Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline

[Aelita]

Introduction

Hi, I'm the writer formerly known as "Jello_Biafra" from alternatehistory.com, and this the definitive version of the timeline I began working on almost ten years ago. It's grown a lot since then. It underwent a major rewrite with the help of Illuminatus_Primus, who has since disappeared from the internet but his contribution to the work won't ever be forgotten. There's now three principal writers: myself, @Mental Omega and @Miss Teri , but it's had numerous smaller contributions from many others.

We're now going to be crossposting on SV. Expect new updates on a biweekly basis at the very least. But there is a lot of material already on AH.com so this process will take some time to integrate. In the meantime, if you can't get enough the timeline is still over at AH.com.

In 1901, the Polish immigrant turned anarchist assassin Leon Czolgosz sought to strike terror in the captains of industry by killing President McKinley. The assassin never completed his task. In a world where Theodore Roosevelt never became president, where the Progressive Era remained stillborn, America's native sons and immigrant workers turn increasingly to militant trade unionism and socialism to put food on the table.

Reds! chronicles a world turned upside down, where the heart of world capitalism succumbs to communist revolution. It is a tale of ordinary men and women turned to revolution, of a tragic civil war spurred on by reaction, culminating in the death of the old United States and its rebirth in the Union of American Socialist Republics.

Prologue: A New World

11 October 1933

"Comrade, would you please state your full name and rank for the record."

"Battalion Commander Marius Victor Gracchus."

The old Chicago Federal Building was filled to the rafters today with throngs of citizens eager to witness history in the making. The first in a series of Extraordinary Revolutionary Tribunals had begun early this morning. Marius sat stiffly in the witness box, while three white judges, twelve white jurors and a gallery full of mostly white spectators waited with bated breath for a black man's testimony.

The People's Tribune was a wiry man in his forties, with hair graying around the temples. "Major- sorry, old habits die hard – ComBat, you fought in the Battle of Chicago, correct?"

"Yes. The defense itself, and the subsequent campaign."

The Tribune paced as he spoke, casually strolling along the well like he owned it. "Could you describe your role for the court, in brief?"

"Objection!" cried the lead defense counsel.

Marius had heard of the man before. He remembered the lawyer's face from old issues of the Daily Worker. R. Nash Baldwin had been one of the Party's top labor lawyers. It seemed queer to see him defending counterrevolutionaries.

"On what grounds?" said the middle judge, a young bespectacled red-haired man.

"Relevance. Gracchus's heroics don't have any relevance to the prosecution's case against my client," said Baldwin. Marius was no lawyer, but he knew a delaying action when he saw it.

The Tribune retorted, "Justice, the witness must provide context to give sense to his testimony against Major General Marshall."

The judge scratched his temple pensively. "Overruled. But keep it pithy."

The Tribune repeated his question. Marius did his best to keep it short, but even the critical points he'd discussed beforehand with Comrade Dennis, the Tribune's assistant. "Well, the short of it is I was a member of the ol' Spartacus League and a union organizer when the Putsch went down. I formed up with the Haymarket Brigade. I served in the 92nd Infantry Division during the Great War as a sergeant, so they gave me a platoon."

"You were promoted quickly, correct?"

"Yes sir, when our company HQ was hit by some of General Marshall's artillery, I suppose I just assumed command of what was left of Baker Company. We were in heavy fighting in the Pullman neighborhood."

"Your foes, were they Regular Army?"

"No sir. Regulars in the White Army, you see they didn't have the stomach for what was asked of them. For the most part they or the National Guardsmen in the White Army fought honorably and professionally. Who we fought in Pullman? I wouldn't even call them men. More like rabid dogs. They didn't take prisoners, and they were real keen on enforcing the renegade MacArthur's Enemy Agents Order."

The Tribune produced a document from one of the stacks on his desk. "I refer the court to exhibit seventeen, an intercepted copy of the so-called 'Enemy Agents' order." With a bit of flourish, he handed copies to the judges and the defense counsel. "ComBat, could you describe for the court what its implementation meant in the battle for Pullman?"

A flood of images flickered through Marius' mind. His pulse quickened as he remembered the vivid smell of blood. The square in front of a train station littered with lifeless bodies. A baby crying, somehow missing the slaughter as they clung desperately to their mother, her eyes open and still in her pale face.

That terrible anger was welling up within him again. Righteous rage he didn't know if he could control. As stoically as he could manage, Marius calmly stated, "Pullman is a working class ward. These men had been given the task of liquidating political opposition. I believe the order termed it 'communist political agents.' As far as I can see, their definition of 'communist political agent' was just about everyone without an English surname, and some with them."

"And these men were fighting as part of the Army of the Mississippi, under the command of General Marshall?"

"Yes sir."

"These irregulars, the Volunteer Brigade of the Salvation Army; what became of them?"

"After three days of brutal fighting we defeated them. They were supported by a machine gun company of the 1st Infantry Division. On the night of 24 April, my company infiltrated the enemy lines, which had worn thin, and outflanked their machine gun support before they could move into position. The Regulars surrendered quickly, and a good number of them even helped in finishing the fight. Finally, on the 26th, their resistance collapsed and they surrendered."

"Major," the main judge scolded, "the details of the military operation do not concern the court. Tribune, what is the point of your line of questioning?"

"I'm just getting to that, your hon- er, I mean Justice." The Tribune turned to Marius, still unrattled. "Did you interrogate any of the prisoners you took?"

"Yes. The XO of the Regulars said he had tried to arrest the Salvationist's CO for ordering the liquidations, but was overruled by division HQ."

"Objection, hearsay," said Baldwin, rising to his feet.

The main judge turned to the Tribune, eyebrow cocked.

As smooth as ever, the Tribune replied, "Justice, these matters have all been entered into evidence. The witness's statements on the content of official military documents of his unit are not hearsay."

The judge cast his glare at Baldwin. "Counselor, your spirited defense of your client doesn't extend to abuse of procedure."

"The intelligence we obtained is detailed in my reports, which I believe were submitted to evidence," Marius continued.

"So in your expert opinion," the Tribune paused for effect, "it was the military policy of General Marshall's forces to engage in atrocity, especially politicide?"

"Indubitably. Not only was it policy, but General Marshall showed complete disregard for the details of the enforcement of the Enemy Agent order. It did not matter how inexcusable was the conduct of fascist paramilitaries so long as the objective was accomplished. This was all done in complete violation of the laws of war. In my opinion, General Marshall is a disgrace to the uniform."

"Objection," cried Baldwin. "My client's personal character is not on trial, his alleged actions are. The Major has no basis to speculate on the details of my client's character or his fitness to wear the uniform of the former United States Army."

The main judge sat pensively for a short moment. "Sustained. The jury will disregard speculations about the defendant's fitness to wear the uniform. Major General Marshall is on trial for his alleged actions, whether his role in the MacArthur Putsch constitutes treason, and his military conduct, resulting in the death of American citizens, would make him criminally responsible for murder."

The gallery rumbled. The gavel remained unused, the stern disapproval of the three judges proved sufficient.

"Tribune, do you have further questions?" said the judge on the left, a sour looking mustachioed man in his early thirties.

"No, Justice." The Tribune turned to Baldwin. "Your witness."

Baldwin approached Marius, calm and professional. "Marius Victor Gracchus is an unusual name. Were you born with it?"

"Objection, relevance," stated the Tribune.

Marius did not wait for the judges to rule. "No, it was originally a nom de guerre. When I joined the Party in 1920, all the Mississippi cells were underground to avoid state terror. We used handles to protect our families from reprisals. But like Lenin and Trotsky, we sort of grew into the habit. Now it's official."

"Admirable. You stated previously you were in the National Army during the Great War. When did you enlist?"

"I didn't enlist, I was conscripted. My number came up in September 1915, when they decided they were going to take colored folks for military service. I mustered out for France in summer 1916, and I was at or near the frontlines until the Armistice."

"What rank did you attain before discharge?" Baldwin asked passively.

"I was battlefield commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant."

"Indeed." Baldwin grimaced slightly, "Yes or no, were you dishonorably discharged? Remember, you're under oath."

"I was dishonorably discharged for being a communist. You of all people should know that this is not a crime."

The judge panel glared at Baldwin, but the trap had been avoided. Baldwin wrinkled his nose.

"Fair enough Major. But down to brass tacks; you are of course familiar with the norms of military discipline and protocol, having served in a leadership capacity."

"Absolutely."

"For the record, what uniform are you wearing presently?"

Marius shifted uncomfortably. Lawyers and their mysterious ways, he concluded. "It's the service uniform of the Workers' and Farmers' Revolutionary Army."

The uniform he wore was simple and utilitarian, an olive jacket with mandarin collar, worn with harness style brown leather rifle belt, simple olive trousers and well-shined leather boots. The gold wheat ear of a Battalion Commander adorned the shoulder straps. Simple campaign ribbons adorned the breast.

"And the defendant, General Marshall; what uniform is he wearing?"

Marius cocked his head.

"Humor me, major."

Marius shrugged. "It's the dress uniform of the United States Army."

It wasn't all that different from the revolutionary uniforms; a simple olive wool jacket, worn over a collared shirt and tie. The rank insignia followed the older imperial style, and hadn't changed much since the Great War. Compared to the ostentatious uniforms of the British, French or Germans, it was rough and provincial, and that much hadn't changed.

"And as a former member of the United States Army, please tell the court what oath you swore to wear that uniform."

It took a moment to recall the words; it seemed like a lifetime ago Marius had stopped believing in them. He repeated them clinically, "I do solemnly swear that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America; that I will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies whomsoever."

"Major, I believe there's more to the oath," Baldwin grinned.

Marius thought a moment. "I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the Articles of War."

"And who was the President of the United States in April 1933?"

"Upton Sinclair," said Marius, rolling his eyes.

Baldwin produced another copy of the evidence exhibit for the Enemy Agents order. He handed it to Marius nonchalantly. Now face to face, Marius could see the sheen of sweat on the counselor's brow. His closely cropped brown hair was slightly disheveled. "Major, could you read for the court the first line of the order you and your valiant soldiers intercepted."

With a moment's hesitation, Marius read aloud "Pursuant to the orders of President of the United States Raymond Moley-"

"Tell me major," Baldwin interrupted, "what is a soldier supposed to do when there's two men both claiming to be president? Whose orders is he to follow? Whosoever are the enemies of the United States?"

"With all due respect, Counselor, I believe the outcome of the revolutionary war settled that matter," hissed Marius.

"Well indeed. The old republic has passed, long live the Union of American Socialist Republics. But you haven't answered my question, major. The matter was not settled when my client's alleged crimes occurred. There were two men claiming to rightfully hold the office of President of the United States. Each had a Congress legitimating them. And in between these two governments, hosts of armed men clashed over the fate of the United States. So I ask again, who is the commander-in-chief? How is a soldier to tell who is a patriot and who is a traitor?"

---

Marius sat on the steps of the courthouse. The imposing neoclassical building loomed over him almost in judgment. He couldn't give a satisfactory answer to Baldwin's question. He knew in his heart that he was right. The inner compass that directed the soul towards justice had pointed him true. The struggle was won, and the tyrants deposed.

But so many others; good men who he might have served beside once upon a time, had failed that that test.

The scars of the MacArthur Putsch still lingered on the city. Bombed out buildings littered Chicago and every other major city. Marius still smelled the ash on the wind. It stirred up memories of huddling behind a rubble barricade, watching as the flashes of artillery pierced the darkness, peering over the heap of bricks to see soldiers silhouetted against a burning department store.

The mirage faded as quickly as it came. Marius' heart raced. He'd broken out in a cold sweat. He decided to go for a stroll, and see what he could find for lunch.

The Red Guards standing watch saluted as he passed. It was born of respect, not military obligation. He crisply returned their salute. The red flag flew proudly atop the great rotunda of the Federal Building. Seeing it calmed Marius' rattled nerves. A new world had been birthed in the ashes of the old. The years of struggle, under the boots of the bourgeoisie, toiling in the factories and fields, bleeding on the fields of war, had finally been vindicated. The workers were calling the shots now. Having freed themselves, they would free the whole of humanity.

Marius got himself a hot dog from a street vendor. The ruddy faced Irishman shook his hand and thanked him for his service. Just a year ago, he could not have imagined being able to get a cup of coffee in a white café, let alone being treated like a comrade.

As he ate his hot dog, Marius wondered if it even mattered if Marshall got what was coming to him. It might be crueler to let the traitor live to see the old world of domination and exclusion he'd bled to defend die by inches.

 

[Spartakrod]

Excerpts from Amanda Waver, The Birth of Columbia, (New York: Prole Posts, 2014) ​

Despite a legacy stretching nearly eighty years, arguably the most frequently analysed portion of what many would call my great-grandmother's most important contribution to revolutionary America was her wartime work. Militantly anti-fascist and constantly trying to push the envelope of animation, many would call the series the animated companion of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight", even though the series started work years before the war actually began.

Created to be a "Revolutionary mythology for a new America", Commander Columbia would break from her contemporaries on the pages of comic books by drawing not from the pages of pulp science fiction like Captain America or Superman but from ancient legends and folklore to create a "pantheon of gods and demons, and heroes and monsters."

Even this day, Samantha insists that "Columbia is a goddess, an American Jupiter, not a superhero" when asked. So for her characters, the battle against Nazism was more than just a political struggle, but a red Titanomachy waged against the sternguard of the reaction by the vanguard of the revolution.

But it would be hardly fitting to speak of Columbia without first talking about her creator. Samantha Moriah Waver was born to second generation Jewish and first generation Irish Immigrant parents in New York City in the year of 1903 and showed an early interest in art and mythology.

She devoured whatever books on myths and legends could find, and was also noted for a deep appreciation of science fiction literature. However she one day came to ask her mother what the American Gods were, only to be told that America didn't have any. This set her on a long path of trying to create her own deities for the modern world if nobody worshipped any of the old ones anymore.

When she saw her first animated films in 1908 she was immediately transfixed and would spend all of her free time practising her craft, trying to break down the process of animation and create her own little flip books.

But had her parents not been buoyed by her father's medical practise, it's unlikely that she would have had the time to hone her artistic abilities to the point that she had become a locally famous artist in her own neighbourhood, often taking commissions or selling drawings to buy more paper, pencils, and other art supplies.

With the start of the Great War came hard times for Samantha however. Her oldest brother Seamus and her uncle Tobiah would both be drafted into the war despite their protestations, while her aunt Mary and her oldest sister Hannah would go off to serve as a nurse, with her father soon being made to serve as a wartime doctor.

Adults in her neighborhood suddenly came in quite short supply, and in her own words "none of the reasons the grown ups gave me for why everyone left made any sense." She would frequently write to her relatives serving in the war, and often mailed them drawings and stories (most of which are still preserved today.) But while her relatives were in the trenches, conditions back home were hardly pleasant either.

Rationing soon set in and imposed a great deal more austerity on her family. Her diet worsened considerably and the sweets she'd often enjoyed at least once a week were far scarcer to provide milk and sugar for soldiers overseas.

"Meat just about disappeared from the table", she recalls, and she grew visibly thinner throughout the war. But more than just affecting her body, the war helped affect her politics. The conflict was deeply unpopular for new yorkers, and her teacher was a "fired up IWW radical who made sure we knew the papers were pushing lies about the war."

Her mother, already a Socialist Labor Party voter, increasingly began to talk politics with her remaining children, telling her about how the "owners and landlords are getting fat while we starve and fight." A hand painted sign she made in support of Reimer's presidential campaign remains in permanent exhibition in the Manhattan museum of labour alongside the poster she painted for Morris Hillquit which even came to be used in a small run in his mayoral election campaign.

Eventually even her art habits would be affected as increasingly frequent strikes cut into the supply of lumber and reduced the availability of pencils and paper, causing her output of drawings and flip animations to plummet, with the worst being in 1918. However the news of her older brother having been killed in Italy during the Battle of the Piave, after having been listed as missing in action the previous year, was to send shockwaves through her world.

Her mother became inconsolable with grief and rage at the people who sent her son to die "spitting curses at everyone from Cadorna to Wilson". And the death of her sister from poison gas in France only further soured the mood at home. Angry and despairing, she joined the mass strikes that would rock New York City in 1918.

In the cold months of January, she joined the picket lines of dock and factory workers, intellectuals, artists, housewives, and children gathered to protest low wages, unfair and uneven rationing that left the rich and well connected still quaffing down "ice cream and steaks like nothing had happened", long and gruelling working hours, and unfair treatment of non-white and female workers.

Though the crowds signing "Bread and Roses" were hardly calling for revolutionary action, the response against them was brutal. With the Pinkertons too afraid of the public fallout if they attacked a crowd of women and children and the police similarly hesitant to act, the National Guard was dispatched to break the strike.

Tear gas, firehoses, batons, rubber bullets, and charging horses were used on the crowds. Her baby brother Sean would end up severely injured by the hooves of a panicked horse as the army cavalryman on top lost control, while she herself was struck with a baton by Corporal Lance Jackson across the head and sent crumpling to the ground.

Though she survived without lasting injury, the experience introduced her to a new level of anger. Every day she could, she would be off joining a strike of some sort, and the drawings and flip books she produced had grown outright revolutionary in character.

Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Vladimir Lenin, and Peter Kropotkin became her idols, and when the German Revolution began and brought about an end to the Hohenzollern monarchy she came to be introduced to the names of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht[1] and soon idolised them as well, organising a commemoration event for Karl when he was killed[1].

Despite a spell of Spanish Flu that she survived due in large part to her less than ideal health[2] after years of rationing, she remained active in wildcat strikes and agitative movements throughout the remainder of 1918 and 1919. With the return of her father and uncle from war however, the revolutionary mood had yet to dissipate.

And with masses of veterans angry about the difficulty of finding work after suffering through years of the trenches in western Asia and Europe she would find herself joined by many faces she hadn't seen in years on the picket lines.

Throughout the summer of 1919, now freed from the duties of school, she'd produce some of her "angriest work yet"; her uncle couldn't find work and despite the war being over living conditions were slow to improve. The cack-handedness of the government's response to the Spanish Influenza pandemic[3] had only hardened the anger many felt to those who survived by hiding themselves away from the proles who gave them their luxuries, and many had found themselves bankrupted by medical expenses.

She'd accompany her father as he offered free medical assistance to his fellow union members, and would come to meet her future husband Spartak Leonovych Kolisnyk, born to Russo-Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution[4], when her father helped treat him for a case of strep throat.


