Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Richard LaFollette allows for the most effective way to use penis jokes as campaign ads bahahahahaRobert M. LaFollette (D-WI) has such a nice ring to it.
As does Robert M. LaFollette Jr. (D-WI) and, more importantly, Philip F. LaFollette (D-WI).
Not as nice as President Robert M. LaFollette, mind you ...
Ireland Unfree
"...security situation that was rapidly unraveling, per the frantic reports from the Royal Irish Constabulary in particular to Dublin Castle and from there, to London.
Thousands of Irishmen had emigrated to the United States, often for part-time work and remittances, in the half-decade before the Great American War broke out, and tens of thousands more - perhaps as many as a hundred thousand - had departed for American shores as volunteers for the front or to work in factories. Though many died, and many would remain after the rolling peace begun at Lima with Chile and concluding with Mount Vernon with the Confederate States, as early as October 1916, when it was clear the war had weeks to go rather than months or years, foreign soldiers were discharged in droves, and as the spring arrived firings and downsizings at American factories cranked up in earnest as war orders plummeted, spiking unemployment and falling on noncitizen workers especially hard.
Accordingly, Ireland was by mid-1917 awash in tens of thousands of veterans of the GAW, men returning to Ireland for work or to their families after many hard years away, broken mentally and physically in a way that their countrymen could not understand and often radicalized in the United States by its republicanism and the potent "Fenian" organizations there that argued vociferously for Irish independence and Gaelic nationalism, oft-embodied by figures such as Irish-American polemicist and emerging politician Eamon de Valera. Senior IRB recruiters and organizers like Michael Collins had gained invaluable experience observing war in the trenches and the guerilla activities of Confederates in occupied territories, as well as the struggles of the American Army to combat them, and he brought this thinking home with him shortly after the St. Patrick's Day Uprisings along with thousands of experienced, armed and radical soldiers.
May and June 1917 were thus two of the bloodiest months of the conflict, as hundreds of RIC constables, officers in particular, were targeted in ambushes and execution-style killings, and the sophistication of the IRB and other, more revolutionary splinter groups was unlike anything commanders had seen previously. Lord Midleton desperately asked for more reinforcements as activities in India were drawn down, and the UVF's activities began escalating again, culminating in a week of brutal violence in early July that finally forced the government's hand.
On July 7th, 1917, a Catholic parish in South Belfast was firebombed by Ulstermen, with four people inside dying; it was later discovered that the next day, during Sunday mass, had been the true target, but the gang carrying out the attack was frightened out of making such a move at the last moment. Belfast erupted again in outrage, with the Twelfth mere days away and the Irish Army dramatically scaling up its patrols in Ulster to prevent further bloodshed, precisely the type of move that had triggered the Curragh Mutiny in the first place. On Tuesday, July 10th, General Henry Wilson was assassinated in London on the steps of his home - suggesting, finally, that the IRB could reach across the Irish Sea if it so wanted. When news of Wilson's death arrived in Ireland, there were small and spontaneous celebrations that were responded to with RIC crackdowns and shootouts between Collins's "fireteams" organized like American death squads that had been active in Kentucky and Tennessee. The tensions culminated with massive riots, bombings, and shootings on the Twelfth, as Irish Volunteers aggressively did their utmost to derail Orange parades.
"Ireland Burns, Cecil Fiddles," Chamberlain roared in the Commons that following day, but the worst provocation that finally tipped the scales would happen the next day. The Lord Clarence and his wife, as they were driving through Dublin accompanied by their bodyguards, became stuck on Wicklow Street due to a tipped-over dairy carriage blocking their path to College Green to address Irish veterans returned from India. As they were trying to get unstuck, several masked men emerged and opened fire on their car, which thankfully was not uncovered. The Lord Clarence suffered a shattered collarbone as a bullet missed his throat by mere inches and a punctured lung, while the Lady Clarence [1] was wounded in her left shoulder. One of their four bodyguards was killed, but three of the assassins were gunned down in response and the other two subdued by constables and onlookers. It was an obvious ambush, and a well-planned one; the Lord Lieutenant's route through Dublin to Trinity College that day had not been public knowledge, and the decision to address the veterans had been a last-minute one made only the day before due to the violence of the previous week and tensions across the British Isles after Wilson's assassination.
Lord Clarence would live, but only barely, and his survival was still unknown when news arrived in London to Buckingham Palace and King George found out his elder brother had been shot in Dublin. While at first, Special Branch suggested that the IRB had carried out the attack, it quickly became clear thanks to an anonymous leak within the RIC that ultra-loyalists unassociated with the UVF had plotted the attack, likely with help from within Dublin Castle. Wilson's death was proposed as a possible catalyst to move plans forward to kill the Duke and Duchess of Clarence, and the motive was postulated as being the view that the King's brother was overly sympathetic to Irish nationalism, that his renouncing the throne to marry a Catholic was an insult to Anglican England, and that he had insufficiently crushed the enemies of the Crown in his tenure of as Lord Lieutenant and that his death would pave the way for a "proper" administration at Dublin Castle.
