fleeing the Confederacy or Mexican seasonal workers returning to prewar employment patterns, streamed into Texas, tens of thousands streamed out, in particular across the Red River into Sequoyah. In sharp contrast to the Texas of the late 1910s and early 1920s which was undergoing a crippling series of economic crises, Sequoyah on the other hand had begun to enjoy the dividends of peace by the turn of the decade, with the oilfields of Tulasah making the Osage and Cherokee tribes in its vicinity among the richest people per capita on earth, a wealth they distributed throughout their tribe via the indigenous precepts of communal land ownership and rights. The Tulasah of 1919, the "oil capital of the world," was a shimmering city undeterred by the sharp drop in oil prices in 1917-18, with new buildings and streets popping up every day to support the waves of men arriving there on six-month, typically non-renewable contracts to work, be paid in American money, and then go home; the practical knowledge of these "Sequoyah Boys" from Texas during the Texas oil boom of the 1920s would be invaluable.
The contracts were generally non-renewable because, in order to preserve communal ownership (and tribal political hegemony), Sequoyah was fiercely (and considering the history of indigenous peoples of the Americas, understandably) opposed to temporary workers staying on their lands. Members of other Sequoyahn tribes were generally prohibited from personal land title within other nations; for foreigners, it was completely out of the question, especially in the oil-rich Osage Hills. The vast tenements of Tulasah were thus never considered to be anything other than transient. This was not necessarily the case, however, in central and western Sequoyah, territory where "reserved land" for freedmen and white men had been opened up in the Treaty of Kansas City, particularly in a patch of central Sequoyah that today is home to Sequoyah City, the country's largest (and most ethnically diverse) city. This was in part due to the disinterest of the Six Nations in this land itself, and also in part due to American pressure that anticipated a need for freedmen to have somewhere to go and not wanting that to be entirely within their own borders; it just so happened that one of the main territories "reserved" for white men was largely co-extant with "Greer Country," the territory between the North and South Forks of the Red River that had been disputed between Texas and the Indian Territory for generations, but which Richmond had, previously, never bothered to resolve, in part due to the land's remoteness from population centers in both.
By 1919, however, Greer Country was home to close to thirty thousand people, almost exclusively white and the vast majority born and raised either there or across the South Fork in Texas. They were not the remittance workers of Tulasah's tenement housing but rather farmers, ranchers, and homesteaders; they were families who had established local schools and, quite critically, believed very much that their land was Texan soil. The ability of Sequoyahn reserve settlements to execute their own laws was fundamental to the Sequoyah Constitution and the Treaty of Kansas City (a circumstance that would be critical upon the discovery of oil in Sequoyah City's vicinity in the late 1920s), and so the "Greerites" had a genuine grievance over the decision of the Chickasaw Rangers to pursue suspected horse rustlers into their territory and hang them extrajudicially on the side of the road.
The Greer Country Dispute may have had its immediate origin in that March 1919 incident in one of the most remote corners of the North American interior, but something else would have triggered it eventually; Texas had her claims, and just needed a reason to exercise them. In lodging such an angry protest, Houston made sure that Texas' voice was heard on a matter of foreign policy for the first time, acting as one of many of a concert of nations in North America. However, in being heard, one also earns a response, and the response from Tahlequah was a cold one. The Council of Chiefs was bitter enough about the extraterritoriality afforded to American citizens; they would hear nothing of the same for Texans, which was essentially how they understood the grievance of Greer Country. Furthermore, even had they wanted to cede Greer Country to Texas (which some were open to, if for no other reason than to shed themselves of a troublesome corner of Sequoyah), their foreign policy was dictated exclusively by the United States and they were forbidden from entering bilateral agreements with other sovereign states. Philadelphia was sympathetic to Greer Country's white settlers for purely racial reasons, but was unwilling to entertain border revisions so soon after the conclusion of the Great American War; though their peace treaty recognizing Texas had established diplomatic relations, it had not said anything about recognizing specific borders of Texas, whereas its protectorate with Sequoyah explicitly mentioned defending its territorial integrity. In the view of American policymakers, on which there was bipartisan consensus, those who settled in Greer Country enjoyed the privileges of a reserve land but they had settled in Sequoyah with eyes open and if they wanted to be Texans, they were welcome to return to Texas.
As such, Houston's lodged complaint and subsequent presidency marked the beginning of two important factors in Texan history - one, its dispute with Sequoyah over the exact border along the Red River, and downstream from that, its uneasy relationship with the United States, which would become increasingly complicated as its economic domination by American capital intensified over the decades to come..."
- Republic Reborn
That poor woman! Though I suspect that she will be making plenty of money on her memoirs someday and is probably going to be quite well cared for by European royals when this is all said and done.
When he DOES finally die; I half wonder if there won't be rumors of her dancing on his grave.
dayum Australian Labor just did a masterpiece play. It's fun to see that despite how so much of the world is so much more conservative, Australia is down there just doing its own thing.
Depends on how the side develop I think, but if I was a betting man... I'd bet on that outcome
Randy
Well, given that it was hinted in one of the earlier updates that he used his experience in the Great America War, - seeing one of the US sieges of a Mexican/Confederate stronghold, - that he kinda double-downs on the excessive brutality.
Him doubling-down on killing POWs - yeah.
Him using excessive artillery attacks on civilians - yes.
His using tonnes of gas - yes.
He's just really mentally disturbed, and he has seen a lot of brutality and even committed a lot as well in his life. Him completely and utterly believing that the "ends justify the means" and even the "I can do what I like as long as I win in the end" type of philosophy.
Its going to completely backfire on him. How though is what us readers are going to enjoy when it gets to it.
I was more or less hoping he goes there and then gets killed by the natives somehow....
But thats probably more up the Amazon river type of shit. But you never know,
Thank you! It’s easy to forget about in the narrative, even though it was hugely important in 1868 when Victoria’s son was murdered there
Not tipping my hand on any of that
Yes. They were able to successfully keep the French from getting everything up to the Mekong at Madrid in 1892. That said, parts of the eastern Lao Highlands are part of Vietnam here; that was a very vague “border”, anyways
TBH I’m open to this direction; I have way too many potential ideas of who gets their crack at the bastard
The idea here is to do an inverse Canada - whereas there the Tories become the 20th century “natural Party” rather than the Liberals, so to does ALP fit that role rather than Australia’s more rightist Liberals.
That said, an ALP dominated by Billy Hughes and his acolytes will be much more statist and authoritarian than OTL version
It says a lot when me, a Australian, is very impressed with this knowledge of Australian history, especially when I pretty much know nothing about it that much.
Also seeing Billy Hughes reminds me of his antipathy/rivalry with John Monash. But given that WW1 and the ANZAC spirit didn't happen, John Monash has kinda been butterflied away.
BUT....John Monash's family arrived in Australia in 1864 He was born in 1865. His Mother and father were German Jews who emigrated from Prussia in that year. Tiny bit of a Butterfly, but the CEW could Johaan Monasch with somehting to do in his native Posen. But then again he would be 54 in 1919, so. He's too old for a combat role, but if his family is still in Germany, he's very talented and could be useful...
Glad I can impress a native! Lol
NZ is part of the Commonwealth of Australia, yes, though it’s got a strong independent streak above and beyond any other state sans maybe West Australia (and Tasmania later) due to its relative distance and the position of the Māori in its society