______________________________________________________________________________________

Author's notes:

[1] TTL, Rosa manages to survive Wiemar's Thermidor moment, Karl does not.

[2] It's worth noting that the Spanish Flu is deadlier to people in good health due to just how the pathogen affects the body. A Cytokine Storm is survivable by the malnourished or the old or young, but is devastating to well fed adults. Samantha Waver is someone who in our timeline, probably died in the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak despite seeming to be in good health.

[3] Continuing from my earlier point, the Pandemic is not quite as severe in America because living conditions are harsher. It is still the most devastating outbreak of disease in the history of the United States (the native genocides not included), but many who would have otherwise died survive. However when the scale of the tragedy becomes apparent it becomes a major sticking point for the SLP because so many people dying of plague in the 20th century is utterly abhorrent.

[4] More specifically from the post-Russo-Japanese war pogroms where the Russian Empire felt its most intense yet wave of paranoia about the Jews in part due to the aid the likes of Jacob Schiff gave to the Japanese war effort to keep them in the financial black.

 

[Aelita]

Excerpts from Sean Hannity, A History of the Worker's Vanguard in America, 1876-1946, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)

The Socialist Labor Party grew respectably throughout the 1890s. Under the firm but often heavy handed leadership of the brilliant theoretician Daniel DeLeon, the party and the affiliated Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance increased its influence within the American working class. However, there were notable setbacks in this period. German language sections of the Socialist Labor Party chafed under DeLeon's rigid ideological purity, particularly those centered around the Newyorker Volkszeitung.

The real godsend came when the relatively young leftist organization, Social Democracy of America, chaired by Eugene Debs, folded into the Socialist Labor Party in 1898.1​ The young organization had formed out of the remnants of the American Railway Union, crushed by the bourgeois state during the Pullman Strike of 1894. Its members, most often relatively new to the politics of Marxian socialism, represented a diverse spectrum of left-wing radicals, from industrial unionists like Debs, to city sewer socialists, to Owenite utopian socialists. After rejecting initial plans for co-operative colonies as unfeasible, the dialogue developed with delegates from Socialist Labor would ultimately prove fruitful.

Debs himself engaged in a lengthy series of correspondence with DeLeon. While the two never found much personal affection for each other, both recognized the importance of an alliance between the two organizations. The potential for a resurgent American Railway Union within the STLA was far too politically important for DeLeon to let slip by. Likewise, Debs immediately recognized the importance of the organization that Socialist Labor had spent the last two decades building, from the myriad working-class newspapers to the socialist clubs and party locals.

After the whirlwind romance, the short history of Social Democracy of America concluded. On June 14, 1898, the group's National Convention dissolved itself into the Socialist Labor Party by an overwhelming vote. Dissenting delegates associated with Victor Berger of Wisconsin left the organization, and attempted to form an independent Social Democratic Party of America later that fall. The Social Democratic Party would prove short-lived, outperformed at the ballot box by the Socialist Labor Party throughout its decade long history. Finally, in 1908, the two organizations made their peace, with both formally endorsing Eugene Debs' presidential bid that November. Within a few months, the dissident Social Democrats accepted the logic of socialist industrial unionism, and joined Socialist Labor.

…Eugene Debs was unequivocally the rising star within Socialist Labor. His rapid ascent to the national executive of the party confirmed his status as DeLeon's foil. The two would form an uneasy duumvirate over the party until DeLeon's passing in 1911. Perhaps the first recognition of the new consensus within the party was the 1899 compromise with the opposition faction, which softened the party's perhaps overly confrontational attitude towards the then dominant labor union, the American Federation of Labor.2​ These changes reflected Debs' own power base within the party. As a union man at heart, Debs' chief early contribution to the Socialist Labor Party was the growing parity of the STLA with the political organizations of the SLP. In time, the STLA would grow to become an equal partner with Socialist Labor, leaving DeLeon's shadow and growing to become an impressive political force itself.

In the 1900 presidential elections, Socialist Labor's ticket of Eugene Debs and Joseph Maloney won a respectable 165,000 votes, placing the party in 4th place on the national electoral stage.3​ While still dwarfed by the dominant parties of the day, Socialist Labor was finally beginning to reach a national audience, allowing it to fulfill its role in developing and organizing class consciousness among American workers.

Excerpt: A selection of posts from the AH.com discussion titled "WI: McKinley Assassinated in 1901", dated May 1, 2009.4​

RedAmerican: So I was just reading through The Daily Worker today when I found a very interesting article. Apparently, when a family in Detroit, Michigan SR were digging through their attic looking at old family heirlooms, they stumbled upon the diary of their great-great-grandfather, a son of Polish immigrants named Leon Czolgosz.
Apparently, Leon's diary had confessed that he had attempted to assassinate the President of the old United States in early September 1901. He made his first attempt on September 5th, but was unable to get close to the old imperialist. He was going to try to catch him on the next day of the exposition, but he was arrested that night by a racist Buffalo cop who had a grudge against Poles and other immigrants.
So what would our world look like today if Leon had managed to assassinate that bourgeois dog?

SeriousSam: Well, that's interesting. If I remember correctly, McKinley's VP at the time was a noted progressive… I forget his name though. Anyway, he's not a very important person in history, so I don't think you'll find too much on Wiki about him.

LeninsBeard: I think his name was Theodore Roosevelt… *wikis*
Yup, Theodore Roosevelt. Apparently, he was a politician of some progressive sympathies at the time, and McKinley picked him for his deputy because it would help him fight off the influence of the populists and the unions. The corporatist establishment kind of marginalized him afterwards, and he faded into relative obscurity.
If McKinley were assassinated, then Roosevelt would become president, which would definitely give a boost to the progressive movement. While it might lead to short-term gains for the working classes, ultimately it might butterfly away the Red May revolution in '33. It was the complete defeat of the progressive wings within the Republican and Democratic Parties that ultimately gave the Socialists the long-term support base they needed.

The Socialist Labor Party as a national party: Primary Documents

National Platform
Socialist Labor Party of America
Adopted by the Eleventh National Convention, Chicago, May 1904
And approved by a general vote of the party's membership.
*​

The Socialist Labor Party of America, in convention assembled, reasserts the inalienable right of man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

We hold that the purpose of government is to secure to every citizen the enjoyment of this right: but taught by experience we hold furthermore that such right is illusory to the majority of the people, to wit, the working class, under the present system of economic inequality that is essentially destructive of their life, their liberty, and their happiness.

We hold that the true theory of politics is that the machinery of government must be controlled by the whole people; but again taught by experience we hold furthermore that the true theory of economics is that the means of production must likewise be owned, operated and controlled by the people in common. Man cannot exercise his right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without the ownership of the land on and the tool with which to work. Deprived of these, his life, his liberty and his fate fall into the hands of the class that owns those essentials for work and production.

We hold that the existing contradiction between the theory of democratic government and the fact of a despotic economic system – the private ownership of the natural and social opportunities – divides the people into two classes, the Capitalist Class and the Working Class; throws society into the convulsions of the Class Struggle, and perverts Government to the exclusive benefit of the Capitalist Class. Thus labor is robbed of the wealth which it alone produces, is denied the means of self-mastery by wagedom, rent, debt, interest, usury; and, by compulsory idleness in wage and debt slavery, is even deprived of the necessaries of life.

Against such a system the Socialist Labor party raises the banner of revolt, and demands the unconditional surrender of the Capitalist Class. The time is fast coming when, in the natural course of social evolution, this system, through the destructive action of its failures and crises on the one hand, and the constructive tendencies of its trusts and other capitalist combinations on the other hand, will have worked out its own downfall.

We, therefore, call upon the wage workers, toilers and yeoman of America to organize under the banner of the Socialist Labor Party into a class-conscious body, aware of its rights and determined to conquer them. And we call upon workers everywhere to join in the campaign of socialist industrial unionism in the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance to stand as one against the foes of human labor. And we also call upon all other intelligent citizens to place themselves squarely upon the ground of Working Class interests, and join us in this mighty and noble work of human emancipation, so that we may put summary end to the existing barbarous class conflict by placing the land and all the means of production, transportation and distribution into the hands of the people as a collective body, and substituting the co-operative commonwealth for the present state of planless production, industrial war and social disorder – a commonwealth in which every worker shall have the free exercise and full benefit of his faculties, multiplied by all the modern factors of civilization.

The two souls of the early Socialist Labor Party, the charming Eugene Debs (left) and the brilliant but abrasive Daniel DeLeon (right)

The Socialist Labor Party "Arm and Hammer" logo, 1876-1921
​

Important Events of Interest

1897
February 10: The Western Federation of Miners breaks with the American Federation of Labor, following the sobering experience of the Leadville miners' strike.

March 4: William McKinley is inaugurated President of the United States, succeeding Grover Cleveland.

June 1: American mine workers begin a strike that successfully establishes the United Mine Workers' Union.

June 15: The original American Railway Union's final conclave begins in Chicago. The new organization, Social Democracy of America, is openly courted by delegates from the Socialist Labor Party following its quick and decisive repudiation of utopian colonization schemes.5​

September 10: The Lattimer Massacre: A sheriff's posse kills more than 19 unarmed immigrant miners in Pennsylvania.

October 4: At the close of the first national meeting of Social Democracy of America, the organization ratifies a general endorsement of industrial unionism, as the first step towards an eventual union with the Socialist Labor Party.

1898
February 15: The USS Maine suffers a catastrophic explosion in Havana's harbor, sinking with nearly all hands. Though the cause of the explosion is unknown, the press, particularly those under the ownership of William Randolph Hearst, portray the sinking as a result of nefarious Spanish treachery.

April 22: The United States is at a de facto state of war with Spain, as the US Navy begins a blockade of Cuban ports and captures a Spanish merchant ship. A formal declaration will come three days later.

May 1: The Socialist Labor Party organizes small pro-labor, anti-war demonstrations in its strongholds in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and San Francisco. While there are minor clashes with the police, the demonstrations fail to gain much public attention.

June 14: Social Democracy of America votes to dissolve the organization and its meager assets into relevant sections of the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance.

July 7: The United States annexes Hawaii.

August 12: Hostilities end in Cuba between American and Spanish forces.

October 1: Victor Berger and other dissidents from the now defunct Social Democracy of America hold their first convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where they form the Social Democratic Party of America.

November 8: New York state office elections: the Socialist Labor candidate Benjamin Hanford makes the party's best run yet for the office, winning close to 30,000 votes, approximately 2.5% of the total.

December 10: The Treaty of Paris is signed, formally ending hostilities between Spain and the United States.

December 31: By year's end, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company controls 84% of the USA's oil, and most American pipelines. The age of monopoly capital has begun.

1899
January 6: The American Railway Union is reassembled as a member of the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. Eugene Debs returns as national chair during the reorganization period.

February 4: The Philippine-American War begins following the outbreak of hostilities in Manila.

February 14: The US Congress authorizes the use of voting machines for federal elections, providing endless amounts of fun for future corrupt corporations and conspiracy theorists.

April 17: Following the firing of 17 union employees at the Bunker Hill Mine in Idaho, 250 workers affiliated with the Western Federation of Miners occupy and demolish a mill at the mine. Following a major bribe by the United Mineowners, the National Guard is deployed by the Governor to Coeur d'Alene. After a violent confrontation, over 1,000 miners and their families are herded into makeshift prisons. Many will never be charged, and won't be released from the concentration camps for many months.

June 1: The Socialist Labor Party's 10th National Convention begins in New York City, to review the integration of the Social Democrats into the party organization.

June 18: At the close of the SLP's 10th National Convention, the leadership of Daniel DeLeon and Henry Kuhn concede to ARU president Eugene Debs' proposal for increased parity between the STLA and the party administration.

June 19: The Newsboys Strike begins in New York. Delegates from the SLP National Convention, inspired by the impressive initiative of the all-children Newsboys Union, agree to help the child laborers organize their strike.6​

June 24: The use of brutal strikebreaking tactics on the Newsies begins to backfire, as the Newsies begin selling working-class alternate press cleverly disguised as more famous newspapers, which bring full exposés of Hearst and Pulitzer's brutal tactics.

August 21: The Newsboys Strike ends, with the recognition of the union, and a return to the pre Spanish-American war bundle price of 50¢. The Newsies will join the STLA by the end of the year.

October 10: Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, has a chance meeting with young, up-and-coming writer Jack London in San Francisco. Clemens, a newly baptized anti-imperialist, befriends the young Socialist Labor activist, though he remains steadfastly opposed to joining the party.

December 2: The Battle of Tirad Pass: Filipino forces successfully commit to a delaying action against the US military, guarding the retreat of Philippine President Emilio Aguinaldo before being wiped out.

1900
January 3: The US Census estimates the country's population to be approximately 70 million.

January 8: Following reports of miners' revolts and lawlessness, President McKinley places the Alaskan territory under military governance.

March 5: Two US Navy cruisers are sent to Central America to protect US interests following a dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
March 15: The Gold Standard Act is ratified, placing the United States currency on the gold standard, ending the era of bimetallism.

May 15: The II Olympiad opens in Paris, France, as part of the Paris World Exhibition.

September 13: Filipino resistance fighters overrun a large American column at the Battle of Pulang Lupa.

November 6: Republican incumbent William McKinley is re-elected President over Democrat William Jennings Bryan. The Socialist Labor Party places a distant 4th, with 165,000 votes, approximately 30,000 shy of the 3rd place Prohibition Party.

1901
March 2: The U.S. Congress passes the Platt Amendment, limiting the autonomy of Cuba as a condition for the withdrawal of American troops.

March 4: United States President William McKinley begins his 2nd term. Theodore Roosevelt is sworn in as Vice President of the United States.

May 17: The US stock market crashes.

June 12: Cuba becomes a US protectorate.

July 5: The Western Federation of Miners adopts a socialist platform, calling for collective, worker control of the means of production, and a program of industrial unionism to further that end.

September 6: Leon Czolgoz is arrested in Buffalo, New York for vagrancy. President McKinley attends the day's festivities unimpeded.

November 28: The new constitution of the State of Alabama incorporates literary tests for voters in the state.

1902
February 18: The US Attorney-General brings a suit against the Northern Securities Company, a railroad trust, under the Sherman Antitrust Act, in order to allay middle class outcry over the very public machinations of the schemers of the trust. In private, the President has expressed his support to the owners of the trust.

May 2: The Coal Strike of 1902. 150,000 miners in the anthracite coal fields of western Pennsylvania from United Mine Workers of America go out on strike, demanding shorter hours, higher pay and increased control over their workplaces.

May 20: The Republic of Cuba begins de jure independence. In reality, the country is an American puppet.

June 2: The Coal Strike deepens as maintenance and clerical workers affiliated with the mines join the strike in solidarity.

July 10: The Rolling Mill Mine disaster in Jonestown, Pennsylvania kills over 100 miners.

August 1: The Coal Strike: The owners appeal to the federal government for aid in defeating the strikers, as the Pennsylvania National Guard is not sufficient to maintain security of the mines and suppress the strike. Coal stockpiles have been exhausted, and by now the entire coalfield has joined in the strike.

August 22: President McKinley becomes the first American president to ride in an automobile today in Hartford, Connecticut.

October 15: President McKinley deploys units of the U.S. Army to suppress the Coal Strike. Over four dozen miners are killed in the resulting battles. The strike ends by early November, with the beaten unionists agreeing to return to work in exchange for modest pay cuts and a chance to keep their jobs.

November 30: The leadership of the United Mineworkers of America, radicalized by what they saw as the blatant betrayal of the people by the government, push for the adoption of a socialist platform at the next union national convention.

1903
February 11: The Oxnard Strike of 1903 becomes the first time in U.S. history that a labor union is formed from members of different races.

March 4: Turkey and Germany sign an agreement to build the Constantinople-Baghdad Railway.7​

March 11: The Hay-Herran Treaty, granting the US the right to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, is ratified by the US Senate.

May 31: Following Colombia's rejection of the Panama Canal Treaty, President McKinley orders the dispatch of a cruiser squadron and a contingent of Marines to support the Panamanian independence movement.

June 1: The Butte Copper Strike begins in protest over low wages and the firing of known union leaders from the mine. The strike, jointly coordinated by the Socialist Labor Party local and the Western Federation of Miners, quickly shuts down the city's crown jewel industry.

October 6: The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty is signed by the US and Panama, giving the US exclusive rights over the Panama Canal Zone.

October 11: In spite of sporadic violence, the Butte Copper Strike ends with a minor victory for the miners' union. While they fail to achieve all of their goals, the union wins pay raises and and a reinstatement of fired workers.

November 23: Colorado Governor James Hamilton Peabody dispatches the state militia to the town of Cripple Creek to quash a miners' strike. The Colorado Labor Wars begin
.
1904
January 31: The American Federation of Labor faces its first major reversal, the product of campaigns waged by employers for "open shops." The employer and government back-push starts with a legal injunction against the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.

March 14: The Supreme Court delivers its verdict in Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197: The Sherman Antitrust Act is overturned as an unconstitutional overstretch of the federal government's authority to regulate interstate commerce due to a violation of the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. The 5-4 decision represents a major blow to progressives in both major parties.8

March 30: The US Army Corps of Engineers begins work on the Panama Canal.

April 8: The Entente Cordiale is signed between the UK and France

May 1: The Socialist Labor Party's National Convention begins in Chicago. The convention nominates Eugene Debs and William Wesley Cox to run on the party's presidential ticket.

June 6: The First Industrial Congress of the STLA opens in Chicago, to promote a national industrial union federation. At the Congress, the Western Federation of Miners amalgamates with the United Mine Workers, joining the STLA. With swelling membership, the STLA can, for the first time, stand as a legitimate alternative to the reformist AF of L.

July 1: The III Olympiad opens in St. Louis, Missouri.

August 14: In the final vote before the Congressional Recess, a revised antitrust bill fails 40-44. The bill, tailored to attempt to pass the Supreme Court's scrutiny following the overturn of the Sherman Antitrust Act, withers under criticism that it will still fail to pass legal muster.

November 8: Republican presidential nominee Charles Fairbanks defeats Bourbon Democrat Alton B. Parker.

The 1904 US General election, in brief

1904 would prove to be a tumultuous year in politics. Nowhere was this more the case than in the Republican Party. Strong voices of "Progressivism" in the party, among them Vice President Theodore Roosevelt and Wisconsin Governor Robert La Follette have become deeply dissatisfied with the state of American politics. With the overturn of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the lack of will to challenge the courts in the party, and the McKinley government's overly cavalier attitude in dealing with organized labor, they felt that the federal government and the state administrations controlled by the party had done great damage to the nation, and aggravated a growing class war.