Such sentiments, naturally, misread the temperature in Whitehall dramatically, where support for Cecil's government had been in sharp decline for months if not weeks and the National-New Conservative coalition was more tenuous than ever. The "July Days" concluding with the attempted murder of a member of the Royal Family, three years after Ulster nationalists had tried to usurp constitutional order both at Curragh and with the Ulster Covenant, essentially persuaded King George once and for all that British liberalism and Ulsterism were not compatible, and for the first time, he showed his hand on his Hibernophilia on July 16th, when he called Cecil to him.
Whether Cecil had planned to resign in that meeting or not was unclear, but it was obvious at that point that his government had failed to solve Ireland and had only smashed the Ghadar Mutiny in India by the skin of its teeth. George, usually hesitant to directly involve himself in politics, purportedly requested a proposal from Cecil on how exactly the Irish Question "was to be answered," and Cecil's response was clearly found lacking. Later that day, it was Chamberlain called to Buckingham Palace to ask if he could form a "peace government" with the express intent of solving the Irish matter. Chamberlain answered with a qualified affirmation, but requested that Cecil be given the opportunity to resign himself ahead of a confidence vote rather than be sacked by the King personally; this was done not out of any love for Cecil, whom Chamberlain privately loathed, but rather because Chamberlain, who lacked his father's Jupiterian confidence, was a stickler for parliamentary formalities [2] but also wanted to make sure that George Barnes and the SDLP was onboard - not a certainty.
Chamberlain's gamble was that forming a minority government immediately and then moving to invite the IPP back to Parliament with concessions was the only path out, and that elections would need to be called more or less immediately to sustain his government. Barnes signaled his openness to external support for six months in return for concessions on matters of unemployment payments and social housing, to which Chamberlain readily agreed, and on July 20th O'Brien would wield the knife, voting against the government on a tangentially-related act around levies on dairy, which the Liberals and SDLP joined. Cecil's government was defeated on the so-called "milk tax," and Cecil traveled to Buckingham Palace later that day to resign, well aware that his defeat had been planned for a whole week for entirely unrelated reasons. Chamberlain would form an unstable minority government shortly thereafter, declaring to gathered reporters as he arrived at 10 Downing Street that his Cabinet's "exclusive mandate" would be to end the Irish conflict and "find a workable peace." He was the first son of a Prime Minister to take such office since William Pitt the Younger, and after a decade of anticipation, the Chamberlain family was back in charge, in the midst of a firestorm the People's Joe could never have imagined..."
- Ireland Unfree
[1] Helene of Orleans
[2] Churchill observed of Austen Chamberlain IOTL that he lacked the ruthlessness to ever actually rise to the top
Thousands of Irishmen had emigrated to the United States, often for part-time work and remittances, in the half-decade before the Great American War broke out, and tens of thousands more - perhaps as many as a hundred thousand - had departed for American shores as volunteers for the front or to work in factories. Though many died, and many would remain after the rolling peace begun at Lima with Chile and concluding with Mount Vernon with the Confederate States, as early as October 1916, when it was clear the war had weeks to go rather than months or years, foreign soldiers were discharged in droves, and as the spring arrived firings and downsizings at American factories cranked up in earnest as war orders plummeted, spiking unemployment and falling on noncitizen workers especially hard.
Accordingly, Ireland was by mid-1917 awash in tens of thousands of veterans of the GAW, men returning to Ireland for work or to their families after many hard years away, broken mentally and physically in a way that their countrymen could not understand and often radicalized in the United States by its republicanism and the potent "Fenian" organizations there that argued vociferously for Irish independence and Gaelic nationalism, oft-embodied by figures such as Irish-American polemicist and emerging politician Eamon de Valera. Senior IRB recruiters and organizers like Michael Collins had gained invaluable experience observing war in the trenches and the guerilla activities of Confederates in occupied territories, as well as the struggles of the American Army to combat them, and he brought this thinking home with him shortly after the St. Patrick's Day Uprisings along with thousands of experienced, armed and radical soldiers.
May and June 1917 were thus two of the bloodiest months of the conflict, as hundreds of RIC constables, officers in particular, were targeted in ambushes and execution-style killings, and the sophistication of the IRB and other, more revolutionary splinter groups was unlike anything commanders had seen previously. Lord Midleton desperately asked for more reinforcements as activities in India were drawn down, and the UVF's activities began escalating again, culminating in a week of brutal violence in early July that finally forced the government's hand.