In spite of the vulgar rhetoric thrown at them by the conservative branch of the Republican Party, the Progressive Republicans were not socialists; or even social democrats at that matter. Almost none of them were opposed to trusts on principle, and many have no love for organized labor. However, they did recognize that a state overtly colluding with the masters of capital on such a grand scale was tearing the nation apart. In their nationalism, they believed that a reconciliation between classes must be achieved; the excesses of capitalism must be restrained, the people must have some democratic voice in their governance.

However, the class collaborationists were unable to convince the rest of the Republican Party of the logic of their position in this campaign. Theodore Roosevelt, though carrying considerable popular support going into the convention, was unable to defeat the retrenched conservatives in the presidential nomination. In a heated series of ballots, the conservative Charles Fairbanks swept aside Roosevelt, clinching the nomination.

As his running mate, the party selected a relative moderate, William Howard Taft. In the aftermath, the Progressive Republicans themselves faced internal conflict over the proper course of action. The "Legalist Progressives," represented among the professional politicians, civil servants, in the law schools and bar associations, argued that the movement as a whole needed to change tack and adapt to the new conditions. The majority of GOP Progressives, their intellectual center adopted a kind of proto-corporatist philosophy. Now that breaking up trusts was no longer on the table, they argued that the government must take an increased role to manage the excesses of capitalism in a more cooperative manner. The cartels would be need to be "guided" by the federal government to produce socially desirable outcomes, regulating prices and quality, with the government serving as the umpire between organized labor and large capitalists. Heavily influenced by political scholar Woodrow Wilson's treatise Congressional Government, the Legalist Progressives believed some form of constitutional form, likely pro-parliamentary, was necessary to reduce the "politics of personality" for the health of the republic.

In contrast, the "Populist Progressives" became embittered by what was seen as a betrayal of the principles of the Grand Old Party of Lincoln. Government of the people, by the people, they argued, could not be achieved through rational scientific management of the opposing classes of society. Without some material leveling, the republic itself was fast becoming an impossibility. Embittered and defeated in the post-election era, many of the faction felt they had been driven into the political wilderness.
The Democrats, at their St. Louis national convention, would ultimately thrust New York Appeals Court Judge Alton B. Parker into the limelight. A man with immaculate credentials and an air of seeming incorruptibility, Parker turned the party's campaign against "the rule of individual caprice" and "the presidential office's growing abuse of authority."

The party platform would condemn the excesses of monopolies, high government expenses, and corruption within the executive departments. In spite of some of these paeans to populism, the party's platform remained essentially Bourbon in nature, favoring the gold standard, free trade and a relatively laissez-faire government attitude. While this put the Democrats at cross-purposes with the growing Legalist Progressives faction of the GOP, some common causes were found in the reduction of corruption and the limitation of presidential authority.

In spite of great enmity between Democrats and Republicans, relations between the two parties were relatively cordial this election. Both Fairbanks and Parker were quite conservative, having very similar philosophies about the role of government in society. Without William Jennings Bryan's decidedly class war laced campaign, the 1904 campaign proved to be quite amiable. And, at the very least, both candidates equally denounced the "radical anarchistic crusade" of the growing Socialist Labor Party.
1904 would be American Railway Union chairman Eugene Debs' second run for president. A brilliant, charismatic orator capable of uniting both AF of L supporters as well as his own STLA union's constituency, Debs gave "socialist treason" a human face. Supported by SLP stalwart William Wesley Cox as his running mate, Debs would greatly expand both the SLP's membership rolls as well as its vote share through the course of the campaign.

The 1904 campaign saw the first chink in the AF of L's armor as well. Defiance of AF of L president Samuel Gompers' explicit voluntarist philosophy became more common among union locals of AF of L affiliates, particularly among teamsters, brewers and locomotive engineers.

The SLP also expanded into the traditional rural domains of the People's Party. Shattered by collusion and subsequent betrayal by the Democratic Party, the remnants of the Populists' organizations largely signed on to support Debs' call for a broad producers' alliance between industrial labor and yeoman farmers. This alliance was not yet universal, and many Populist groups did not actively endorse Debs' candidacy or make alliances with industrial labor. However, with the disintegration of much of the Populists' national organization those opposed to alignment with the SLP were unable to run a Populist candidate in the election.

Presidential Results

Candidate	Party	Popular Vote	Pct.	Electoral Vote
Charles Fairbanks	Republican	7,415,312	55.51%	336
Alton B. Parker	Democratic	4,987,123	37.33%	140
Eugene Debs	Socialist Labor	705,235	5.28%	0
Silas C. Swallow	Prohibition	248,482	1.86%	0

1. This is the first major divergence of the TL.
2. IOTL, this is the major issue that ultimately caused the split in the Socialist Labor Party. That rift is patched over and the split averted ITTL.
3. Other than OTL's Social Democrats and SLP's vote totals combined, there is no real change in the election outcome.
4. This was the POD from the draft version of the TL. While the divergence still occurs, it is no longer the specific POD.
5. This is the new POD: with a slightly greater turn-out of industrial unionists at Social Democracy of America's opening meeting, it adopts policies more in line with the SLP, and soon falls into its orbit.
6. This is included more for my own amusement than anything. The idea of militantly socialist newspaper boys just tickles me.
7. This event, IOTL, had dramatic consequences for great power relations. Ultimately, if completed, it would give Germany access to developing Turkish oil supplies, and ensure that the threat of a naval blockade on Germany couldn't force her capitulation. This is one of the many factors that led to the First World War.
8. The case went 5-4 the other way IOTL, validating the breakup of the Northern Securities Company. The dissent, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and joined by Fuller, White and Peckham, held that the act was unconstitutional.

 

[Aelita]

Excerpt from The Socialist Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Through Both Revolutions, by Louis Hartz (Harcourt: Brace Publishers, 1955)

…The socialist tradition's triumph among the American proletariat was not, as it might appear, the Red May Revolution of 1933. Such a victory, bold and obvious as it is, would be entirely impossible without a far more subtle but ultimately more earth-shattering development. That small but vital turning point can be found with the eclipse of Samuel Gompers and the AF of L, and the rise of "Big Bill" Haywood and Solidarity.

1912 would prove to be a year of revolutionary importance in the American socialist movement. February would bring Gompers' capitulation, and the final abandonment of class-collaborationist "craft-union" strategies in American organized labor. The commitment to revolutionary industrial unionism among the American proletariat would serve to provide the organizational bedrock upon which the class could be mobilized to seize political power. For now, that was still largely confined within the norms of Fabian Socialism, but important deviations from the traditional Bernstein-Kautskyian line of the Second International were also embraced by the Socialist Labor Party.

As the chief intellectual theorist of the early Socialist Labor Party, Daniel DeLeon built the fundamental theoretical doctrine that would serve to distinguish the American movement from the parallel movements across Europe. For all of their zeal and scholarship, the European "Marxist" intellectuals of that era were almost without exception a sort of liberal reformer dressed in worker's clothing. The leaders of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) led the international workers' movement due to their mass organization and, on paper, powerful influence within the German Reich. However, the liberal whiggery of the Erfurt-era SPD confined the influence of the German working class to the narrow avenues provided by the bourgeois state. The left-wing dissidents of the SPD such as Luxemburg notwithstanding, the whole of the party was as bourgeois to the core as any of the other German parties.

The German reformists conceived of the class-struggle within the narrow confines of the bourgeois halls of government. In doing so, they neglected the very clear understanding that Marx and Engels had cultivated in their works for over three decades: the economic base of society is prior to and more fundamental than its superstructure.

The class struggle is a battle fought within the economic base of society between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As such, it is also fought in all of the manifestations of the superstructure, of which the tiny parliament is but one of the many institutions of state, and the state in turn only one of many components of the social superstructure. These "Marxists" handily neglected the primary mode of the class-struggle, and the trade unions that had formed as a direct consequence of the class struggle. The trade union wasn't just denied revolutionary potential; it was totally disregarded and placed as a secondary institution to the party's parliamentary designs on power.

Even while the Socialist Labor Party made gestures to bourgeois respectability during the period immediately prior to the First World War, the party never abandoned its revolutionary orientation. The political struggle of the working class was properly understood to be broader than just elections. Elections would only be one aspect of the emerging vanguard's function within the proletariat. In many ways, the experience of the Socialist Labor Party would serve as a prototype to Lenin's writings on the nature of the revolutionary vanguard following the October Revolution.

As the vanguard party, the SLP would serve as the "university of the working class," educating the the proletariat in the theory of revolution, and providing the organizational tools to teach the working class a means of resisting capital. In doing so, it would coordinate the totality of politics, and its intersection with social life. The vanguard party's apparatus would provide an authentically proletarian alternative to the organized corruption of the city machines, offering the means of subsistence, and most importantly, dignity and self-respect as a worker. As a rule of American politics, wherever the machines retreated or were dissolved, the vanguard party quickly advanced to fill the vacuum. The Republican campaigns against the corrupt Democratic Party machines prior to the 1912 General Election, and which only barely ensured victory for the Republicans, would leave a fallow field for working class organization to grow in.

…The SLP's and the Solidarity union's policy with regards to small freeholders and rural farm workers was another important revolutionary deviation from the whiggish orthodoxy of the European Lasalleans. The unique absence of feudal legacies, especially serfdom and religious absolutism, in American history created a vital difference in American class dynamics. Unlike in Europe, the rural farmer was not a peasant. The whole of the rural areas of America were not populated with a vast reactionary mass; instead, the rural worker and the freeholder were members of and natural allies of the urban proletariat respectively.

The 1912 General Election demonstrated this abundantly to the ruling classes, as vast sections of the rural Midwest and Western states turned out to support the Socialist Labor Party. Almost half of the Socialist caucus in the House of Representatives would come from predominantly rural western states, and these states had large slates of Socialists in their own state legislatures.

Excerpts from Sean Hannity, A History of the Worker's Vanguard in America, 1876-1946, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)

The period from the mid-1890s to the start of the First World War is often described by historians of the left as the Rise of Monopoly Capital. This pithy phrase, while apt, unfortunately cannot capture the full terror of this era. Never before in history had the economic power of society been constituted and consolidated into so few hands. These robber barons, men like John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab and Henry Morrison Flagler, often amassed fortunes literally one million times greater than the wealth of the average worker.

Through entirely legal machinations, the cartels of this era centralized ever greater sections of capital into united combines called "trusts". As they expanded, they plowed their lesser competitors under by the score.

The reasons for this expansion of capital have been well understood by modern political economy. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall in a capitalist society, first elucidated by Marx in Vol. 3 of Capital, is the inexorable historical force that drives the concentration of capital. As he noted, within the capitalist epoch "it is thereby proved a logical necessity that in its development the general average rate of surplus-value must express itself in a falling general rate of profit." As the value of past labor, capital, increases exponentially with accumulation, the volume of current labor shrinks in proportion. Thus:
​

"…it follows that the portion of living labour, unpaid and congealed in surplus-value, must also be continually on the decrease compared to the amount of value represented by the invested total capital. Since the ratio of the mass of surplus-value to the value of the invested total capital forms the rate of profit, this rate must constantly fall."
​

As the rate of profit fell, the very nature of capitalist market competition drove consolidation. It was no longer enough to be content with dozens of competitors in a given commodity market. But the size of the market for goods simply could not expand fast enough to keep in pace with the falling rate of profit. Without consolidation, each passing year would bring ever diminishing returns to capital, and thus stagnation. The successful firms, chiefed by the most ruthless and unscrupulous, acted first. They destroyed their competitors by whatever means they could, and absorbed their empires into their own. They colluded with one another to form cartels to maintain profits for themselves and their shareholders. And through the consolidation of power in the monopoly trust, they came to dominate political power within the state.

It was simply no longer the case that the state was "the executive committee to manage the common affairs of the bourgeoisie." The state became the executive committee of the national bourgeoisie. The final logic of moribund capitalism was the corporatist state, in its liberal and fascist forms.

As part of the centralization drive, the trusts turned themselves to the seemingly largest champion of labor, and brought the full force of their might upon it. They crushed the American Federation of Labor, in spite of the pathetic class-collaborationist organization's sycophantic attitude towards capital. True to the inexorable dialectic of history, every action taken to preserve capital only dug its grave deeper. Through their machinations, the trusts worked harder than any activist to build the Socialist Labor Party and the Solidarity industrial union. Only too late would they realize that they had created their personal undertaker and reaper.

Important Events of Interest

1905
March 4: Charles Fairbanks is inaugurated as President of the United States.

March 20: The Grover Shoe Factory disaster: a massive boiler explosion occurs in a factory in Brockton, Massachusetts. The building subsequently collapses, killing 60 workers and injuring numerous others.

April 6: The United States Supreme Court overturns a New York state law regulating the work week in the case Lochner v. New York. The sweeping decision invokes the Fourteenth Amendment's "Due Process Clause," and results in the widespread invalidation of many state laws regulating commerce and the work week. The doctrine of "substantive due process" as enumerated by the Court gives another blow to progressives in the GOP.

May 1: STLA deputy chairman William "Big Bill" Haywood announces the creation of two new unions within the STLA: The Yeoman Farmer's Federation, and the Agricultural Worker's Organization. As part of the declaration, Big Bill Haywood promotes the concept of the "One Big Union," in which all members of the producing classes would organize together for a common socialist platform. The new organizations seek to organize cooperative mutual aid and revolutionary enthusiasm among small freeholders and the workers, sharecroppers and hired hands in big plantations respectively.

May 16: The beginning of the Congressional Revolt: Progressive GOP leadership in the House steer the passage of Comprehensive Federal Trade Act. The sweeping legislation, modeled in many ways off German Chancellor Bismarck's "practical Christianity" or "Staatssozialismus" programs, would establish a Department of Industrial Coordination, comprehensive safety regulations, an old-age safety net, as well as some limited collective bargaining standards.

June 1: National Steel, a trust controlling almost 3/4ths of steel production in the United States, begins a major anti-union campaign against the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, withdrawing recognition of the union in all of the organized mills. Though the AAISW and the AF of L attempt to organize a national campaign against this, many of the larger locals go down without a fight in the opening salvo. The Labor Wars begin.

June 4: The Senate narrowly gives assent to the Comprehensive Federal Trade Act. However, the act is quickly and aggressively vetoed by President Fairbanks. In his veto message, Fairbanks scathingly denounces the Congressional leadership who forged the compromise act, accusing them of bowing to "syndicalist-anarchist intimidation" and "waging a bloody, unconstitutional class war by despotically depriving men of their property and liberty."

June 12: Amidst a growing sense of constitutional crisis and paralyzed government, Princeton University professor Woodrow Wilson's monograph Congressional Government is cited by popular editorials in newspapers across the country.

June 30: The Labor Wars: The International Mercantile Marine Co. begins its own anti-union campaign, particularly against longshoremen, using the AF of L's counter-reaction as a pretext to destroy affiliated unions.

July 1: Congressional leaders fire back at the President, accusing him of abuse of power, and of undermining the health of the nation by refusing any compromise over the growing inequalities of power in the country. Though attempts to override Fairbank's veto fail, it's clear that the honeymoon between Fairbanks and his party is over quite soon.

July 9: The Labor Wars: Standard Oil joins in the attack on the AF of L. Attempts at organizing at fields and refineries owned by the trust are met with strikebreakers and scabs, resulting in the accidental death of three labor organizers in Texas.

July 20: Governor Robert LaFollete of Wisconsin announces a major legislative deal with Victor Berger's growing Social Democratic Party. LaFollete's progressive Republicans and the Milwaukee "Sewer Socialists" agree to cooperate on a progressive agenda very close to the SDP's minimum program.

July 31: The Women's Trade Union League votes to quit the AF of L, citing the ineffectiveness of the craft union policies, and the perverse indifference within the AF of L towards women workers and the women's suffrage movement. The predominantly socialist leadership of the League begin talks with the STLA to join the industrial union federation.

August 24: The American Amalgamated Coal Company forms. The new trust is an offshoot of the National Steel trust, formed as part of a vertical integration plan by the trust's leadership. The new trust acquires the Consolidation Coal Company and the Pennsylvania Coal Company, two of the largest coal mining companies in the United States.

September 7: The American Telephone & Telegraph Company joins the Labor Wars, successfully crushing small union strikes within its branches.

September 20: Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, publishes his political satire, What's Mine is Mine, skewering the unashamedly servile press coverage of, among other things, the 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike. Even the great humorist is not immune to charges of being a "socialist-anarchist bombthrower."

October 1: The Labor Wars: The Anaconda Copper Company, in Butte, Montana, begins a union-busting campaign at its flagship copper mines. The United Mineworkers responds by voting for a general strike against the Anaconda Company and its affiliates.

October 8: Congressional GOP leadership enter into a further row with President Fairbanks, over corruption within the executive departments. The "Imperial President" widely loses favor with the public over apparently rampant connections to major trusts, especially the much reviled Northern Securities Company.

November 1: One month into the Copper General Strike, there seems to be very little hope for a peaceful resolution. The Governor of Montana, Democrat Joseph K. Toole, is pressured into mobilizing the National Guard to "restore order" in Butte, Anaconda, and the surrounding counties. This move meets wide resistance from Farmer-Labor groups, and ends up pushing the remnants of Montana People's Party organizations into the Socialist Labor Party, which has played a significant role in organizing the strike.

November 12: In one of the last votes of the year, the House of Representatives votes 254-99 to endorse the Congressional Government Amendment. The Amendment, authored by Democratic Minority Whip Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, will be debated in the Senate next. The Amendment would significantly strip the powers of the presidency and establish a parliamentary governmental structure, with the Cabinet responsible to the House of Representatives.

1906
January 16: The President's standoff with the legislative branch continues in the new year. Fairbanks' barbed State of the Union address reveals an executive unintimidated by the Congress' threatened rebuke. He appears confident that the Republican Party political machines in the states will side with the executive instead of the Congress in the upcoming Constitutional Amendment battle.

February 10: The HMS Dreadnought is launched, revolutionizing naval warfare. An impending naval arms race between the UK and the German Reich is on the horizon, with the lesser naval powers of France, Italy, the US, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Japan expected to take part to some degree.