On July 7th, 1917, a Catholic parish in South Belfast was firebombed by Ulstermen, with four people inside dying; it was later discovered that the next day, during Sunday mass, had been the true target, but the gang carrying out the attack was frightened out of making such a move at the last moment. Belfast erupted again in outrage, with the Twelfth mere days away and the Irish Army dramatically scaling up its patrols in Ulster to prevent further bloodshed, precisely the type of move that had triggered the Curragh Mutiny in the first place. On Tuesday, July 10th, General Henry Wilson was assassinated in London on the steps of his home - suggesting, finally, that the IRB could reach across the Irish Sea if it so wanted. When news of Wilson's death arrived in Ireland, there were small and spontaneous celebrations that were responded to with RIC crackdowns and shootouts between Collins's "fireteams" organized like American death squads that had been active in Kentucky and Tennessee. The tensions culminated with massive riots, bombings, and shootings on the Twelfth, as Irish Volunteers aggressively did their utmost to derail Orange parades.
"Ireland Burns, Cecil Fiddles," Chamberlain roared in the Commons that following day, but the worst provocation that finally tipped the scales would happen the next day. The Lord Clarence and his wife, as they were driving through Dublin accompanied by their bodyguards, became stuck on Wicklow Street due to a tipped-over dairy carriage blocking their path to College Green to address Irish veterans returned from India. As they were trying to get unstuck, several masked men emerged and opened fire on their car, which thankfully was not uncovered. The Lord Clarence suffered a shattered collarbone as a bullet missed his throat by mere inches and a punctured lung, while the Lady Clarence [1] was wounded in her left shoulder. One of their four bodyguards was killed, but three of the assassins were gunned down in response and the other two subdued by constables and onlookers. It was an obvious ambush, and a well-planned one; the Lord Lieutenant's route through Dublin to Trinity College that day had not been public knowledge, and the decision to address the veterans had been a last-minute one made only the day before due to the violence of the previous week and tensions across the British Isles after Wilson's assassination.
Lord Clarence would live, but only barely, and his survival was still unknown when news arrived in London to Buckingham Palace and King George found out his elder brother had been shot in Dublin. While at first, Special Branch suggested that the IRB had carried out the attack, it quickly became clear thanks to an anonymous leak within the RIC that ultra-loyalists unassociated with the UVF had plotted the attack, likely with help from within Dublin Castle. Wilson's death was proposed as a possible catalyst to move plans forward to kill the Duke and Duchess of Clarence, and the motive was postulated as being the view that the King's brother was overly sympathetic to Irish nationalism, that his renouncing the throne to marry a Catholic was an insult to Anglican England, and that he had insufficiently crushed the enemies of the Crown in his tenure of as Lord Lieutenant and that his death would pave the way for a "proper" administration at Dublin Castle.
Such sentiments, naturally, misread the temperature in Whitehall dramatically, where support for Cecil's government had been in sharp decline for months if not weeks and the National-New Conservative coalition was more tenuous than ever. The "July Days" concluding with the attempted murder of a member of the Royal Family, three years after Ulster nationalists had tried to usurp constitutional order both at Curragh and with the Ulster Covenant, essentially persuaded King George once and for all that British liberalism and Ulsterism were not compatible, and for the first time, he showed his hand on his Hibernophilia on July 16th, when he called Cecil to him.
Whether Cecil had planned to resign in that meeting or not was unclear, but it was obvious at that point that his government had failed to solve Ireland and had only smashed the Ghadar Mutiny in India by the skin of its teeth. George, usually hesitant to directly involve himself in politics, purportedly requested a proposal from Cecil on how exactly the Irish Question "was to be answered," and Cecil's response was clearly found lacking. Later that day, it was Chamberlain called to Buckingham Palace to ask if he could form a "peace government" with the express intent of solving the Irish matter. Chamberlain answered with a qualified affirmation, but requested that Cecil be given the opportunity to resign himself ahead of a confidence vote rather than be sacked by the King personally; this was done not out of any love for Cecil, whom Chamberlain privately loathed, but rather because Chamberlain, who lacked his father's Jupiterian confidence, was a stickler for parliamentary formalities [2] but also wanted to make sure that George Barnes and the SDLP was onboard - not a certainty.
Chamberlain's gamble was that forming a minority government immediately and then moving to invite the IPP back to Parliament with concessions was the only path out, and that elections would need to be called more or less immediately to sustain his government. Barnes signaled his openness to external support for six months in return for concessions on matters of unemployment payments and social housing, to which Chamberlain readily agreed, and on July 20th O'Brien would wield the knife, voting against the government on a tangentially-related act around levies on dairy, which the Liberals and SDLP joined. Cecil's government was defeated on the so-called "milk tax," and Cecil traveled to Buckingham Palace later that day to resign, well aware that his defeat had been planned for a whole week for entirely unrelated reasons. Chamberlain would form an unstable minority government shortly thereafter, declaring to gathered reporters as he arrived at 10 Downing Street that his Cabinet's "exclusive mandate" would be to end the Irish conflict and "find a workable peace." He was the first son of a Prime Minister to take such office since William Pitt the Younger, and after a decade of anticipation, the Chamberlain family was back in charge, in the midst of a firestorm the People's Joe could never have imagined..."
- Ireland Unfree
[1] Helene of Orleans
[2] Churchill observed of Austen Chamberlain IOTL that he lacked the ruthlessness to ever actually rise to the top
Every time I think the Orangemen have hit rock bottom I sadly discover that they can and will keep digging.
Huzzah! I called the assassination attempt on Lord Clarence by Unionists
Great update and I'm somewhat excited to see the second Chamberlain administration - though I suspect it will be a very short and very bumpy ride!
Great update and I'm somewhat excited to see the second Chamberlain administration - though I suspect it will be a very short and very bumpy ride!
When it comes to Orangemen, there is no bottom
You were what gave me the idea!Huzzah! I called the assassination attempt on Lord Clarence by Unionists
Great update and I'm somewhat excited to see the second Chamberlain administration - though I suspect it will be a very short and very bumpy ride!
And, yes, unfortunately. this is not a mild Brit-screw (at least at this point in things) for nothing
Def not anything close to 1894’s generational realignment
I predict it's going be short and unstable and his successor is going to be Jix
An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924
"...whatever very real, very genuine substantive complaints that could be made about the Second Republic and how it functioned, it is also true that in one sense, its Presidential system was considerably more democratic than the controlled elections imposed by the Kuomintang post-1924. The Second Republic of China had devised a semi-runoff system, where the two candidates with the most support in the National Assembly would then advance to a straight, up-or-down vote of the Chinese people on a general ballot. This allowed both for control of the proceedings by the establishment while also presenting a bonafide democratic choice to the electorate, narrow as the qualifications for suffrage may have been.
It is also true that, had it been given a chance to survive, the Second Republic had a system of government that may indeed have served China well. The central regime was designed to be strong vis a vis its relationships with the provinces, but internally had a number of constitutional checks inspired by the American constitution, unlike the robust constitutional monarchy Japan or Korea had implemented drawing on Prussian or French ideas. President Li Yuanhong was a powerful figure at the center of it, in control of the armed forces, but his day-to-day power over the Assembly and Prime Minister Tang was very cabined. Considering the travails of China since 1898, a cautious conservative like Li at the heart of the system designed by Tang and Liang Qichao served to calm the country's fractiousness and present some semblance of stability.
The elections of 1917 were, in many ways, a continuation of that, and it would have been hard for anybody observing the proceedings to have guessed that the Second Republic would struggle to outlive Li's two five-year terms, particularly as the famed "Yellow Caesar," Wang Zhanyuan, elected not to challenge the President and instead not only stayed in his power base of Hankow but endorsed Li and promised him his unqualified support and allegiance. Western observers were shocked and some dismayed; Wang had long been thought of as precisely the kind of popular strongman who could "bring the nationalists to heel," as a British diplomatic cable described it, as opposed to the more milquetoast Li, despite the latter having guided the country through the civil war.
Wang's decision, however, portended something darker under the hood of Chinese government - the millennia-old tension in the Middle Kingdom between the central authority and the periphery had not gone away, and it was not healthy for Chinese democracy generally or the Second Republic's stability specifically that the survival of the Li regime had essentially boiled down to whether the "Yellow Caesar" wanted to challenge Nanking from Hankow or not. The Jinbudang had been offered a stay of execution on a costly internal civil war that could have involved actual soldiers purely on the goodwill of the country's most powerful warlord. Even as Li's faltering but strong patronage machine ramped up ahead of the June elections, this lesson did not go unlearned: the Second Republic's survival would boil down to whether local strongmen would allow it to do so, rather than anything the electorate or central government wanted.
Sun Yat-sen was, by most definitions, precisely such a strongman from his base in Canton, and despite some interest by Song Chiao-jen in being the Kuomintang candidate for the Presidency, Sun overruled him in an internal party caucus at the end of May and Song stepped aside magnanimously, though it was yet another moment that persuaded the younger man of Sun's imperiousness and the budding cult of personality within the party around him. The National Assembly's two main parties thus had their clear candidates - the incumbent Li, and the insurgent populist Sun, and the country was thought to be split along its traditional north-south lines ahead of the campaign.
The 1917 Chinese Presidential election was neither clean nor dirty; ballot boxes were neither stuffed nor stolen, but voter intimidation was rampant both through threats of physical violence (particularly in Kuomintang strongholds, by both sides) and through economic or social repercussions. Western observers were intrigued - here was the mess of young Chinese democracy on display, and a great many were hoping that whatever came to fruition there did not augur the Kuomintang exporting its revolutionary pan-Asianism further beyond Chinese borders. There were thus many sighs of reliefs in the Foreign Quarter of Shanghai and at various Western missions when Li carried the day by a narrow but workable five-point majority; China was closely divided, but his victory was clear.