February 14: An attack by the Montana National Guard against strikers in Butte is repulsed by an armed Farmer-Labor "Vigilance Committee." Before the Montana front of the Labor Wars can further escalate, the Governor begins backing down, as he continues to lose support among the farmer constituencies that helped bring him into office. He urges the Board of Directors for the Anaconda Copper Company to enter the bargaining table with the strikers. Meanwhile, American Railway Union workers refuse to load shipments to and from the Anaconda Company, in solidarity with the UMW.

February 28: Upton Sinclair publishes his landmark novel, The Jungle. Though the socialist tract also spreads considerable concern about the health and safety of the meatpacking industry, the Supreme Court's case law precedent, and the President's threatened veto stymie attempts to make headway on regulation.

March 1: National leaders of the STLA and the United Mineworkers, including Eugene Debs and "Big Bill" Haywood, travel to Butte to begin a collective bargaining agreement with the Anaconda Company.

March 15: The US Senate votes 60-30 in favor of the Congressional Government Amendment, narrowly meeting the two-thirds constitutional requirement. The Amendment will now head to the states for ratification.

March 17: The six-month long Copper General strike reaches an end, with a negotiated settlement. The UMW is tacitly recognized, and a bare-bones collective bargaining agreement is instituted, giving the union a measure of control over dismissal of members from the mines. The mineworkers also win small pay raises and shorter hours.

April 6: The Congress and the President again enter into a row, this time over naval armament spending. The President finds himself reluctant to authorize the necessary spending increases to pay for a navy necessary to project America's status as an emerging world power.

April 18: The Populists' emergency national convention begins. At stake is the future of the organization and its mission of a broad, class-reforming government. The convention of the ailing organization is divided between two hostile camps. The "Left Populists," consisting of Farmer-Labor and rural worker groups, endorse socialism and industrial unionism, and wish to enter the Socialist Labor Party led worker's movement. The "Right Populists" wish to maintain electoral independence, and stay steadfastly opposed to collaboration with other groups. The "Left Populists" carry the day, and begin the process of affiliation with the SLP. "Right Populist" sections leave the organization, and vow to carry on the true Populist spirit in a new organization.

May 1: SLP activist and novelist Jack London begins serializing his novel White Fang in The Outing Magazine.

May 8: National Steel purchases its largest competitor, Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. The J.P. Morgan backed steel trust controls nearly 3/4ths of American steel production. The corporation's aggressive expansion is paved by innovation, combined with the nullification of American antitrust statutes.

June 1: With the near total eradication of the Amalgamated Iron Workers' union, the STLA forms a Steelworkers' Organizing Committee, to begin making cautious inroads into forming a steelworker's industrial union. Other proposals for industrial oil workers and telephone workers are considered as well, but rejected in the interim to concentrate the STLA's resources on the large steel industry.

June 18: House Speaker Joseph Cannon (R-IL) meets with a delegation of Democratic Party leaders, including several Southern state governors, the Minority Leader John Sharp Williams (D-MS) and Minority Whip Woodrow Wilson (D-NJ), to discuss a compromise agreement on the Congressional Government Amendment. The eventual agreement balances populist issues with trusts, a key Democratic constituency and something looked down upon even by Bourbon Democrat hardliners, as well as Democratic isolationism. In exchange for Southern state support for the amendment, a Cannon-led Congressional government will push for means to regulate and control trusts and improve wages for workers, hoping to shore up dwindling Democratic support among the industrial working class.

July 11: Seven Southern states ratify the Congressional Government Amendment, intensifying the conflict between the President and the Congress. However, hopes of getting the Amendment ratified before the 1906 election seem wildly optimistic.

August 1: President Fairbanks deploys the US Army to Cuba, to contain a Cuban rebellion that the puppet government has been incapable of putting down. The intervention quashes moderate Cuban leaders' hopes of slow moves to independence.

August 14: With the mid-term elections looming on the horizon, the GOP heavyweights in the National Convention lock horns with one another over the future of the party. While the growing consensus is towards Legalist Progressivism, balancing the wishes of the electorate with the powerful business constituency in the Republican Party is difficult. While corporate interests can back the governmental reform of the Congressional Government Amendment, other proposals, such as an "antitrust" amendment to the Constitution, are unable to gain traction.

September 1: An electoral fusion alliance is negotiated in Wisconsin, with a number of Progressive Republicans running on Victor Berger's Social Democratic Party ticket as well.

October 11: The Steelworkers' Organizing Committee begins the first part of its unionization push, starting in the smaller foundries of the Pennsylvania-based Bethlehem Steel Corporation.

November 6: Midterm elections in the United States: The Republican Party gains an increased majority in both the House and the Senate. The Social Democrats and the Socialist Labor Party make their first entry into the US House of Representatives, as well as significant gains in state legislatures across the country.

December 2: After failing to obtain court injunctions or state aid against Steelworkers' Organizing Committee actions at a number of plants, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation reluctantly recognizes the union. Bethlehem Steel stock prices fall, and orders for steel steadily shift to its monolithic competitor, National Steel.

Congressional Results, 1906

House of Representatives	Seats​	Change​
Republican Party	260​	9​
Democratic Party	123​	-12​
Social Democratic Party	2​	2​
Socialist Labor Party	1​	1​

U.S. Senate	Seats​	Change​
Republican Party	58​	0​
Democratic Party	30​	-2​
Social Democratic Party*	2​	2​

​

1907
January 1: Daniel J. Tobin becomes president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

February 11: Progressive Republican-controlled states begin ratifying the Congressional Government Amendment, with Wisconsin leading the charge.

February 28: The American Federation of Labor receives a major blow, as the rail-based craft unions vote to leave the Federation, citing its inability to challenge the declining benefits for union members. The effectiveness of the industrial American Railway Union's actions leads many members, and the entire Brotherhoods of Locomotive Engineers and Railroad Signalmen, to decide to join the ARU.

March 4: With the opening of the new Congressional term, freshman Congressman Victor Berger (SD-WI) delivers a scathing criticism of President Fairbanks' failed leadership of the nation, reaching across the aisle to Progressive Republicans to curb the excesses of plutocracy in the US.

March 12: The Autoworker's Organizing Committee is founded in Detroit, Michigan, by delegates of the STLA and workers from the Ford Motor Company. Almost immediately, Henry Ford attempts to destroy the fledgling union. The tide begins to turn in the Labor Wars.

March 30: The Agriculture Workers' Organization reaches a membership of almost 100,000 workers.

April 4: Republican politician and figure of the Progressive movement Theodore Roosevelt delivers a major speech at an organization of Northeastern Republicans. Roosevelt criticizes the failed hardline policies of the GOP center, represented by the current president, charging them with ignoring the growing class war in the country.

April 17: The South American dreadnought race begins in earnest with the laying down of the Brazilian Minas Geraes at the Armstrong Whitworth yards in the UK.

April 18: The battleship USS Kansas (BB-21) is commissioned, the first of the American dreadnought type all-big-gun battleships.

June 6: The Lumber Workers' Industrial Union organizes in the Pacific Northwest and South from a coalition of smaller local unions and craft union locals representing workers in the lumber industry. The Lumber Strike begins almost immediately.

July 8: The ailing AF of L begins a National Conference, with the hopes of finding a solution to its plummeting membership and distressed financial situation. While Gompers puts on a brave front, and his Voluntarist faction carries the day, behind closed doors it is grimmer than many had feared. The AF of L strike fund is nearly depleted, and a number of affiliates are on the verge of total bankruptcy.

August 1: The Aeronautical Division is established within the US Army Signal Corps.

August 14: The Seventh Congress of the Second International begins in Stuttgart, Germany. The Congress opens with the welcoming of a large slate of delegates from the fast growing Socialist Labor Party of America.

August 31: Count Alexander Izvolsky and Sir Arthur Nicolson sign the St. Petersburg Convention, which results in the establishment of the Triple Entente.

September 6: The Anaconda Copper Company, joined by a group of investors led by John D. Rockefeller, purchase a majority stake in the United Copper Company. The new cartel, which will become the US Copper Corporation, will soon control almost three-fourths of the American copper market.

November 16: The Oklahoma and Indian Territories are combined, entering the union as the 46th State.

December 6: Monongah Mining Disaster: A coal mine explosion kills 362 workers in Monongah, West Virginia.

December 11: The Great White Fleet departs from Hampton Roads, Virginia, as a display of growing American military might.

December 19: An explosion in a coal mine in Jacobs Creek, Pennsylvania kills 239. The second major coal mining disaster in a month, the central committee of the United Mineworkers vote to begin broad strikes in the coal mining industry to protest the lack of safety precautions. This time the unionists enter the battle from a position of strength, with major public sympathy on their side.

1908
January 1: The first ball drops in Times Square on New Year's Day, beginning a long tradition.

January 6: The Amalgamated Coal Company reaches an agreement with the United Mineworkers, beginning a serious investigation by a joint company-union task force on mine safety, and agreeing to the Mineworkers' wage increase demands. This successful coup ensures that Amalgamated Coal will be the only sure supply of coal this winter.

January 12: The American Railway Union and the Steelworkers' Organizing Committee begin sympathy actions to support the United Mineworkers. ARU organized locomotives and railyards refuse to deliver coal from mines owned by companies still under strike, and Steelworkers strike at factories that buy coal from said mines.

February 1: The Lumber Strike ends, a major success for the Lumber Workers. Sustained by graft, lumber camp occupation, and generous donations from other working-class organizations, the Lumber Workers gain total recognition by much of the industry.

February 12: Following rumors that the West Virginia Governor will deploy the National Guard to end the strike, coal miners arm themselves and begin an occupation of many of the rural coal pits. This escalation leads to the federal mobilization of the National Guard, and of the US Army by the president, to suppress the strike.

February 15: Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon openly defies the President's command authority of the military, invoking the Posse Comitatus Act. A Congressional Joint-Resolution, condemning the president's violation of the Act (which prohibits the use of the military or National Guard under federal control for law enforcement within the borders of the US except when authorized by the Congress or the Constitution), and subtly threatening impeachment should he continue, passes both houses of Congress by a 2/3rds majority, gaining the support of nearly the entire Democratic Caucus as well as sufficient factions of the Republican Party.

March 1: Following the President's retreat, and the refusal of state governors to intervene on behalf of mine-owners, shares of affected companies, and notably the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, plummet at the New York Stock Exchange.

March 15: Negotiations begin to end the largest strike in American history. Congressional leaders agree to mediate the negotiations between STLA leaders and the coal industry.

April 1: National Steel begins a hostile takeover of the ailing Bethlehem Steel Corporation, cornering the plummeting stock of the corporation. If the deal is allowed to be completed, National Steel will hold a near total monopoly on the US steel industry. Public outcry against the move is strong but impotent.

April 5: The Coal Strike ends, following a successful settlement. The massive press coverage of the strike make the United Mineworkers and the STLA's victory a virtual propaganda coup. The Labor Wars effectively end.

April 27: The IV Olympiad begins in London, England.

May 26: At Masjid-al-Salaman in Southwestern Persia, the first major oil discovery in the Middle-East is made. The rights are quickly acquired by the United Kingdom, following a cryptic telegram delivered to the Home Office: "See Psalm 104, Verse 15, Line 3".

June 16: The Republican National Convention begins in Chicago, Illinois. Following a series of ballots, the Legalist Progressive aligned delegates succeed in their coup, nominating William Howard Taft for President.

June 30: The Tunguska Event occurs in Siberia.

July 1: The Socialist Labor Party National Convention begins in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Party ratifies a new platform, and endorses a large slate of representatives, some running on fusion tickets. The new platform specifies a minimum and maximum programme for the first time.

July 3: The Young Turk Revolution begins in the Ottoman Empire.

July 18: As the election draws near, delegates of the SDP and the SLP meet to finalize an electoral cooperation agreement. Congressional candidates for both parties will not run against each other, with hopes of maximizing the left vote, and paving a road to reconciliation between the two groups.

August 12: The United Teamsters of America form a successful "dual-union", effectively breaking the International Brotherhood of Teamsters craft-union policies, and IBT president Daniel J. Tobin's stranglehold on the organization.

September 16: William C. Durant founds the predecessor to the General Motors Corporation.

September 25: The first Ford Model T is produced.

October 6: The Bosnia Crisis begins as the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexes Bosnia-Herzegovina.

October 15: The International Union of Brewery Workmen of America votes to leave the AF of L and join the STLA.

November 3: The 1908 US General Election. William Howard Taft is elected President of the United States, but the Republican Party faces a major defeat in Congressional elections as well as control of State Legislatures.

December 2: Child Emperor Pu-Yi ascends to the Chinese throne at the age of two.

General election, 1908

Presidential Results

Presidential candidate	Party	Popular Vote	Percentage	Electoral Count
William H. Taft	Republican Party	6,032,171	42.59%	321
Alton B. Parker	Democratic Party	4,987,123	35.21%	140
Eugene Debs	Socialist Labor Party	1,632,400	11.52%	0
William Jennings Bryan	Populist Democratic	1,512,011	10.68%	0

Congressional Results

House of Representatives	Seats​	Change​
Republican Party	206​	-54​
Democratic Party	165​	37​
Socialist Labor Party / Social Democratic Party	20​	17​

U.S. Senate	Seats​	Change​
Republican Party	50​	-8​
Democratic Party	40​	10​
Socialist Labor Party/ Social Democratic Party	2​	0​

1909
January 1: Drilling begins on the Lakeview Gusher.

January 5: Colombia recognizes the "independence" of Panama.

February 4: The long string of AF of L defections and takeovers continue, with the syndicalist takeover of the mostly immigrant Journeyman International Barber's Union. The new Revolutionary Barbers' International federates with the STLA.

February 22: The Great White Fleet returns to Hampton Roads, Virginia.

March 4: William Howard Taft succeeds Charles Fairbanks as President of the United States.

March 31: Serbia accepts Austro-Hungarian control of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

April 1: The Bricklayers', Masons and Plasterers' International Union adopts an industrial unionist platform, beginning a power struggle in the AF of L between Gompers' Voluntarists and the still AF of L-loyalist Bricklayers.

April 14: The government of Argentina begins negotiating with the German government and the Wilhelmshaven Imperial Shipyard to construction competing dreadnoughts, with Germany eager to use the premium price commanded by such a build to finance further shipyard expansions.

April 19: The Anglo-Persian Oil Company is founded.

May 6: The US Senate ratifies a treaty allowing co-recognition of corporations between the US and the Russian Empire.

May 14: Following the completion of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, the parent company is acquired by the Northern Securities Company, granting the new Enterprise Railroad Corporation a near monopoly on transcontinental travel in the north of the country.

June 16: President William Howard Taft recommends to Congress to vote to propose an amendment to the US Constitution to permit the federal government to levy an income tax upon persons and corporations, as well as clarify the meaning of the commerce clause.

July 13: STLA union workers, affiliated with the ARU, begin a walk-out at the Pressed Steel Car Company in Pennsylvania. Nearly three quarters of the six thousand employees of the company, which mass produces rail cars via assembly line methods, join the strike action. An attack by Pinkertons as well as the Pennsylvania State Police are unable to bring an early resolution to the strike.

July 18: With 36 states ratifying the Congressional Government Amendment, the Sixteenth Amendment becomes the supreme law of the land. Democratic Party Majority Leader Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey successfully forms a coalition government with Republican Progressives and the Social Democrats.5

July 30: President Taft welcomes the new First Secretary Woodrow Wilson to the White House, where the two hammer out a political agreement. The first "cohabitation" government appears to be a success, as talks are cordial, and a fair division of powers is achieved. The President will cede initiative in domestic affairs to the Cabinet, while the Cabinet assures the President's initiative in foreign and judicial affairs.

August 2: The US Army Signal Corps purchases its first airplane.

August 8: With Gompers' demands left unheeded, the AF of L votes to expel the Bricklayers from the Federation. Stung by this bitter betrayal, the Bricklayers naturally drift into the STLA.

August 14: First Secretary Wilson's coalition government obtains its first legislative victory, steering the passage of the Mann-Elkins Act, expanding the authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission to include communications, and also strengthening regulation of railroads, mines and the steel industry.

September 12: Emiliano Zapata begins his revolutionary career, when the city leaders of San Miguel Anenecuilco select him to recover lands owned by the village.

September 18: The Pressed Steel Car Strike ends, with the strikers winning company recognition of the Industrial Assemblers' Union, as well as significant wage increases.

September 20: The Union of South Africa is created, following legislation in the British parliament.

October 4: The Industrial Assemblers' Union begins its first national congress. The congress is attended by representatives of the Autoworkers' Union, the Boot and Shoeworkers' Union, the Boilermakers and Iron Shipbuilders' Union, the Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Ironworkers' Union, the Iron, Tin and Steel Workers', and the International Association of Machinists. Attending unions are immediately suspended from the AF of L.

November 11: The US Navy founds a navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

December 17: King Albert I of Belgium succeeds his uncle, Leopold II, to the throne.

1910
January 17: By voice vote, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously approves a bill calling for statehood for the territories of Arizona and New Mexico.
February 4: The Boy Scouts of America youth organization is incorporated.

February 7: France joins the naval arms race, with the passage of a bill calling for the construction of 28 major surface combatants and 94 submarines over a 10-year period.

March 8: A battle begins for control of the Carpenters' Union. One of the key organizations of the AF of L, its large membership constitutes the majority of current deflated AF of L membership. Gompers' allies squash proposals to build a political program, or open the union up to racial minorities. "Outside agitators" linked with the STLA begin agitating for the union to quit the AF of L and join the STLA.

April 18: The White-Slavery Act, also known as the Mann Act, passes with strong majorities in the House and Senate.

May 11: The US Congress authorizes the creation of the United States Bureau of Mines.

June 1: The American Civil Service Act of 1910 is steered through the House by First Secretary Wilson. The popular bill, aimed at improving efficiency and fighting corruption in the Executive Departments, greatly expands the existing Civil Service system to large numbers of positions within the government. The Act also establishes a temporary commission to weed out corrupt federal employees within the government.

July 8: Social Democratic/Socialist Labor members of Wilson's reform coalition meet with the First Secretary today to discuss collective bargaining and safety standards. With the passage of the Commerce Amendment a near foregone conclusion at this point, Wilson confidently assures progress on mediating between capital and labor.

August 22: The Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty is signed.

August 28: The Eighth International Congress of the Second International begins in the socialist-governed city of Copenhagen, to considerable fanfare. With over a thousand delegates from thirty-three countries, the Congress strengthens previous commitments against war, and entertains the American delegation's draft proposals for a socialist trade union international, modeled off the American Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance.

October 7: The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified.