Li's triumph did little to quiet the pressures within the country, however. Sun was convinced that the Jinbudang had won on account of fraud and suspicious electioneering in rural northern districts, and protests rocked southern cities like Canton and Foochow, with hundreds dying in various riots over the back half of the summer. Many Kuomintang district commanders became further convinced that they needed some kind of edge, and the appeal of semi-warlordism and building stronger ties to local country bosses in rural China became key as the movement tried to branch out of its urban literati base to speak directly to the conservative, traditional Chinese agrarian tenants. There was also the fact that Li was a compromise figure from the beginning even as he had helped seize power, and even as the Second Republic had tried to consolidate itself under him, he had no obvious successor in 1922 unless Wang Zhanyuan was eager to enter national politics, and the various factions of the Jinbudang looked primed to tear into one another once his unifying personage was gone. 1917 had perpetuated the Second Republic - but the questions which ate at its foundations like a million red termites had not only not been answered, but were being asked louder than ever before..."
- An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924
It is also true that, had it been given a chance to survive, the Second Republic had a system of government that may indeed have served China well. The central regime was designed to be strong vis a vis its relationships with the provinces, but internally had a number of constitutional checks inspired by the American constitution, unlike the robust constitutional monarchy Japan or Korea had implemented drawing on Prussian or French ideas. President Li Yuanhong was a powerful figure at the center of it, in control of the armed forces, but his day-to-day power over the Assembly and Prime Minister Tang was very cabined. Considering the travails of China since 1898, a cautious conservative like Li at the heart of the system designed by Tang and Liang Qichao served to calm the country's fractiousness and present some semblance of stability.
The elections of 1917 were, in many ways, a continuation of that, and it would have been hard for anybody observing the proceedings to have guessed that the Second Republic would struggle to outlive Li's two five-year terms, particularly as the famed "Yellow Caesar," Wang Zhanyuan, elected not to challenge the President and instead not only stayed in his power base of Hankow but endorsed Li and promised him his unqualified support and allegiance. Western observers were shocked and some dismayed; Wang had long been thought of as precisely the kind of popular strongman who could "bring the nationalists to heel," as a British diplomatic cable described it, as opposed to the more milquetoast Li, despite the latter having guided the country through the civil war.
Wang's decision, however, portended something darker under the hood of Chinese government - the millennia-old tension in the Middle Kingdom between the central authority and the periphery had not gone away, and it was not healthy for Chinese democracy generally or the Second Republic's stability specifically that the survival of the Li regime had essentially boiled down to whether the "Yellow Caesar" wanted to challenge Nanking from Hankow or not. The Jinbudang had been offered a stay of execution on a costly internal civil war that could have involved actual soldiers purely on the goodwill of the country's most powerful warlord. Even as Li's faltering but strong patronage machine ramped up ahead of the June elections, this lesson did not go unlearned: the Second Republic's survival would boil down to whether local strongmen would allow it to do so, rather than anything the electorate or central government wanted.
Sun Yat-sen was, by most definitions, precisely such a strongman from his base in Canton, and despite some interest by Song Chiao-jen in being the Kuomintang candidate for the Presidency, Sun overruled him in an internal party caucus at the end of May and Song stepped aside magnanimously, though it was yet another moment that persuaded the younger man of Sun's imperiousness and the budding cult of personality within the party around him. The National Assembly's two main parties thus had their clear candidates - the incumbent Li, and the insurgent populist Sun, and the country was thought to be split along its traditional north-south lines ahead of the campaign.
The 1917 Chinese Presidential election was neither clean nor dirty; ballot boxes were neither stuffed nor stolen, but voter intimidation was rampant both through threats of physical violence (particularly in Kuomintang strongholds, by both sides) and through economic or social repercussions. Western observers were intrigued - here was the mess of young Chinese democracy on display, and a great many were hoping that whatever came to fruition there did not augur the Kuomintang exporting its revolutionary pan-Asianism further beyond Chinese borders. There were thus many sighs of reliefs in the Foreign Quarter of Shanghai and at various Western missions when Li carried the day by a narrow but workable five-point majority; China was closely divided, but his victory was clear.
Li's triumph did little to quiet the pressures within the country, however. Sun was convinced that the Jinbudang had won on account of fraud and suspicious electioneering in rural northern districts, and protests rocked southern cities like Canton and Foochow, with hundreds dying in various riots over the back half of the summer. Many Kuomintang district commanders became further convinced that they needed some kind of edge, and the appeal of semi-warlordism and building stronger ties to local country bosses in rural China became key as the movement tried to branch out of its urban literati base to speak directly to the conservative, traditional Chinese agrarian tenants. There was also the fact that Li was a compromise figure from the beginning even as he had helped seize power, and even as the Second Republic had tried to consolidate itself under him, he had no obvious successor in 1922 unless Wang Zhanyuan was eager to enter national politics, and the various factions of the Jinbudang looked primed to tear into one another once his unifying personage was gone. 1917 had perpetuated the Second Republic - but the questions which ate at its foundations like a million red termites had not only not been answered, but were being asked louder than ever before..."