October 18: First Secretary Wilson introduces three bills on the floor of the House of Representatives. The first would establish a small progressive income tax to generate revenue for the federal government. The second would establish a new federal department, the Department of Industrial Coordination, to serve as the Cabinet's oversight over the regulatory arms of government and to manage the increasingly tense conflict between labor and capital. The third would establish a central bank to regulate the American money supply and bring stability to the country's chaotic financial institutions.

November 8: Midterm Senate elections begin. By the time the arcane process is done, the Democrats pick up five Senate seats, and the Socialist Labor Party picks up one, bringing the totals in the Senate to 45 Democrats, 44 Republicans, and 3 Socialist Laborites.

November 20: The Mexican Revolution of 1910 begins, as Francisco I. Madero declares the elections of 1910 are null and void, calling for an armed revolution against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz.

December 12: President Taft signs First Secretary Wilson's "Progressive Slate" into law, following the lightning passage of the three bills. As per the previous agreement with the First Secretary, Taft submits his new Cabinet appointments to the House of Representatives: James R. Mann (R-IL) as Secretary for Industrial Coordination, and Victor Berger (SD-WI) for Secretary of Labor.

1911
January 31: At a special congress of the Social Democratic Party, the party votes to formally weld the party-apparatus to that of the larger Socialist Labor Party. The merger is expected to be confirmed by an early Summer special conference of the SLP.

March 4: Congress returns from recess to face a growing crisis of confidence among the American people over the role of big business in society. The events of the year will not do much to help that confidence.

March 8: The first installment of Frederick Taylor's monograph, The Principles of Scientific Management, appears in The American Magazine. The three-month run gives a tremendous boost to the growing proto-corporatist movement among American Progressives.

March 29: The M1911 .45 caliber pistol is adopted by the United States Army.

May 1: The publicly owned central bank of the United States, the Bank of the Republic, begins formal operation today, with the appointment of economist Irving Fisher as Chairman of the Bank of the Republic.

May 15: Standard Oil achieves monopoly status in the oil industry, with greater than 99 percent control of the American domestic oil market. This news is met with great apprehension throughout much of the country. Two massive monopolies are now entrenched in the US market, and have been hostile to both organized labor as well as progressive government attempts to regulate them.

May 31: The RMS Titanic is launched. As the White Star Line's new flagship, she promises to be the most luxurious ocean liner in the world.

June 14: A national seamen's strike begins in Britain.

June 20: The National Executive of the SLP authorizes the mass enrollment of the Social Democratic Party into the SLP. The move is unpopular with Daniel DeLeon, and his allies, but Eugene Debs remains hopeful that the reformist wing can be won over to a revolutionary position.

July 1: The creation of a special committee to investigate the Monopoly Capital situation is announced by First Secretary Wilson. A joint creature of the Cabinet and the Commerce Committee, the committee's chairman, James Mann, makes broad sweeping subpoenas to begin its task.

August 8: Public Law 62-6 sets the number of representatives in the House of Representatives at 435.

August 21: SLP National Secretary Daniel DeLeon passes away of a sudden stroke in the early hours of the morning. The powerful leader and brilliant Marxist theoretician will be sorely missed in the SLP. His funeral is attended by the First Secretary and the Speaker of the House. Future historians will remember DeLeon's funeral as the last of the halcyon days of broad progressive reform.

September 8: Infighting begins in Wilson's coalition government over the preliminary reports of Mann's special committee. While the committee's recognized the trend to increasing capital concentration and its potentially dangerous effects on the health of the Republic, the preliminary report's cautiously pro-capital policy recommendations draw fire from the left-wing members of the coalition.

October 10: The Wuchang Uprising starts the Xinhai Revolution.

October 18: Revolutionaries under Sun Yat-sen overthrow China's Qing Dynasty, founding a provisional government that would become the Republic of China.

November 14: Just before the end year recess, a preliminary policy agreement is reached by the Wilson Cabinet. A new antitrust law, narrowly tailored under the new Seventeenth Amendment and the Court's interpretation of the takings clause from the case of Northern Securities Co. v. US, the new act would chiefly prevent vertical integration and collusions between trusts from different industries. The bill is chiefly aimed at separating the various parts of the J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller empires.

December 8: The Carpenter's Union votes to quit the AF of L, and join the STLA, basically signally the death knell of the American Federation of Labor as a viable union federation.

December 31: Sun Yat-sen becomes the first President of the Republic of China

1912
January 5: The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party splits into two separate organizations along the Bolshevik/Menshevik divide.

January 18: Forty thousand workers walk out of textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, beginning the Bread and Roses strike.

February 14: The now bankrupt American Federation of Labor capitulates to the industrial unionist STLA. The AF of L President Samuel Gompers accepts STLA President Big Bill Haywood's offer for a "Continental Congress of labor" to handle the organizational task of merging the two union federations.

March 14: The Bread and Roses strike ends, with the combined forces of the craft-union United Textile Workers and the mostly woman, immigrant Revolutionary Textile Workers winning a forty-hour work week, better pay, and a collective bargaining agreement.

April 17: The RMS Titanic arrives in New York harbor, having bested the White Star Line's previous Atlantic crossing record. The White Star Line flagship's smashing success is a major coup for the International Mercantile Marine Company, the transnational cartel that holds a near monopoly on transatlantic shipping.

May 1: The streets of Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and New York are paralyzed by May Day demonstrations organized by the Socialist Labor Party. The march this year is unique, making women's suffrage a center issue alongside traditional labor issues.

May 5: The V Olympiad begins in Stockholm, Sweden. It is the first of the Olympic Games to have participants from all five continents.

May 16: Gompers' and Haywood's "Continental Congress of labor" meets in Chicago. The Congress, attended by representatives of every major trade union in America, including the internationalist Industrial Workers of the World, would lead to the merger of the AF of L and the STLA into a new trade union federation, the International Workers' Solidarity Union. The new union would serve as a prototype for the international union federation endorsed by American delegates to the Second International.

June 6: The Socialist Labor Party National Convention begins in Toledo, Ohio. The motley convention, representing a broad spectrum from Western miner syndicalists and prairie socialist yeoman farmers, to dissident intellectual progressives from the Republican Party, ratifies what would later be known as the Toledo Programme, endorsing industrial unionism, revolutionary socialism, and fierce anti-imperialism.

June 18: The Republican Party re-nominates William Howard Taft for the presidency, almost completely unopposed.

June 25: The Democratic Party nominates William Jennings Bryan for President, healing the potential split between his Populist Democratic insurgents and the rest of the party apparatus.

July 3: The Socialist Labor Party and the International Workers' Solidarity Union ratify a joint-constitution, welding the two organizations together while preserving union independence from the party.

August 6: Following pay-cuts dictated by the US Steel Corporation's central management, the Steelworkers' Organizing Committee votes to organize a walkout, to both win union recognition and push back the declining wages among steelworkers.

August 21: Membership in the Steelworkers' Organizing Committee grows substantially, as the strike spreads like wildfire. The largest corporation in America is nearly paralyzed by striking workers. The only thing preventing a direct armed confrontation between the strikers and US Steel's allies in state governments and private mercenary organizations is the direct intervention by Wilson's coalition government to prevent such a catastrophe.

October 7: The Eighteenth Amendment, guaranteeing the right to vote for women, and supporting the principle of electoral fusion and free association, is ratified, though not quickly enough to come into full effect for the general election less than a month away.

November 5: William Howard Taft is narrowly re-elected President, while the Republican Party makes considerable gains in the House of Representatives. Negotiations soon begin between House Speaker Cannon and the incumbent First Secretary Wilson over whether the current cross-party coalition government will persist.

November 7: US Steel settles with the steelworkers, recognizing the organization and rolling back the pay cuts. However, the union was unable to win pay increases or shorter hours.

November 24: An extraordinary congress of the Second International is convened in Basel to address the rapidly escalating tensions between Austrians and Serbs and the growing fear that a general European war is on the horizon. The congress reiterates the International's "war on war", and called on all member parties to resist national war movements in their countries.​

General election, 1912

The defection of large sectors of the Republican Party to support Woodrow Wilson's trans-party reform coalition following the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment would prove to be a wakeup call for the party establishment. In spite of infighting in the coalition, Wilson governed effectively, and enjoyed broad support amongst the electorate, regardless of party affiliation. Neither could the stalwarts of the party ignore the growing class-war issue.

With the 1912 Republican Convention, these divisions were healed. The conservative, pro-business faction moved to the center to placate dissident Republicans. For the first time, the growing concentration of capital, and the formation of large monopoly trusts in steel, oil, transatlantic trade, transcontinental railroad, and even sugar, was addressed in a sober manner.

To the chagrin of the Populist Progressives, the Republicans would not go any further than mediating the class war, and regulating away its excesses through the application of a corporatist economic doctrine. The tacit endorsement of Legalist Progressivism by the Convention's Platform Committee was made explicit by Taft's renomination acceptance speech.

Thus, in the 1912 election, two ostensibly "Progressive" political parties would battle for control of the national political economy. Unfortunately for Wilson's Democrats, the existence of a growing mass-based socialist party undermined the very point of Democratic Progressivism in electoral politics. The decline of the Northern working-class vote for the Democratic Party would prove fatal to the party's prospects as a national political party. Only thanks to the socialists sapping away large portions of formerly Republican voting electorates was the party able to mount an effective national campaign in 1912.

For the Socialist Labor Party, 1912 seemed like the entrance into the big leagues. The growth of the party showed no signs of stopping or even slowing, and it seemed it would soon take power, perhaps by the end of the decade. So long as the party kept growing, the unresolved issues of reform vs. revolution could be put off for a later date. But even with the total capture of the formerly Democratic aligned northern working-class vote, and a significant further influx of Republican defectors, it was simply not likely that the party could crack the powerful Republican ideological dominance in many of the Northern states.

Regardless, the 1912 election is a particularly interesting one for historians, due to how close the electoral count ultimately was. The shift of a few thousand votes in just one of the several Midwest industrial states, such as Illinois, Indiana, or Ohio, would have given the state's entire elector slate to the Democrats, and put William Jennings Bryan in the White House. In spite of almost a twenty-percent lead over Bryan, Taft was very nearly defeated in the election.

Presidential Results

Presidential candidate	Party	Popular Vote	Percentage	Electoral Count
William H. Taft	Republican Party	6,801,565	48.45%	277
William Jennings Bryan	Democratic Party	4,122,721	29.37%	254
Eugene Debs	Socialist Labor Party	3,115,015	22.19%	0

Congressional Results

House of Representatives	Seats​	Change​
Republican Party	235​	29​
Democratic Party	160​	-5​
Socialist Labor Party	40​	20​

U.S. Senate	Seats​	Change​
Republican Party	49​	5​
Democratic Party	44​	-1​
Socialist Labor Party	3​	0​

Amendments to the US Constitution, 1905-1913

Sixteenth Amendment (Ratified July 18th, 1909)

§ One: The executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States; and in the Cabinet of the United States, consisting of the various Secretaries in charge of the executive departments, the First Secretary, and such other officers of the House of Representatives as determined by law.
The First Secretary and Secretaries of the Cabinet shall be elected by the House of Representatives without debate on the proposal of the President. The person who receives the majority vote of the House of Representatives shall be appointed by the President.
Members of the Cabinet may serve concurrently as members of the House of Representatives.

§ Two: The House of Representatives may express its lack of confidence in the Cabinet only by electing successors by majority vote of the members and requesting the President to dismiss the Cabinet. The President must comply with this request and appoint the successors.
If a motion of the First Secretary for a vote of confidence is not supported by a majority of members of the House of Representatives, the President may dissolve the House of Representatives, and order new elections to occur within twenty one days of dissolution.

§ Three: Save the following provisions, the House of Representatives shall be elected for four years. Its term shall end when a new House convenes. New elections shall be held no sooner than forty-six months and no later than forty-eight months after the electoral term begins. If the House be dissolved, new elections shall be held within sixty days.
The House of Representatives shall convene no later than thirty days following election.

Seventeenth Amendment (Ratified October 7th, 1910)

§ One: The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

§ Two: The Congress shall have the power to regulate Commerce within the United States; specifically with respect to the fair standards of safe labor, the regulation of the operations of trusts, corporations, cartels, trade unions and other such commercial combinations.

§ Three: The Congress shall have the power to establish a national bank.

Eighteenth Amendment (Ratified October 7th, 1912)

§ One: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

§ Two: The right of citizens to form associations within and between political parties shall not be infringed. Neither the United States, nor any State, shall prohibit electoral fusion as a matter of free association in all elections.

§ Three: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

 

[Aelita]

Excerpt from "The First World War," An EBC 1 documentary series, 5 July 2014

Episode I: The Road to War
​

Iconic archival footage from the Battle of Somme plays, depicting a mass of British soldiers emerging from the trenches to charge across no man's land. Whistles, gunfire and incoherent shouts are dubbed over.

NARRATOR​

Four and a half years of war. Over nine million soldiers dead on the battlefields. Seven million civilians perish. The map of Europe is redrawn. Old empires die, new nation-states emerge. A grand experiment in social revolution begins in what was once the Russian Empire.​

FOCUS ON:​

A map of the infamous Schlieffen Plan, depicting the movement of German armies through neutral Belgium to outflank the French Army

TITLE CARD: "The First World War"​

NARRATOR​

How did the world plunge so swiftly from "peace in our time" into the abyss of war? How did the web of alliances grow to ensnare the old United States of America? We all know of the spark that lit the magazine, but in this episode we shall trace how Europe came to be strewn with powder kegs.​

CUT TO:​

A re-enactor in costume of KAISER WILHELM II sits at the head of the table while various government ministers flank him. Toy battleships litter the table.

CUT TO:​

Historian JOHN DERBY* sits in front of a camera.

DERBY​

The origins of the First World War go back decades, and while it would be impossible to list them all, the ascension of Kaiser Wilhelm II to the throne of the German Empire is among the most important turning points. The previous Kaiser, Frederick III, had reigned for only ninety days before his untimely death. Wilhelm II inherited an empire that had no serious enemies and quite strong allies thanks to the diligent work of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The impetuous Wilhelm II chose to sack Bismarck and pursue a new course.​

INTERVIEWER​

You make him sound very foolish.​

DERBY​

(Laughs) Well, he very much was. He had a cavalier attitude that oft caused trouble, and it took a great deal of effort on the part of his ministers to rein in his passions. Wilhelm II wished to intervene on behalf of Spain in the Spanish-American War, hoping that the war would humble the young upstart U.S. and perhaps gain access to the West Indies in the trade.​

CUT TO:​

An infographic plays, displaying the result of the Spanish-American War. After, an overlay displays the relative naval strength of the various powers.

NARRATOR​

The Royal Navy had by tradition maintained a "two-power" standard, maintaining in peacetime a fleet sufficient to defeat the next two largest naval powers. When Wilhelm II signed the First Imperial Naval Law in 1898, the planned fleet of 19 battleships and 12 armored cruisers did not change the balance of power in Europe.​

The launching of SMS Pommern, with Kaiser Wilhelm II in attendance, circa 1905.

NARRATOR​

A second Naval Law is passed just two years later, doubling the authorized strength of the Kaiserliche Marine. The naval arms race begins. Advances in gunnery and technology will intensify this race.​

The HMS Dreadnought at sea, eight of her ten 12-inch guns firing a broadside volley.

NARRATOR​

In a single stroke, the HMS Dreadnought renders all existing capital ships obsolete. A double-edged sword, such a revolution she was she reset the arms race to zero.​

WIPE TO:​

The commissioning of the SMS Nassau, Germany's first dreadnought battleship, with the commissioning of the USS Kansas, America's own first dreadnought in shown in a split screen to contrast the two events.

NARRATOR​

Events would conspire to bring two emerging world industrial powers into conflict.​

Naval historian JEAN-MARIE BENOIT* sits behind two scale replica battleships, the Brazilian Minas Geraes and the Argentinian Rivadavia. He speaks in Received Pronunciation with a noticeable French lilt.

BENOIT​

The richer states in South America are at each other's throats at this time. The arrival of the Dreadnought revolution gives them a new way to tip the balance. Brazil orders her own dreadnought, the world-class Minas Gareas with her twelve 30cm guns. This forces a response from Argentina. Both Germany and the United States are interested.​

WIPE TO:​

American president Taft attends the launching of the USS Mississippi, an eight gun dreadnought.

BENOIT (VOICE-OVER)​

There was an intense bidding process, and it caused multiple political conflicts within Argentina and the United States. In spite of the ability of the hyperefficient National Steel trust to provide cheap, high quality steel, ultimately the Argentine minister of war's preference for a unified logistics train won out, and the Rivadavia was ordered from Wilhelmshaven in Germany.​

CUT TO:​

A map of the Western hemisphere detailing spheres of interest, with American ones in focus.

NARRATOR​

The United States had long held to a policy called the Monroe Doctrine, echoes of which still guide policy in Soviet America. Old World influence in the New World was to be resisted, and Kaiser Wilhelm II's influence in Argentina was seen as a direct violation of this doctrine. The United States begins to align more closely with its largest trade partner, Great Britain.​

CUT TO:​

JOHN DERBY sits with the British archival copy of the Treaty of Toronto.

DERBY​

What we see following the Argentine crisis is a United States government increasingly conscious of its world interests. Not only did she greatly increase the pace of battleship construction, but she looked to strengthen economic and military ties with the United Kingdom. This was mutual beneficial, as the Royal Navy could free itself from having to prepare against the United States as a potential threat, to focus on the German Navy, while the US Navy was able to benefit from the immense experience the Royal Navy had to offer.​

Excerpt from "The Mexican Revolutions: 1910-1934", secondary school textbook , c. 1998

[...] The overriding goal of Germany during the reign of Wilhelm II was acquiring Germany's "time in the sun", by building an empire to match or even eclipse Britain's. Key to this was acquiring leverage and building a base of power in the Americas, long firmly in the Anglo-American sphere of influence. Though Wilhelm was unable to get his war for Spain's sake in 1898 due to the admiralty feeling unready for such a conflict, the dream of getting Germany a "seat at the table of the new world" never vanished.

The first step was then getting Germany's foot into the door in the south American Dreadnought race, known as the "ABC" (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) powers of the continent looked to modernise their militaries and establish themselves as first rate powers with first rate navies. Due to extensive pitches by German arms' manufacturers beforehand, Argentina was already making heavy usage of German equipment, settling Argentina on a course of acquiring warships from the Kaiserreich. This culminated in the sale of the battleship Rivadavia and her sister Moreno, bouying German finances and was seen as a diplomatic coup in Berlin.