- An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924
With added drug trafficking, even relative to Mexico today, let alone the PRI era.
Ggddaano
Banned
*across the aislesPlaying devil's advocate (because I don't really think LaFollette will be the 1920 Democratic candidate): LaFollette has already been described as Democrats' favorite liberal, meaning not only were his policies more in line with the Dems than his fellow Liberals, but he has a long standing reputation of working across the isles with Democrats (much as in OTL, actually - he actually supported Wilson in '12, though that was at least partially due to his dislike of Taft and his utter loathing of Roosevelt). So much so, in fact, that the Dems supported him as the leader of the commission which was investigating war profiteering. We also know that certain factions within the Democraticc Party are looking to nominate a Westerner in 1920; and what better candidate than one who could plausibly draw votes from the Liberals, who's policies are already in-line with the views of, and popular amongst, Democratic voters, who has a proven track record of working close with the Socialists (thereby negating or minimizing the risk to the party from the Left flank) and who has a reputation for supporting clean government and being against "the machine" (okay, so he created his OWN machine. But ... it's okay, beause HIS machine works for the good of the people!).
He's not a turncoat: LaFollette is just the prodigal son coming home and last to his TRUE political home. The Democracy!
@Mayukh has it right though it’s more of an inspiration than a parallel
Of course there’s the caveat that, as you yourself pointed out, heroin is a very different animal than cocaine, and China does not share a land border with the US, but yes
Jix
"...arguably the weakest minority government in decades, under threat at any moment to be toppled by socialists and with a ticking clock as the handshake agreement with George Barnes was for only six months; it was not, exactly, a long lease on life for a government appointed specifically to solve the riddle of Ireland that had vexed every Cabinet since the Famine while also taking on the minor task of mapping out a post-Mutiny future for India, where tempers still ran hot and memories were anything but short.
After the three hideously long years of embarrassment and failure by Cecil, however, Britain was willing to give Chamberlain a chance. Joynson-Hicks was as quick as anyone to note what Austen Chamberlain's greatest problem was, however - his last name, arguably his great strength. "One struggles," he wrote in a letter to Long in early August 1917, shortly after the Clarence Crisis ended with the Liberals being returned to government at the edict of the King, "to think of any trait of Sir Austen's that suggests a talented Prime Minister other than his surname and the fact that no other man in his faction wants to govern Britain at this critical hour." History had chosen Austen Chamberlain long ago, by being born to the People's Joe; it was cruel irony that this was the moment fate had selected to thrust him into the position.
Unlike Cecil, however, who genuinely was just a product of his aristocratic lineage and family benefit, Chamberlain had acquitted himself well in Parliament and Cabinet before, and as Prime Minister was eager to step out from the shadow of his father's legacy and the heavy expectations placed upon him as a likely future Prime Minister from the moment he had entered Parliament thirty years earlier. Much like Joseph loomed over the Liberal Party for a quarter century, Austen had essentially been the designated dynastic Prime Minister-in-waiting since the stroke that felled his father in 1906, and this state of affairs had badly destabilized both the Trevelyan and Haldane governments and caused a great deal of consternation as to what kind of role, if any, Chamberlain could be given in either of their Cabinets without threatening to bring the whole thing down. This had not necessarily been a negative; Chamberlain had been canny enough to gradually persuade himself of the necessity of Home Rule after at first being a militant against it who would not have been out of place amongst the Nationals [1], and had carefully avoided taking a firm position during the internecine warfare between Asquith and Lloyd George that had torpedoed both men's careers and left his two most potentially formidable rivals for power on the outside looking in.
Chamberlain moved quickly to make clear that he could form a capable, talented and experienced government in short order. A close Haldane hand in Walter Runciman was given the crucial job of the Exchequer at a time when Britain's economy looked creakier than the rest of Europe, and the stodgy old conservative Reg McKenna was brought back to the Bank of England in tandem with him; socialist-minded Liberals like John Burns, David Lloyd George and Austen's younger brother Neville were given roles such as President of the Board of Trade, Minister of Labour or President of the Local Government Board (an excellent landing spot for Neville, a talented and transformative Lord Mayor of Birmingham). Many of these appointments were made, Joynson-Hicks would wryly note, to "stave off Barnes until the Crown can be sufficiently betrayed;" Burns and Neville Chamberlain in particular were serious departures even from the radical impulses of the 1890s. Chamberlain's other choices were more cautious, however; Asquith, now ennobled as Baron Asquith, was dispatched as Viceroy of India with the Marquess of Reading, the Cabinet's only Jew, made Colonial Secretary; the firmly conservative Sir John Simon, a close personal friend of both Cecil and Chamberlain, took over the Home Office while the Marquess of Crewe returned to 11 Downing Street for a second stint as Foreign Secretary, a role he had previously excelled at. Haldane, purely as a sinecure, was made Lord Privy Seal, while Beauchamp was tapped as Lord President of the Council, the Viscount Morley was handed the new Ministry of Education, and Charles Hobhouse was granted the position of Secretary of Defense.