However in the halls of Parliament and Congress, this would be seen with great concern. This was nothing less than a direct attack on the "informal empire" of Britain's trade domination over South America and America's mandate to keep out the old powers of Europe from the New World specified in the monroe doctrine. Germany's announcement of further plans to cultivate ties in the new world would only harden opinions about "the Prussian scheme' as it was called at the time; the establishment of German domination over much of the Americas south of the Rio Grande.

With the success in Argentina, German Foreign Minister Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter soon paid attention to events in Mexico and its ongoing revolution. In particular, they were focused on [Victoriano] Huerta, who had already begun his plot with [Bernard] Reyes and [Felix] Diaz against [President Francisco] Madero.

Huerta, thus, gained the help of German ambassador Heinrich von Eckardt in his plot against Madero. With Eckardt's help and assurances of support from the German government, Huerta, Reyes and Diaz were able to proceed with the coup in February, 1912. [1]

[....]

After Huerta's coup and execution of Madero and [Vice President José María Pino] Suarez and assumption of the Presidency , President William Howard Taft was alerted to the involvement of Eckhardt and subsequently, the German government in these events. After the embarrassment in Argentina, the administration was now faced with German intervention across their very own border.

Taft thus refused to recognize Huerta's presidency, and enacted an embargo against Mexico. Tensions increased between the US and Mexico, especially since Huerta was receiving German aid and weapons, which circumvented the embargo. After the rising of the Constitutionalist Army under [Venustiano] Carranza, the US backed them against Huerta.

German interference within the Mexican Revolution, as well as their growing relationship with Argentina, led Taft to an anti-German foreign policy, and building ties with the United Kingdom against them. This would culminate in the 1912 Toronto Treaty, which established economic and military cooperation between the US and the UK. Most importantly, its secret protocols stated that the US will back the UK in a defensive struggle against the German Empire…..

[*] Asterisks by a name is our convention for indicating that a person has no OTL analogue.
[1] Much earlier than OTL

 

[Instant Sunrise]

Excerpt from City of Quartz by Mike Davis (1990, New Left Books, New York)

The City of Los Angeles was somewhat unique, in that it had lower levels of unionization prior to the revolution. This is largely due the active efforts by the Merchants & Manufacturers Association to dilute the power of unions across the country. In Los Angeles, the three most prominent members of the M&MA was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, self-proclaimed General Harrison Gray Otis, Felix Zeehandelaar, and Pacific Electric Railway owner Henry Huntington. The M&MA was not opposed to unions per se, they just opposed strikes, boycotts, picket lines, collective bargaining, or anything that would make a union actually effective.

Otis in particular was vehement in his anti-union beliefs, and forced the Los Angeles Times to print story after story about the evils of unions.

At one o'clock in the morning on October 1st, 1910, three bombs exploded n Los Angeles. One exploded at the Los Angeles Times' office, killing approximately 20 workers, one exploded at the home of the Times' publisher, the self-proclaimed General Harrison Gray Otis, and one at the home of M&MA secretary Felix Zeehandelaar. Otis survived the blast by sheer luck and quickly pinned the responsibility for the attack on the city's labor movement. Two brothers, James and John MacNamara, were arrested and dragged out a meeting of the Iron Workers Union in Indianapolis, and without even allowing them to see a lawyer, extradited them back to California.

While many in Los Angeles had been sympathetic to the plight of the 20 workers who had died in the bombing, the face of a relentless propaganda campaign by the Times and Otis, along with his support for the "open-shop" movement, convoked many residents that the bombing had been a frame-up. Eugene V. Debs even privately speculated that Otis himself had planted the bomb to discredit the labor movement.

Job Harriman, the Socialist Candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, had agreed to represent the brothers, convinced of their innocence.

The resulting show trial for the MacNamara brothers was one of the most shamelessly naked attempts at suppressing the city's burgeoning labor movement. Anything and everything that had ever happened in Los Angeles up until that point was pinned on the two brothers and subsequently on the labor movement as a whole.

AFL president Samuel Gompers, fearing that this trial might encourage more workers to take up arms against the state, asked his friend Clarence Darrow to assist in the defense of the MacNamara brothers.

After arriving in Los Angeles, Darrow met with the prosecutors prior to speaking to Harriman or the MacNamara brothers. While the contents of that meeting might never become known, what happened next was that Darrow held a closed-door meeting with the brothers, excluding Harriman.

At the next hearing, the MacNamara brothers surprised everybody, including Job Harriman, by changing their plea to guilty. They were sentenced to life in the then-notorious San Quentin prison.

Convinced that a long trial would irreparably damage the labor movement, Darrow had secretly arranged for a plea bargain, if he could get the brothers to plead guilty, the prosecutor and judge would not give them the death penalty.

The rest of the newspapers had rallied behind Otis. The General, now even more righteous in his anti-socialist beliefs, turned the Los Angeles Times into his own propaganda mill, turning many in the city against their fellow workers.

Job Harriman's mayoral campaign had been sunk by the outcome of the trial. For most in Los Angeles, this had created a deep scar against the labor movement. Those who still believed that the brothers were innocent had placed the blame squarely on the AFL for sending two innocent men to prison.

———

Most of this is taken directly from OTL, except that OTL only the bomb at the Times office went off, the other two were overwound and didn't go off at the right time, causing them to be found before they went off.

 

[Aelita]

Notable events, 1913

January 1: The Chinese Exclusion Act expires in a calculated political move to divide organized labor.

January 12: Bolshevik activist Josef Dzhugashvili publishes for the first time under the nom de guerre Stalin, meaning "steely."

January 30: The Extraordinary Ninth Congress of the Second International meets in Basel to discuss growing tensions between the great powers and the series of crises that warned of a coming war. The parties resolve to oppose any imperialist wars.

February 9: A massive meteor precession is seen across most of North America. It is notable in that it appears to have no apparent source.

February 17: President Taft signs the National Defense Act of 1913 into law. The act would double the size of the standing army to 200,000 men, and quadruple the size of the National Guard to 450,000 men by 1916. Other provisions included federalization of the National Guard units, a reserve officer training program, and an enlisted reserve.

February 27: USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) is laid down at Newport News on an accelerated timetable.

March 4: William Howard Taft is sworn into his second term as President of the United States. The 62nd United States Congress opens its session with James R. Mann elected First Secretary.

March 12: Emiliano Zapata's Liberation Army of the South forms a coalition with the Constitutionalist Army of Venustiano Carranza. Though wary of American involvement in the form of advisors and cavalry, the resources it brings is welcome against Huerta's regime floating on a German line of credit.

March 22: After assassinating political opponent Prime Minister Song Jiaoren, President Yuan Shikai begins plotting a repression of the KMT and the National Assembly, and establishing an autocracy over the Republic of China.

April 7: Ford Motor Company introduces the moving assembly line in automobile construction, reducing chassis assembly time from 12 hours to just under 3.

April 18: Mexican autocrat Victoriano Huerta conducts a purge of suspected collaborators with rebel forces.

May 1: The largest May Day parades yet in the United States take a more galvanized tone, with much of the focus turning to anti-militarism.

May 10: The Rite of Spring, a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky, debuts in Paris

May 19: R. J. Reynolds introduces the Turkish-style Pharoah, the first prepackaged cigarette brand.

May 22: Under intense political pressure, the US Supreme Court refuses to grant certiorari to a case challenging the constitutionality of state laws prohibiting "yellow dog contracts" that prohibit workers from unionizing. Progressive leaders hope that avoiding an extension on Adair v. United States, 208 U.S. 161 (1908) will take the fire out of the socialist labor movement.

May 30: Chicago city police mutiny over orders to protect strikebreakers in the Chicago railway strike. Expecting a brutal slugging match, many units fail to deploy, and a few brave souls cross the barricade. The remaining loyal cadres fail to break the picket lines, leading to an explosion of rioting in the streets. The breakdown of public order ends with the mobilization of the National Guard and the personal intervention of the Illinois State Governor. Twenty five rail workers are killed in the unrest, many by the National Guard.

June 3: After a meeting in London, the Ottoman Empire and the coalition of Balkan states opposing it come to a peace treaty, where the Ottoman Empire recognizes the independence of Albania, but leaves the Balkan states to decide the borders between itself outside of Ottoman-occupied Thrace. Serbia and Greece divide the region amongst themselves, leaving Macedonia in Serbian hands. Bulgarian resentment over the deal sows the seeds for the Second Balkan War.

June 15: Police in Indianapolis raid the Iron Workers Union in response to the Los Angeles Times bombing in 1910. Charges are leveled against 54 workers. Ultimately, 38 of them would be convicted and sentenced.

June 19: The Naval Act of 1913 is ratified. The US Congress authorizes the construction of sixteen battleships, six battlecruisers, twenty cruisers and seventy destroyers to be completed by 1919.

June 30: Bulgaria launches an invasion of Serbia and Greece, attempting to conquer Serbian-occupied Macedonia. The counterattack is quickly repulsed, and only grows more dire when Romania intervenes over disputes in Southern Dobruja.

July 18: The Socialist Labor Party strikes a major blow by succeeding in organizing mine workers in West Virginia coal country across racial lines. Black "scabs" brought in to force a resolution to the the general strike join white coal miners at the picket line.

July 19: The Aviation Section is established as part of the Signal Corps of the US Army. Under the terms of the National Defense Act, the reorganization allows expansion in men and planes while solving the organizational issues that hampered the previous Aeronautical Division.

July 20: After a series of defeats against the Greek, Serbian and Romanian armies, the Ottoman Empire launches an invasion of eastern Bulgaria in an effort to reclaim pre-war borders.

August 3: The California Farm Strike starts following the abuse of agricultural workers in Wheatland. The Agricultural Workers' Organization demands the release of arrested workers from Ralph Durst's hop farm, and the removal of the local sheriff. Following pressure from the governor to restore order, the demands are met within the week.

August 10: A peace treaty to end the Second Balkan War is signed in Bucharest. After Romanian armies nearly marched on Sofia, the Bulgarian government resigned and Tsar Ferdinand I agreed to a peace treaty. Bulgaria agreed to cede Thessaloniki and its surrounding areas to Greece, South Dobruja to Romania, and much of central Macedonia to Serbia. Bulgaria had failed to achieve any of its war goals and had its population reduced by 3.5 million.

August 12: The Jewish Labor Bund of America is founded in New York City as part of the Socialist Labor Party.

September 9: The first commercial plant for the production of fertilizer using the Haber process opens in Oppau.

September 14: Mohandas Gandhi, a young Indian lawyer in South Africa, is arrested while leading a march of Indian miners in protest of a tax on all former indentured servants.

September 17: The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith is founded in Chicago.

September 29: The Treaty of Constantinople, concerning the border between Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire is signed. Bulgaria recognizes the gains made by the Ottoman Empire during the war, most notably the city of Edirne, and agrees to reestablish ties. Most of the cessions are reversed when Bulgaria joins the Central Powers.

October 3: The Revenue Act of 1913 raises federal income tax rates while lowering basic tariff rates to levels set by the Treaty of Toronto.

October 31: Streetcar employees in Indianapolis win significant compromise on wages and time off, avoiding a walkout. The city government cooperates over fears of widespread police mutiny, a major crack in the edifice of state.

November 2: With an influx of recent Chinese immigrants leaving the turmoil of the Xinhai Revolution, the Socialist Labor Party of California establishes a Chinese language section.

November 27: The Chilean battleship Almirante Latorre is launched at the Fore River Shipyard, Massachusetts.

December 4: Royal Navy attaches begin consulting with the US Navy's Board of Construction on battlecruiser design.

December 21: American writer Ambrose Bierce begins a serialized account of his experiences in the Mexican Revolution, travelling with Pancho Villa.

December 25: Christmas is celebrated throughout the United States and much of Western Europe..

 

[Aelita]

Like the Snows of Yesteryear…

President Taft's 1914 State of the Union address talked of "peace and prosperity in our time", and promised that his administration's policies would be directed towards promoting those ends for the nation. As the thunderous applause in the halls of Congress died down, the grim execution of this promise lay but a few months away.

On 28 June, a group of Serbian nationalists carried out an ill-planned and ill-conceived assassination in the streets of Sarajevo. Their target, Austro-Hungarian heir apparent Franz Ferdinand, was fatally shot that afternoon by the young Serb Gavrilo Princips. Austria's rapid mobilization to punish independent Serbia soon triggered a Russian mobilization. France soon followed, calling up reserves in preparation for a general European war.

Germany, the growing titan of central Europe, mobilized in response to the threats against her ally Austria. Diplomatic efforts to halt the plunge towards war soon became mere token formalities given the nature of the revanchist regime in France, and as ultimatums were left unheeded a general state of war across the whole of Europe followed. The European parties of the Second Internationale, in spite of their commitments in the 1912 extraordinary world congress, all capitulated within days, voting for war credits.

Germany soon invaded the Low Countries as part of the later infamous Schlieffen Plan. Their aim was to move mass columns of troops across France's undefended Belgian border to outflank French static defenses, followed by a deep salient penetration to capture Paris and end the war in the west. The violation of Belgian neutrality provoked Britain to declare war on Germany. The Schlieffen Plan would also export this European war across the Atlantic, to Canada and even the United States, which hitherto had always committed itself to general neutrality to European affairs.

According to the 1912 Toronto Treaty, passed in a closed session of the U.S. Senate, the United States would stand in solidarity with the UK if ever the neutrality of a British ally was violated resulting in a state of invasion or occupation. While the clauses of this treaty allowed the U.S. to remain neutral in most possible European conflagrations, the language of the treaty clearly applied to the Belgian question. President Taft, in a speech to a joint session of Congress, argued that the terms of the treaty made the U.S. at a de facto state of war with the German Reich.

A resolution formalizing the state of war was soon passed, with the Socialist Labor Party standing in firm opposition along with a few dissident members of the Democratic Party, as well as the last remainder of the populist-progressive wing of the Republican Party. The vote for war mobilization soon followed, this time with the Socialist Labor Party standing alone in opposition to committing to the imperialist slaughter.

The Schlieffen Plan required that the French military be committed elsewhere to ensure its resolution. In a rare coincidence, French war planners obliged their German counterparts with General War Plan XVII. Under the mobilization scheme of the plan, the French military would concentrate on the narrow frontier between Germany and France and begin an assault into Alsace-Lorraine, under German occupation since 1871.

By the end of the year, neither France nor Germany succeeded in accomplishing their primary objectives. The Schlieffen Plan, for all of its precision, was logistically impossible. In spite of the efforts of the best logisticians the world had to offer, there simply were not enough roads and rail to move troops and supplies fast enough to exploit the breach. Both sides had fundamentally underestimated the ferocity of modern warfare. When the lines stabilized in the Winter of 1914-5, both the French and the Germans had completely exhausted their pre-war ammunition stockpiles, especially for the increasingly vital artillery.

In spite of noted successes in the Lorraine campaign, French troops were by and large stuck back in the massive frontier fortifications. On the left flank of the growing trench line, the German military was camped uncomfortably close to Paris, and large portions of French industry were now in German hands.

The days of wars decided by brilliant leaders and decisive battles were as dead as the one million soldiers killed in the Frontier battles. In spite of the stigma of incompetence given to WWI generals, both the Allies and the Central Powers displayed a level of professionalism in stark contrast to the experience of previous wars. It could even be argued that, on the whole, both sides did the best they could with the resources they had.

Stabilization of the Frontier, Winter 1914-5, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the History Department of the United States Military Academy.​

Excerpt from James P. Cannon, Days in Red: A Memoir, (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, Chicago, 1969).

…The vote on [President] Taft's mobilization bill was scheduled for the second day of new Congressional term. Fresh from his party's election victory, he expected [House Speaker] Fred Gillett to comply with his bill with no debate and at all due haste. Of course, we had other plans. The Party's Central Committee voted unanimously to call for a nationwide general strike of all of the affiliates the week before the opening of the new Congress. I can still remember being on the picket lines in front of the steel mills that day.

…The working class unity was amazing. For the first time that I could recall, black and white, native and foreigner agreed to put aside all differences, if only for this one moment in time. Even though the horrors of the First World War had yet to be revealed to anyone so far from the fronts, the great fear of another major war, begun for seemingly no reason other than to ensure that bankers would get a return on their loans, quickly turned into anger and, for the moment, a galvanized resolve to oppose the war.

…We got exactly what we wanted; we gave them pause for debate. However, the general strike turned out to be a sword that cut both ways. Until now, the political classes had been apathetic about the rise of industrial unionism and the Socialist Labor Party. It was all too easy to give ground and let the radicals recruit another worker than to deal with them in any concerted fashion either through terror or appeasement. Our united front had unwittingly unleashed the largest domestic terror and propaganda war by any State extant in the world at the time.

When we would not be complicit in the march to war, they killed us by the hundreds. Even the police and Pinkertons, never a friend to the workingman, grew sick from the violence and bloodshed. When we would not volunteer, they drafted us into the military. The capitalists and their lackeys controlled the draft boards. To destroy the workers' movement, they arranged to have rabble-rousers and leaders in the unions be selected. On the oath of some fink for the boss, I was ordered to muster for service in the Army of the United States. They thought some military discipline would beat the communist out of us. Based on my own experience and the men I served with in France, I'd say it had rather the opposite effect. America would enter the war with a professional bourgeois army and navy. When the armistice was signed, America had a communist army and a syndicalist navy. It rather came back to haunt them in thirteen years' time.

Excerpts from Patton's War Diaries, 1915-1919, by Martin Bluemenson, Ed. (Washington State University Press, 1972).

3 August 1914

Was ecstatic today to learn that we [America] would go to war against Kaiser Billy soon. It would be a great tragedy to miss out on the great War of this generation. And to be doing it for such a noble cause should be the dream of every Christian soldier to fight and die for. It will be some time before we actually can ship out, and I do feel anxious about leaving my young wife so soon, but I have talked to her about it and she feels filled with pride that her husband has such devotion to duty. An acquaintance at the officer's club informed me that such a sentiment is unlikely to last, and since he is many years my senior I am inclined to trust him on the matter. But her heart is in the right place.

I read this morning that the damned Socialist leader Debs had pledged to do everything in his power to stop the war. Such a prominent firebrand of a leader speaking such things on the eve of war ought to be put up against a wall. But I am told that only the savage nations permit such practices, and I will leave the matter at that…

2 December 1914

…Also informed of possible promotion today. With the mobilization for war, the Army is forming cadres for new units. Would have rather learned that promotion had come because of merit rather than a sudden urgent need for more First Lieutenants. But I won't say no to company XO if offered.

5 April 1915

Currently aboard ship headed for France. The [American Expeditionary Force] I am told will be deploying on the line somewhere, though for obvious reasons I still do not know where. One of the more cynical lieutenants remarked that the whole A.E.F. was nothing more than a propaganda ploy. Suspect him of being a Socialist subversive, though I am wondering if he is how he made it through West Point. He carries the air of the professional, educated soldier, though I wonder if it is indeed just cynicism on his part.

4 June 1915

Haven't written for several days. Still trying to make sense of it all. Our first action began on the 28th of May. We just arrived on the line to reinforce French push at Artois. We began the campaign with much enthusiasm; the news had told us the French were nearing a breakthrough and we were eager to push through the breach…On the front, the sound of the shelling was everywhere. I had never imagined warfare quite like this. Our battalion would lead the charge. We went over the wall that morning, running through the fog over the broken earth. We covered no-man's-land quickly, and encountered minimal resistance from the Huns. We neutralized their remaining machine gunners with minimal casualties and took their first trench with little difficulty. No sooner had we prepared to advance further than we came under bombardment. First thought the Frogs had fouled up the operation. But we were soon under massive attack from the Germans. No sooner had the bombardment lifted than we saw waves of gray-uniformed German soldiers charging at us. We fought them off as long as possible, but they had the advantage of numbers and terrain. We were forced to retreat, abandoning all the ground we had gained, leaving behind many of our brothers…
The Germans pressed us until the 1st on the line before the skirmishes stopped. Only just now beginning to make sense of it. We went over the wall with 1,120 men, exactly, as the Mstr. Sgt. informed me. By the time fighting died down, we had just over five hundred battle ready men. At least two hundred were killed in the initial engagement, and the remaining wounded, missing and dead accumulating over the next four days.

30 June 1915

In the battalion infirmary today. The doctors tell me that I suffered "mild exposure" to "chlorine gas" during the fighting. I suppose that means they think I should feel more gracious about my fortune. Ashamed to say that I too retreated from the yellow gas clouds. A week ago, I had no knowledge of any such horrifying weapon. It came on the winds, and wafted into our trenches, and rather than stay and suffocate we all ran. Retreat could have turned into a rout, but the winds reversed just in time, and we rallied to a secondary trench. Still, had to be carried off the lines on a stretcher, in spite of my insistence that I could still walk. Breathing has been more difficult than I've ever known, like being perpetually at a run. My lungs still burn some. I suppose it's Christ's Providence that it wasn't worse. The man in the bed next to me suffocated in the night. Still feel shame over retreating without orders. But men can be fought with bullets and steel, this gas cannot.

9 August 1915

The horrors of this war do not cease. We marched through a ruined French village today, finally leaving the line. What I saw I'll never forget. The little French girl, in torn rags, crushed under the collapsed house, sinking in the mud; must have been killed by artillery bombardment. I can't stop thinking about my little daughters, young Beatrice, and Ruth, whom I have not even been able to see, or to hold yet. What if my daughters, or my wife, or any of my family were killed, an innocent "casualty of war"? I left for France with so much resolve, but my experiences here have given me doubts about our purpose…

…Met a young lieutenant today, one David Eisenhower. In our spare time we took to talking of things we missed back home. He tells me to call him by his boyhood nickname, Ike. I suppose it's easier than picking him out of the many Davids in the world. He's five years my junior, and unmarried, but he's bright and a welcome confidant. Apparently he shares my growing doubts about the war, doubts which we wisely keep to ourselves lest it affect the men's morale. Still, I am sure that our cause is just, even if the outcomes have been unsavory so far. Our road is not an easy one, and we must push onward.

 

[Aelita]

Nineteen-Fifteen: Into the Maelstrom
​

Excerpts from John Keegan, The First World War, (London: Hutchinson, 1998)

Following her induction into the Entente, the United States embarked upon a rapid drive to full wartime mobilisation. America's new parliamentary institutions were strengthened; First Secretary Joseph Cannon, a member of the President's Republican Party, stepped down, and Taft duly appointed Woodrow Wilson to his second tenure as chief of government. Though Wilson was a Democrat, he was the one man with the experience necessary to lead the state in the crucial affair of a national unity government. Wilson's Cabinet, for its part, wasted no time in making itself the focal institution for managing the war effort. Taft's newly created "War Cabinet" was quickly and decisively wrested under the control of the Wilson-Gillett duumvirate.
[...]
The government's political difficulties were, however, immense, in spite of its commanding control of the United States Congress. While the coalition of dissenters, led by the Socialist Labor Party, controlled perhaps, at best, the votes of about 80 representatives and eight senators, the anti-war faction had tapped into massive public support outside the councils of government. Following the successful vote for war credits and military mobilization in early December of 1914, America's radicalized labour federation, the International Workers' Solidarity Union (IWSU) voted to walk out en masse.

The government's reaction to the anti-war strike was swift and brutal. Wilson, for lack of legal options, invoked the state of exception. The federal government quickly assumed extraordinary and extralegal powers to crush the strike. Habeas corpus was suspended, militia and police forces around the country were nationalised, and the army itself was mobilized without regard to Posse comitatus. Order was soon restored, but at a bloody cost. The American rail workers had paralyzed the nation's commerce for almost three weeks, and production nearly stopped altogether in many of the nation's industrial cities.

As part of the state of exception, the increasingly corporatist state assumed a greater role in directing the national economy. American dirigisme quickly crystallised, and the full might of the American economy was quickly marshaled towards war production. The Congress itself, long a target of derision for its rampant infighting, quickly assumed the role of a rubber stamp to the War Cabinet's directives. A slew of new laws, granting new powers to the state over both economic and personal life, were adopted: the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Rationing Act, the Selective Service Act, the Industry and Commerce Act.

All this and more would be necessary. The United States entered the First World War with an army comprised of seven infantry and two cavalry divisions, with scarcely 150,00 men in the whole of the active army. In spite of the massive public diplomacy campaigns to support the mobilization for war, less than ninety thousand young men volunteered for service within three weeks of the declaration of war. Drafts would be necessary to sustain the war effort…
[...]
The mobilisation of industry, proved complicated as well. While the magnates of big business were enthusiastic at the commercial opportunities that the war effort and the powerful War Industries Committee in the Department of Industry would allow, organized labor remained militantly opposed throughout the war. While the major strikes quickly petered out in the face of state repression, small wildcat strikes, work stoppages, "work to code" slowdowns, and absenteeism plagued the mobilized industries. Unions also organized oppositions to recruitment, rationing and state repression of free speech.

---

Excerpts from Boyan Caan*, Fighting Quaker: A Biography of Smedley Butler, (Annapolis: Naval Academy, 1971)

The United States Marine Corps entered the Great War with 712 officers and 16,890 enlisted men. Under pressure from the Entente to commit at least a token force in support of its beleaguered allies, the War Cabinet pledged a number of ships and men to support peripheral campaigns while the it raised the National Army to fighting readiness to deploy to France.
With its deep reserves of professional NCOs, the Marines were the ideal scalpel to be deployed quickly, sending the message of unity after the disastrous setbacks of the frontier battles, which had obliterated significant fractions of French industry and placed the country on the backfoot. As the country mobilized for war, Butler itched with anticipation. As the Marines expanded and called up reserves, his experience fighting the brushfire wars in Latin America earned him the command of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment.

He spent the winter of 1914/15 dividing his time between his family and his cryptic official duties with the newly formed Marine Expeditionary Brigade. Expecting to go to France as part of the American Expeditionary Force, now Lt. Colonel Butler focused his free time on studying French, and socializing with Haitian sailors, hoping to turn his conversational French into mastery by the time of deployment.

To his chagrin, he would learn at Christmas that his unit was to be deployed to Egypt, to begin drilling with Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.
[...]
Butler would find General Sir Ian Hamilton's command mostly agreeable. While initially blanching at the notion of being under foreign command, it was the only way to get into the fight quickly. He would reflect in his memoirs that, "the two months spent marshalling in Egypt were the longest in my life.

Rehearsals, attached to the Australasian Army Corps, took place on 7 April 1915, utilizing the Greek island of Lemnos. The preparations, however, were wanting. Circulars sent from the MEF's general staff painted a picture of the Ottoman Empire as a rotting structure that would collapse as soon as the door was kicked in, Ottoman soldiers as oriental barbarians and ignoramuses.
[...]
The Marine Expeditionary Brigade would land just after dawn on the second day, 26 April 1915, after a failed lobby by Brigadier General Lejeune to join the vanguard of the attack. Butler would arrive with the first wave, wading ashore under Turkish artillery bombardment. The thin beachhead, three and a half kilometers long, and seven hundred meters at the deepest, was hemmed in by elements of the Ottoman 9th and 19th Divisions, under the local command of Colonel Mustafa Kemal.

Stalled far short of their objective, clinging to the reverse slope of the krags overlooking the Aegean, the Australasian Corps was in dire straights. Butler immediately took the initiative, moving his battalion forward to shore up one of the undefended zones of the beach head.

By noon, the Turkish counterattack began. The 19th Division, supported by six battalions of the 9th, advanced under artillery and machine gun cover.They were far from the cravens the British had expected. While short on the modern implements of war, the soldiers themselves were crack riflemen, well disciplined and orderly. The Marine Brigade, similarly understrength in machine guns, held the slopes beneath the 400 Plateau with grim tenacity.

The counterattack did not push the Entente back into the sea. But Kemal's offensive placed constant pressure, pinning the troops to the beachhead. At 1400, Butler was ordered to take the 400 Plateau, thereby relieving pressure on the center of the beachhead. The waning Turkish offensive seemed like an opening, and with the typical enthusiasm of the Marines, Butler roused his troops, declaring that "immortality is just beyond that bluff. It's ours for the taking. Huzzah!"

The attack proceeded with calculated ruthlessness. Though wounded in the initial assault, Butler refused evacuation, and continued to command as the battalion clawed its way forward, pushing the Turks from their positions. At 1430, triumph seemed in reach, until additional Turkish forces moved in to reinforce. Pinned to the plateau, the Marines fought off two attacks, often resorting to shovels and bayonets, until dusk settled.
[...]
The Marines at Gallipoli would endure eight long months of disappointment. Pinned far from objectives, eeking out a few meters of progress at a time proved demoralizing even to the once cavalier Butler. He found the experience seldom pleasant. The genteel British officers, with whom he was expected to socialize, treated Butler and the other Marines like provincial rubes, well beneath their station. He confided that he much preferred the company of his men, or the Australasians, who received similar contempt from the gentry.

Aside from picking up a love of rugby, and a rudimentary grasp of Turkish, Butler generally reflected sourly on his time spent with the MEF, both in the pigheadedness of the leadership and the ill-conceived strategy.

Although the man himself denied it, Marine lore credits Butler for popularizing the moniker batıkurtlar, "western wolves", earned from Turks impressed by the soldierly courage of the Marines, recalling the proverb of the "thick-necked wolf who fights".

---

Excerpt: A selection of posts from the alternatehistory.com discussion titled "Writing a TL – How do I get a Central Powers victory in WW1?"

HerrBean: Hai gaiz, I want to write a TL with a Central Powers victory over the Entente in OTL, but I don't exactly know how to get it. I also want to do something maybe different from other stuff on the subject, but I'm not quite sure what's come before. Here in the DFSR, it's not exactly a very popular subject. Almost taboo really…If there's one thing that's even close to as hated as the Nazis, it's the Hohenzollern Reich.
I think I know where to go with this, but I'm having trouble getting there. Thanks in advance!

LeninsBeard: We can definitely never have too many Germans on this board.
I think the bare minimum consensus that we've reached over the years is that America needs to be kept out of the war. American industrial might and troops definitely stacked things in the Entente's favor. That's not a silver bullet, but definitely a good start. I don't know enough about WW1 to comment further.

Laserz: Well, at the same time, it's become kind of a trope that American neutrality just leads straight to Entente defeat. Even a neutral American is still trading with the French and especially the British, supplying them with arms and credit to support their war effort. I really can't see America's hypercapitalists missing out on that bonanza of buying.
Even if America is neutral at first, they could get drawn in at a later date. The economic reasons for war are pretty plain. Still, having American divisions gone during those crucial days in 1915 and 1916 might mean the Germans can pull of some kind of successful offensive operation. The deteriorating morale of the French army could turn the tide.
IOTL, there was a pretty common complaint among French soldiers that Britain and America would fight the Germans to the last Frenchman, and in a lot of ways, it's unfortunately true. The French received the disproportionate share of the casualties thanks to political pressure to reduce British and American deaths.
Not like it helped all that well. The Americans lost almost a million men in those trenches, largely thanks to idiotic attempts to break trench warfare.

DeOppressoLiber: That's a common misconception about WWI and trench warfare. The large casualties of the war were not due to a military leadership out of touch with reality, but the nature of the ground on the Western Front. In the East, the German Army maintained largely open mobile warfare against the Russians due to the larger frontage and the terrain.
The Franco-German frontier is much smaller. The size of the forces involved, and the tendency of artillery to wreck lines of communication and make supporting your attacks difficult ensured that breakthroughs would be all but impossible until some disruptive technologies could be fielded. That, and the Germans were holding ground that had much of France's core industry. France could only win by repelling the Germans. Attack was absolutely necessary.

---

The Naval War

On 12 January 1915, the American heavy cruiser USS Montana (CA-13) was attacked by a German U-boat approximately 100 kilometers off the Azore Islands. The 14,000 tonne ship, returning from a training cruise, was ambushed just after dawn. She quickly took two torpedoes on her port side. Taking on water rapidly, the Montana began to list heavily. In spite of this, her crew mustered to general quarters, and launched several salvoes from her complement of sixteen 5 inch guns. However, she could not hit the small target presented by the U-Boat's periscope. While the third torpedo missed, a fourth struck her just aft of midships, flooding the main-engineering spaces. She suffered a catastrophic boiler implosion, and quickly foundered. At 10:23 a.m., she slipped under the waves. Less than one quarter of her 859 man complement were rescued.

The naval war against Germany began long before the American Expeditionary Force set foot in France. With Germany's attempted U-Boat blockade of Britain, both economic and military considerations required that the Kaiserliche Marine be driven out of the North Atlantic. It would not do, either for the War Cabinet or American corporate interests, to see millions of dollars of war material end up at the bottom of the Atlantic.

The naval arms building began in earnest. U.S. Steel, chafing under the depressed state of the steel market, soon found an influx of orders for steel to sustain the massive expansion of the American Navy: fifteen new battleships in three classes, all built around an all-or-nothing armor scheme, four main turrets, and top speed of 21 knots; twenty new light cruisers, starting with the Omaha-class, and close to forty new destroyers spread across six classes of "thousand tonner" ships. Taken together with the growing losses of ship tonnage to German submarine warfare, it ensured that the steel industry would remain profitable throughout the war. The beginning of the naval building campaign saw U.S. Steel acquiring a large stake in the Atlantic shipbuilding industry. Naturally, this proved to be quite profitable to the shareholders in the steel cartel.

In February of 1915, the US Navy sortied four of her coal-firing dreadnoughts to Scapa Flow, as a token of American involvement in the war effort. While the four ships were obsolete compared to the fast, oil burning super-dreadnoughts that were the pride of the Home Fleet, they were reliable, and even twelve-inch guns were deadly enough for most purposes. However, it was the symbolism of the act that was most important: the American Navy would stand with the British in defending their home island. And most importantly, the coal-fired ships wouldn't cut into Britain's scarce oil supplies.

War Mobilization

The War Cabinet first met on 14 January 1915. The first item on the agenda was not unexpected, but still controversial. In spite of the general agreement among the assembled leaders of the Democratic and Republican Parties about the need to give the war effort the full resources of the United States, most had reservations about taking the despotic measures against the right to property that would be necessary to mobilize the economy.

The American military itself was tiny and woefully unprepared. Preliminary estimates delivered by the War Department recommended a full twenty-fold expansion of the US Army; the current volunteer rates would not come close to meeting that. The lack of enthusiasm also betrayed a greater problem in the public's lack of confidence in the motivations for war. The Wilson government agreed early on to solve the problem from two fronts. The beginnings of what would be the National Service Act of 1915 were laid down in this first meeting. Under the act, all able-bodied males between the ages of 19 and 31 would be registered for potential service. Exemptions were made for those men who were working in vital war industries. The target set by the War Cabinet in January was to have just under one-million men inducted into the US Army by the end of the year, with a further two million drafted or volunteered by the end of 1916.

Beyond the shortage of men, the US Army was critically short of experienced officers. At the recommendation of the Army Chief of Staff, the Army would transform its light triangular divisions - viz., each division composed of three regiments, each regiment composed of three battalions, etc, into square divisions. This would enabled the few officers with experience in controlling large formations to command the basic building blocks of the army and conserve on high level staff officers. But it would reduce flexibility, and burden commanders with keeping control of a larger number of subunits.

New bureaucracies were created to instill a sense of enthusiasm in the effort into the public. The most powerful of these would be a new Committee for Public Information and its ancillary agencies. Chaired by the journalism magnate George Creel, and including among its members the Secretaries of State, War and Commerce, as well as media moguls such as William Randolph Hearst, the CPI would become a permanent fixture of the American state.

Every form of mass media available, from newspapers and radio, to the burgeoning movie industry, to even dime-store novels, became mobilized for the purpose of dragging an unwilling public into the war effort. The face of Progressivism, upon which most members of the second Wilson government had built their political careers, had changed. Progressivism had been shaped into something gaudy and lethal; equal in militancy to the "Jack-booted Huns" the nation was being mobilized to fight.

For now, the campaigns bore their bitter fruit. The CPI was instrumental in halting the advance of the Socialist Labor Party-led anti-war coalition, and for a time managed to turn the tide of public opinion back against the SLP. The Army and Navy would have their warm bodies to fill their ranks.

But warm bodies were not enough to fight a war, especially a modern one. As the American Expeditionary Force found in its first series of engagements in May-June of 1915, the American Army was woefully unprepared for the tenacity of trench warfare. While the 1st Infantry Division was well trained, and entered with high spirits, the unit entered combat under-equipped in both machine guns and artillery support. Lacking in both number of guns as well as ammunition stocks, 1st Infantry fared poorly in the first engagements in support of the French attacks near Artois.

In all, there was a tremendous burden placed on American industry to support the war effort. By winter of 1914, the federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts had produced some two hundred thousand of the Model 1903 bolt-action rifle, chambered in the .303 Springfield cartridge. The Army would need millions more.

Everything from trench knives to boots, mess kits to artillery guns, would need to be mass-produced in short order to support a modern army that would quickly number in the millions. Mistakes were bound to be made along the way. Production problems, work stoppages, and confusing orders would plague the war industries throughout the war, but most acutely during the crucial first months. While the Army was able to eventually scrape together enough British and French surplus machine guns to supply the six lead divisions of the AEF adequately, the tide of new soldiers coming in the winter and next spring would need an American-built alternative capable of using the same round as the standard battle rifle if the logistic system was to have any chance of coping.

The Browning Model 1915 machine gun was an excellent design, lighter and more reliable than the British Vickers or Maxim guns. However, its production, subcontracted to multiple manufacturers, was plagued by problems in the first runs. Most of the first run, serial numbers 1000 to 27000, faced considerable jamming problems due to tolerance problems, and had to be completely remachined. Other orders were delayed due to machining and assembly line problems.

Production orders with private arms manufacturers such as Colt and Winchester for the M1903 Springfield rifle were further complicated by the British Army's order for several hundred thousand of the Springfield rifles rechambered in the .303 British cartridge. During initial production runs, the receivers were not stamped effectively enough to differentiate the American and British models, and often times large orders of the British model would wind up in the hands of American units and vice-versa.
In spite of the complications, the Department of Industrial Coordination's ever expanding bureaucracy proved efficient in coordinating the war effort and managing the collective affairs of the increasingly top-heavy cartels that dominated the American economy.

The Entente Offensives

At the beginning of 1915, the German Heer occupied a large swath of Northeastern France. Large sections of French industry were under German occupation, and the frontlines themselves were perilously close to Paris. With the French General Staff and government fearing the possibility of a disastrous German breakout, and large portions of the country's warmaking capacity occupied or threatened, it became both politically and militarily imperative to push the Germans back.

In spite of mass strikes and war resistance, a steady stream of American reinforcements began starting in April. While the 1st Infantry Division saw some fighting during June and July, the bulk of the AEF was held in reserve for a fall combined Entente offensive. In late July, the British Army renewed its offensives at the Loos. In August, the French began attacks at Vimy in the North and from the great fortress of Verdun in the South. The AEF joined the offensives at Champagne, with five divisions of green American infantry, supported by a rag-tag collection of French artillery units, and American units utilizing scrounged British and French field guns as well as American guns.

In terms of the cost, in both manpower and equipment, they were staggering failures. The attempts to close the Saint-Mihiel salient south of Verdun received devastating casualties from German artillery and machine guns as they went over the wall into no-man's land. While they succeeded in taking German forward positions by the dawn of the third day, the French army was soon overwhelmed by German counterattacks, which soon pushed into the French front-line trenches and then into the rear. By the time the operation was cancelled in late October, the French Army had suffered over 90,000 casualties against 60,000 German casualties, gaining at best a few meters of ground here and there.

Up North, the British and German offensives, continuations of previous spring offensives, were similarly futile. Tens of thousands of men were lost for no appreciable gain. Neither side seemed capable of breaking the stalemate of trench warfare. The only appreciable progress in the whole of 1915 was in the combined Franco-American offensive at Champagne. In twelve weeks of desperate fighting, the AEF and the French Army pushed the frontlines forward approximately nine kilometers.

American soldiers in particular felt the brunt of the losses. They were literally being killed as fast as reinforcements arrived from across the Atlantic. The American attack, beginning with around 190,000 men in five divisions, would ultimately result in ninety thousand casualties . Reserve units took up the attack as soon as one division was ground to the nub, continuing the maelstrom near to the point of futility. The attack, under the command of French Marshal Joffre, was a political disaster for Franco-American relations. American units, previously under French general command, would be separated in the fallout. American General John Pershing would be placed in command of American forces in Europe. On December 7, the United States Congress authorized the creation of new flag ranks for the Army and Navy, to give American flag officers parity with their Entente counterparts. Pershing would be the first promoted to the rank of General of the Armies of the United States.

 

[Aelita]

Nineteen-Sixteen: Red Blood, Black Earth
​

Excerpt from Henry A. Wallace, Salt of the Earth (Nashville, TN: Pathfinder Press, 1963)

The war, I think, changed everything. I am candidly certain that had not over one million young American boys bled the soil of France red, then life as we know it today would be radically different. I'm sure it is the peculiar navel-gazing of old men and historians to ask what would have happened if some important event were to have been undone, but I cannot help to succumb to the temptation. One thing I do know for sure is that my own part in the war changed my life forever. The deaths of my comrades in the trenches of France and the militarization of society at home are an irrevocable part of me, and without them, I do believe I would have remained a simple farmer, happy with the smell of good tilled earth. I'm sure I would have been happier for it.

…During the 1916 Red Scare, President Taft and all of the kings of mine, rail and factory declared that the Army deployed in France was becoming a "boot camp for communist, socialist and anarchist subversion". I do not know much of other regiments, but that was certainly true of mine. My fellow enlisted men were my teachers in the great school of Marxism, and much of what I am today I learned there. When the "dangerous subversives" and "bomb-throwers" are the only men decrying the insanity of attacking machine guns with the chests of men, of sending men to dark and bloodied battlefields for the purpose of conquest and plunder, of killing our brothers so that the Imperialist scramble can continue unhindered; then we all come to find that perhaps we who went along with the bloodshed were the insane ones, not those who denounced it.

Excerpt from Barry Goldwater, The Last Days of the Republic (Havana: Freedom Press, 1961)

It became very clear by 1916 that the Republic that our Founding Fathers had labored so hard to build, placing all the best hopes for humanity in, was entering its twilight years. A great proletarian mass from below, driven by immigrant anarchists, foreign agitators and home-grown demagogues, had come to reject the Enlightenment liberal values of the nation. Set against them, the great captains of industry had too forgotten what had made America great. Caught in between the great tides of Communism and Corporatism, the Constitution could not long endure.

Nevertheless, it became quite clear that the proletarian agitators were the aggressive party. The nation, caught in a war against Prussian militarism, found itself facing a great treasonous uprising among the unwashed masses. Rather than wage a war for liberty, they waged a class war against the Republic and the Constitution. It is no hypocrisy for those who defend liberty to use all means at their disposal to destroy the forces that threaten liberty. The Communists who accuse the War Government of being "proto-fascists" had far less noble aims than the government they betrayed.

Starting with the so-called "Bloody Valentine Raids", the government aimed to suppress such seditious conduct by the Socialist Labor Party. Of the thousands of party activists and leaders arrested under the Espionage and Conspiracy Acts, not a single one of them was guilty of anything less than seditious libel, and a fair number of them were guilty of outright treason. While the leaders of Congressional opposition could not be arrested under federal law, thanks to the immunity granted to them by the very Constitution they sought to destroy, the National Executive of the Party and of the trade union congress were arrested.

While a number remained fugitives of justice until the granting of amnesty post-war, the party itself was decisively crippled during the state of emergency. But rather than destroy it outright, the leaders of the nation shirked at the duty they had to defend the constitution, and allowed the party itself to remain. By failing to destroy the organizational base, and arresting moderate "yellow socialists" alongside hardened reds, the noble cause of defending the Constitution would only serve to unite and further radicalize the forces that opposed the Republic.

Excerpt from Alan Smithy, The Twilight of the Law: The Legal Degeneration of the Old Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975)

In 1916, Charles Schenck was General Secretary of the Socialist Labor Party of America. As part of his political duties, Schenck was responsible for printing, distributing and mailing party literature – in this case, leaflets advocating that American proletarians refuse to submit to conscription to fight in the First World War. Because of its principled opposition to the First World War, the party had found unprecedented growth, tapping into a powerful popular discontent with what was viewed as an imperialist war.

For exercising what he believed to be his constitutional right, protected by the First Amendment of the 1787 Constitution, Schenck was indicted and convicted under the Espionage Act of 1915.[1] Upon appeal, the case made itself all the way to the Supreme Court. It is here that the eminent Justices of the Supreme Court stepped into the breach, not to protect the rights of a citizen of the United States, but to affirm evermore that war is the health of the state. The case of Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S 47 (1917), represents a tortuous legal opinion that failed to articulate a credible standard in determining the free speech protections enjoyed by residents of the United States.

The "Clear and Present Danger" test put forth by Schenck was never applied in contemporary or subsequent jurisprudence.[2] The "Bad Tendency" test put forth by the subsequent case Eugene Debs v. United States, 249 US 211 (1917) gave even less protection to free speech. The overturn of precedent in mere months undermined the credibility of the Court's implied position as an impartial arbiter of the law. As the legal logic of the Schenck case will show, maintaining the conviction and punishment of dissenters was a higher priority than the consistent application of the Court's own legal standards.

In Schenck, the esteemed so-called liberal Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes freely admitted that "in ordinary times" Schenck would have been perfectly within his rights in saying all that was said in the pamphlets he distributed, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1917). It is here that Holmes utters the famous analogy, that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."

Thus begins the false dilemma, expertly crafted to nullify the right of political speech whenever the state has declared an emergency, wartime or otherwise. However, Holmes paints us a picture, not of a man expressing his dissatisfaction at a nation being ram-rodded into a war it had no stake in, but rather of a bomb-throwing anarchist; a menace to society whose words are weapons against the state. True, Holmes lays out a fairly succinct and clear standard. As he writes; "The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

What "substantive evil" might there be in this case that we should so devoutly wish that Congress use all the majesty and might of the state to prevent? Holmes does not elaborate beyond the obstruction of recruitment into the armed forces. Truly a great evil that Schenck might dissuade people from being sent off to by truckloads to die in the mud of northern France in a war that was being waged for economic interests.

It is quite telling that Holmes offers no concrete example in the Opinion of the Court as to what way the exercise of Schenck's political speech – opposing a war that was absolutely lethal to working class soldiers – might threaten the state. The United States was not under the threat of invasion. To the extent that the United States was directly threatened came only from the sinking of American merchantmen at sea – merchantmen who were shipping war material to Great Britain flying the flag of Mexico, a supposedly neutral country, in direct violation of the laws of war. It is simply taken, ipso facto, that to dissent in time of war constitutes a seditious crime against the state. This was a total violation of the Court's assumed role as a guardian and fair arbiter of the law.

It was during times of war that the fundamental liberties protected by the Bill of Rights were needed the most. The text of the First Amendment stated very plainly that "Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." It made absolutely no mention that these rights only apply in peacetime. It did not say that speech is free unless it is speech that is dangerous to the state.

In the total absence of precedent, the Court set out – in the midst of the First World War – not to impartially interpret the law, not to protect the rights of the citizenry; but rather to find whatever rationalization possible to ensure that the enemies of the state were punished. The Court applied two separate standards in the three largest cases it saw of this type, all within a single year. The clear chilling effect upon free speech is plain to see. In the case of Debs v. United States, the plaintiff, Eugene Debs, then four time Socialist Labor Party candidate for president, had very carefully tailored his speech to avoid prosecution under the Espionage Act. It was to no avail. The so-called liberal Holmes did his patriotic duty, and found Debs guilty of intending to obstruct recruitment on the flimsiest of grounds, 249 U.S. 211, 212-4 (1917).

There can be no doubt that the Court had no lofty minded goals in its conduct of the free speech trials. The standard of "clear and present danger" put forth in Schenck was articulated in bad faith, inconsistently applied, and then unceremoniously abandoned the moment it was no longer useful in upholding the convictions of enemies of the state. It was not as though the facts of the case were not properly understood by the Court. The facts themselves were irrelevant in the face of the necessity of protecting the state's use of terror against dissidents. Schenck and the related cases were not just bad law; they represent a total abdication by the Court, and thus of the rule of law itself, to the political class and the state. The Court fulfilled its most basic, never admitted role: perpetuating the state and the class that controls it. Holmes et al. did their patriotic duty to the Fatherland in clear violation of their duty to the rule of law. Perhaps what is most illustrative of these cases and the abject failure of the rule of law is that they have proven it does not matter if the Emperor has no clothes. In the very speech that resulted in his conviction, Debs noted that "Every single one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers declares himself to be an arch-patriot." It was not just the political branches of government that were guilty of betraying the public to serve narrow class interests. The Supreme Court made itself a willing accomplice as well.

The War on the Front

It was a badly hidden secret that all the various armies on the Western Front were in bad shape by 1916. The front-line divisions of all of the belligerents had been ground into dust months ago; the French Army held on with poorly trained reservists and new call-ups. The British Army's entire professional core was gone; either dead or incapacitated or watered down to provide NCOs for the waves of the recently conscripted. The US Army fared no better. The professional core had been pulverized, and while the new waves of conscripts were better equipped with machine guns and artillery than they had been in 1915, morale had plummeted.
In May 1916, the French Army began its costly attempt to break out from the fortress town of Verdun. The German Heer, predictably, gave ground stubbornly and at great cost to the French. The German commanders, having lost the initiative in the West, were determined to wage a battle of attrition against the Entente.
The main action of the year, however, would be the bloodiest single battle of the war: The Somme. On June 1, the American and French armies began a joint offensive, supported by the largest artillery bombardment yet seen. It would not be enough. While the American and French units were better equipped with artillery and ammunition, they lacked a sufficient number of heavy guns to destroy the well-prepared German bunkers. Further, the gunners lacked sufficient accuracy to drop shells to maximum effect on the front.

In spite of an average of fifty tonnes of explosives and shrapnel being dropped on each kilometer of front, many of the frontline soldiers survived the barrage in their deep dug-outs, and savaged the infantry in no-man's-land as soon as the barrage lifted. In spite of the outright failures of the initial attacks, the assaults continued until November, with the Heer giving ground slowly and at great cost.

In late July, the British Army under General Haig joined the battle on the northern flank, hoping to provide the extra push necessary to collapse the German defenses. Unfortunately for the Entente, the British proved no more effective than their American or French allies, and were similarly savaged. While the British Army fielded its wonder weapon, the tank, in September, this proved to be entirely underwhelming, and had very little effect on the outcome of the battle. Many of the tanks broke down before they reached the starting line, and those that did begin the assault could not sustain the offensive. But, in spite of this, the tank proved to be an effective terror weapon, and the proof of concept had been made.

Both the American and French armies soon formed their own tank corps. However, the bodies continued to pile up at the Somme. By the time the offensives ceased in early November, there were over 900,000 casualties for the Entente, and perhaps 600,000 for the Germans. Little more than 13 km at the deepest penetration, the Somme was a catastrophic debacle. However, the German army could little afford the causalities either. The Somme truly represented the attritional phase the war had entered.

The State of Exception on the Home Front

By September, it was abundantly clear to the War Cabinet that the political costs of the war had become astronomical. The upcoming general election would likely result in a disastrous political defeat for the National Unity Government. With the continuing bloody nose at the Somme, the debacle at Jutland, and the seething unrest at home, the government was faced with politically catastrophic consequences.

Thus Wilson did what had been previously unthinkable: dozens of opposition Congressional candidates were arrested and held without trial by federal and state police. Patriotic citizen groups brutalized Socialist Labor Party gatherings, and attempted to suppress the vote in November. And the truly unheard of happened: Democrats and Republicans did not stand for election against each other.

Such brutal, unconstitutional exercises of power were justified, as always, to defend the Constitution and the state against a clear and present danger.
However, as always, there was skullduggery afoot, even within the National Unity government. President Taft declined Wilson's proposal that he run for a third term as president. In a seeming gesture of goodwill, Taft instead offered for the Republican Party to not run a candidate in the 1916 election, and instead back prominent Democrat Thomas R. Marshall on a unity ticket, with a Republican as his running mate.

While the resulting deals would give the Democratic Party its first taste of power in ages, it would also place the political cost of the war firmly at the feet of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party would quickly capitalize on this after the conclusion of the war, victorious or otherwise, and place the entire blame for the war on the Democrats.

Economically, the American worker was somewhat secure. Unemployment had dropped to 2.5 percent by mid-year 1916, completely unheard of levels. Immigrants from China, Japan, and Latin America were being hired for farm or war industry at the ports of entry to keep up with the demand for labor. With much of France's native industry under German occupation, American industry boomed thanks to the demand generated by French and British orders, themselves buoyed by favorable loans given by American financial institutions and secured by the United States government. And through the central control of war production in the Department of Industrial Coordination, the American industry rapidly transformed itself with the application of scientific management and patent sharing.

Wages ticked up modestly, held down by a mixture of government intervention and public diplomacy. Rationing of many basic consumer goods and food ensured workers and farmers would invest their gains in government bonds to support the war effort. The public face of the system of wage and price controls, rationing, conscription and Taylorism was one of patriotic sacrifice for the freedom of the people of the United States. In practice, the system was immensely corrupt, and the Wilson government made few attempts at seriously curbing it.

The scions of rich and politically connected families received draft deferments, or posts at the much expanded US Military Academy in West Point, all but guaranteeing they would miss the present slaughter. Luxuries of the rich were excluded from rationing, and few local sumptuary ordinances regulating restaurants, which were unrationed, were seriously enforced. A perception of corruption and war profiteering was widespread. An unreasonably high number of defective rifles, machine guns, and munitions made it to the front. Food and clothing for the troops was another target of war profiteering, and the US government's overtaxed resources faced difficulty combating it. In one of its last acts before the 1916 General election, Wilson's government moved to nationalize munition production, to meet demands for quality and quantity that the previous system of subcontracting had failed to do.

The much cowed labor movement made political hay of these scandals, focusing efforts away from direct resistance towards criticism of corruption, and profiteering. It proved to be an effective way to condemn rent-seekers and capitalist bloodsuckers while avoiding the worst of the wartime environment.

General Election, 1916
Presidential Results

Wikibox courtesy of @Asami

Congressional Results

House of Representatives	Seats	Change
Republican Party	190	-45
Democratic Party	182	+22
Socialist Labor Party	63	+23
U.S. Senate
Republican Party	47	-2
Democratic Party	41	-3
Socialist Labor	8	+8

1. U.S.C. 18, Pt 1, Ch 37. Specifically, IOTL Schenck was convicted for "causing and attempting to cause insubordination, &c., in the military and naval forces…and to obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States…" while in a time of war. See Schenck v. United States, 249 US 47, 48-9 (1919).
2. IOTL, See Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919) and Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919). Notably, these cases also involved Socialist Party politicians being convicted for speaking out against the war.