It was a thoroughly diverse Cabinet comprised of all the leading lights of British liberalism, all save one - Sir Edward Grey, conspicuously not invited to return as Chief Secretary of Ireland, the role he had held in the Haldane years, and who indeed found himself outside of Cabinet looking in and eventually dispatched as Governor-General of Australia. The reasoning was that Grey was denounced, even in radical Liberal circles, for having instigated much of the chaos ahead of the Government of Ireland Act and boxing in Haldane, to the point that a great many men privately informed Chamberlain that a Cabinet with Grey in it would see them refuse to serve. However, that left Dublin Castle unattended, as it was plain that Midleton himself would be unlikely to serve under a Liberal government considering his Unionist sympathies; indeed, Midleton began making arrangements to move to a private accommodation in South Dublin upon hearing the news of Cecil's resignation. Out of respect for the gravely wounded Duke of Clarence, however, a new Lord Lieutenant could not be appointed without the incumbent's resignation, as such would have disrespected the King, which placed even more importance than usual on the role of the Chief Secretary.
Chamberlain's first thought was Sydney Buxton, a core member of the group of left-wing Liberals including Runciman, Morley and Hobhouse that had formed a clique of anti-Lloyd George but radical members of Parliament in the latter half of the Haldane years. Buxton was well into his sixties, however, and sought not a difficult role like Chief Secretary but rather a late-career capstone, and thus was made First Lord of the Admiralty despite the reservations many had about him in the role. Instead, Chamberlain looked to the bright and diplomatic Herbert Samuel, the former Home Secretary who had stood behind the protestors during the Great Unrest of 1912 and threatened to resign rather than send a naval vessel to the Mersey to put down a particularly violent episode in Liverpool. Samuel was in many ways a curious choice for the role, not least of which being that he was Jewish; indeed, even Chamberlain quipped that in dispatching Samuel to Dublin Castle, "we give our Irish brothers and sisters the gift of the first Jew to set foot on their shores." The "Loneliest Jew in Ireland," as his nickname came to be in the press, was taken unseriously at first in Dublin and was met with dismissiveness if not contempt in London, all at a hugely important moment in British history, but Samuel would in time rise to the occasion even if those like Joynson-Hicks were loathe to see it.
The arrival of this new Cabinet of old hands appeared to Joynson-Hicks as a largely recycled group of has-beens leftover from the original Chamberlain's time or partisans of the fractious post-1906 Liberal Party; other than Samuel, whose talent even Joynson-Hicks was quick to spot, he was left unimpressed by the new government. The opposition benches would have to be a comfortable landing position for him, however, as he emerged from the debacle of the Cecil years as one of the few protagonists of the National Party government to have "clean hands" of both Ireland and India. As it turned out, the Ministry of Health had been a terrific landing spot for him, well out of the path of the flames of the burning Hughligans and standing with only his reputation for administrative ability associated with his name..."
- Jix
[1] Little in-joke based on OTL there
After the three hideously long years of embarrassment and failure by Cecil, however, Britain was willing to give Chamberlain a chance. Joynson-Hicks was as quick as anyone to note what Austen Chamberlain's greatest problem was, however - his last name, arguably his great strength. "One struggles," he wrote in a letter to Long in early August 1917, shortly after the Clarence Crisis ended with the Liberals being returned to government at the edict of the King, "to think of any trait of Sir Austen's that suggests a talented Prime Minister other than his surname and the fact that no other man in his faction wants to govern Britain at this critical hour." History had chosen Austen Chamberlain long ago, by being born to the People's Joe; it was cruel irony that this was the moment fate had selected to thrust him into the position.
Unlike Cecil, however, who genuinely was just a product of his aristocratic lineage and family benefit, Chamberlain had acquitted himself well in Parliament and Cabinet before, and as Prime Minister was eager to step out from the shadow of his father's legacy and the heavy expectations placed upon him as a likely future Prime Minister from the moment he had entered Parliament thirty years earlier. Much like Joseph loomed over the Liberal Party for a quarter century, Austen had essentially been the designated dynastic Prime Minister-in-waiting since the stroke that felled his father in 1906, and this state of affairs had badly destabilized both the Trevelyan and Haldane governments and caused a great deal of consternation as to what kind of role, if any, Chamberlain could be given in either of their Cabinets without threatening to bring the whole thing down. This had not necessarily been a negative; Chamberlain had been canny enough to gradually persuade himself of the necessity of Home Rule after at first being a militant against it who would not have been out of place amongst the Nationals [1], and had carefully avoided taking a firm position during the internecine warfare between Asquith and Lloyd George that had torpedoed both men's careers and left his two most potentially formidable rivals for power on the outside looking in.
Chamberlain moved quickly to make clear that he could form a capable, talented and experienced government in short order. A close Haldane hand in Walter Runciman was given the crucial job of the Exchequer at a time when Britain's economy looked creakier than the rest of Europe, and the stodgy old conservative Reg McKenna was brought back to the Bank of England in tandem with him; socialist-minded Liberals like John Burns, David Lloyd George and Austen's younger brother Neville were given roles such as President of the Board of Trade, Minister of Labour or President of the Local Government Board (an excellent landing spot for Neville, a talented and transformative Lord Mayor of Birmingham). Many of these appointments were made, Joynson-Hicks would wryly note, to "stave off Barnes until the Crown can be sufficiently betrayed;" Burns and Neville Chamberlain in particular were serious departures even from the radical impulses of the 1890s. Chamberlain's other choices were more cautious, however; Asquith, now ennobled as Baron Asquith, was dispatched as Viceroy of India with the Marquess of Reading, the Cabinet's only Jew, made Colonial Secretary; the firmly conservative Sir John Simon, a close personal friend of both Cecil and Chamberlain, took over the Home Office while the Marquess of Crewe returned to 11 Downing Street for a second stint as Foreign Secretary, a role he had previously excelled at. Haldane, purely as a sinecure, was made Lord Privy Seal, while Beauchamp was tapped as Lord President of the Council, the Viscount Morley was handed the new Ministry of Education, and Charles Hobhouse was granted the position of Secretary of Defense.
It was a thoroughly diverse Cabinet comprised of all the leading lights of British liberalism, all save one - Sir Edward Grey, conspicuously not invited to return as Chief Secretary of Ireland, the role he had held in the Haldane years, and who indeed found himself outside of Cabinet looking in and eventually dispatched as Governor-General of Australia. The reasoning was that Grey was denounced, even in radical Liberal circles, for having instigated much of the chaos ahead of the Government of Ireland Act and boxing in Haldane, to the point that a great many men privately informed Chamberlain that a Cabinet with Grey in it would see them refuse to serve. However, that left Dublin Castle unattended, as it was plain that Midleton himself would be unlikely to serve under a Liberal government considering his Unionist sympathies; indeed, Midleton began making arrangements to move to a private accommodation in South Dublin upon hearing the news of Cecil's resignation. Out of respect for the gravely wounded Duke of Clarence, however, a new Lord Lieutenant could not be appointed without the incumbent's resignation, as such would have disrespected the King, which placed even more importance than usual on the role of the Chief Secretary.
Chamberlain's first thought was Sydney Buxton, a core member of the group of left-wing Liberals including Runciman, Morley and Hobhouse that had formed a clique of anti-Lloyd George but radical members of Parliament in the latter half of the Haldane years. Buxton was well into his sixties, however, and sought not a difficult role like Chief Secretary but rather a late-career capstone, and thus was made First Lord of the Admiralty despite the reservations many had about him in the role. Instead, Chamberlain looked to the bright and diplomatic Herbert Samuel, the former Home Secretary who had stood behind the protestors during the Great Unrest of 1912 and threatened to resign rather than send a naval vessel to the Mersey to put down a particularly violent episode in Liverpool. Samuel was in many ways a curious choice for the role, not least of which being that he was Jewish; indeed, even Chamberlain quipped that in dispatching Samuel to Dublin Castle, "we give our Irish brothers and sisters the gift of the first Jew to set foot on their shores." The "Loneliest Jew in Ireland," as his nickname came to be in the press, was taken unseriously at first in Dublin and was met with dismissiveness if not contempt in London, all at a hugely important moment in British history, but Samuel would in time rise to the occasion even if those like Joynson-Hicks were loathe to see it.
The arrival of this new Cabinet of old hands appeared to Joynson-Hicks as a largely recycled group of has-beens leftover from the original Chamberlain's time or partisans of the fractious post-1906 Liberal Party; other than Samuel, whose talent even Joynson-Hicks was quick to spot, he was left unimpressed by the new government. The opposition benches would have to be a comfortable landing position for him, however, as he emerged from the debacle of the Cecil years as one of the few protagonists of the National Party government to have "clean hands" of both Ireland and India. As it turned out, the Ministry of Health had been a terrific landing spot for him, well out of the path of the flames of the burning Hughligans and standing with only his reputation for administrative ability associated with his name..."
- Jix
[1] Little in-joke based on OTL there
Every British monarch to every Prime Minister of any party when they are asked to "solve" the Irish Question: