- Location
- Albany, NY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
-
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Lists of Heads of Government and Heads of State
- Thread starter Mumby
- Start date
A more successful Western offensive in 1914 prompts the French to evacuate Paris rather than fight for it, retreating behind the Seine and allowing the Germans to become far more embedded in France, at much greater cost. As the bloody stalemate intensifies a successful penetration of the Bosphorus provokes an Ottoman capitulation, the threatening of the Balkan flank, and an interrupted flow of supplies to the Russians. Despite enormous logistical hiccups, the Russian Army pushes irrevocably westward into Poland and Austria; the survival of Serbia and the entrance onto the Entente side of Romania and Italy by the end of 1915 pushes the Central Powers to their breaking point.
Nonetheless the languid, exhausted, and bereaved Asquith fails to properly press home the advantage gained; allies deserting him, he reluctantly hands over power in 1916 to a small Executive War Committee chaired by Lloyd George; Asquith serves as the nominal head, but never attends any meetings. Lloyd George takes further control behind the scenes to effectively exile Kitchener to the Eastern front, the pressure on Germany from all sides seeing the War end in the autumn of 1917 with some minimal American intervention. The Liberals are swept aside by the Conservatives in the khaki election of 1918, Bonar Law’s negotiations at Versailles resulting in a reformed but greatly neutered Kaiserreich and a Hapsburg rump holding together the squabbling minorities of central Europe and giving moral and military support to the liberalising Russian and Ottoman Empires. The collapse of Austria-Hungary and the sending of troops to crush the Bavarian Soviet distract the Conservatives from the Irish bloodbath on their doorstep. Adding to this trade union militancy, rising unemployment, austerity, and the overall feeling of having lost the peace, the Conservatives looked set to be obliterated before the forces of the left in 1922. But it was not to happen.
Asquith had resigned not for the radical, scheming Lloyd George but the bullish Winston Churchill, the most popular politician in the country after his successful Dardanelles campaign. Not as radical as some would have liked, his larger-than-life personality contrasted sharply to the exhausted, overstretched Tories. Bonar Law went down in flames but narrowly emerged the largest party in 1922 as the Liberals stayed to a resolutely middle-class program, a slowly growing but irremovable Labour Party pushing at them from the left.
As much an interventionist as his predecessor, Churchill believed in firm action to defeat the enemies of democracy and progress, be they Turkish republicans, Hungarian Communists, or Italian Socialists. Largely leaving the domestic front to his Chancellor Lloyd George, with whom he greatly quarrelled, Churchill battled more and more opposition from trade unions, the increasingly radicalised Labour Party and its staunchly pacifist leadership, and the left of his own party. After the Samuel Commission of 1925 recommended a wage cut to miners that Lloyd George came out against and the Cabinet came out against sending troops to support the collapsing government of Wilhelm III, Churchill called a motion of no confidence in his own government, daring his opponents to vote in the Conservatives. His brinkmanship split the Party, allowing an ageing Bonar Law to return to Number 10.
Law’s second time in office saw his health catch up with him, his austere outlook unpopular in a time of growing postwar prosperity, but his puritan sensibilities survived in his successor, a suave scion of the landed gentry, a moralist with a ruthless streak, who sought to undercut Liberal support with interventionist and internationalist policies. Wood’s lofty promises of mass housing and agricultural prosperity combined with a new European order were shattered by events beyond his control. Ludendorff’s dictatorship clashed with Tsar Michael’s Russia in a dissolving Poland, American investors in the new post-Versailles democracies pulling out and in doing so collapsing the fragile economies of Europe. Austerity was the only answer, and Wood reluctantly complied. The death of George V in 1929 to septicaemia added to the sense of a decade of mismanagement and missed opportunities, the promises of 1919 lost to old men with old ideas.
The landslide of the left did not come for the mistrusted Lloyd George, but for a staunch opponent of his, although not quite as radical, but eminently more respectable, with undeniable internationalist credentials. The right wing of the party, angered by Lloyd George’s undermining of their popular war hero and the co-operation with the socialists, gathered around the brilliant but aloof John Simon, breaking with the new leadership and joined by sympathetic colleagues from the left to offer Gladstonian correctives to Britain’s troubles. They would go on to absorb many middle-class votes who did not trust the radical, squabbling left, or the exhausted right, as the working classes grew increasingly bitter from the failure of their leaders to secure the promise of a New Jerusalem.
Now it falls to Graham White to solve Britain’s manifold problems and keep his party united amidst a European turn towards authoritarianism, a retreating United States, and a new King ready to make his influence felt...
George V (Sax-Coburg-Gotha/Windsor; 1910-17/1917-29)
Edward VIII (Windsor, 1929-)
Herbert Asquith (Liberal, leading War Government with Conservatives and Coalition Labour, 1915-17)
1915 Formation of War Government
1916 Formation of Executive War Cabinet
Herbert Asquith (Liberal, leading Caretaker Government, 1917-18)
Bonar Law (Conservative majority, 1918-22)
def. 1918 Herbert Asquith (Liberal), Eamon de Valera (Sinn Fein), William Adamson (Labour), Henry Page Croft/George Barnes (National/National Democratic and Labour);
1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty Signed
Bonar Law (Conservative minority, 1922)
def. 1922 Winston Churchill (Liberal), Ramsay MacDonald (Labour), Henry Page Croft (National);
Winston Churchill (Liberal minority with Labour confidence and supply, 1922-5)
Bonar Law (Conservative minority, 1925)
Bonar Law (Conservative majority, 1925-8)
def. 1925 Winston Churchill (Liberal), Ramsay MacDonald (Labour), John Simon (Centre), Henry Page Croft (National);
Edward Wood (Conservative majority, 1928-30)
Graham White (Liberal minority with Labour confidence and supply, 1930-)
def. 1930 Edward Wood (Conservative), George Lansbury (Labour), John Simon/Philip Snowden (Centre/Social Democratic), James Maxton (Independent Labour);
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Walpurgisnacht
It was in the Year of Maximum Danger
- Location
- Banned from the forum
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is cool, but a little hard to read--maybe bold the winners and colour the losing parties?
Walpurgisnacht
It was in the Year of Maximum Danger
- Location
- Banned from the forum
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That's much more legible, but personally I'd unbold the defeated. OTOH that's a bit more of a matter of opinion.
Really interesting scenario. Simon and Snowden essentially creating the Alliance in the Twenties is a nice touch.
Just a suggestion, I find that olive shades work well as 'stands in for yellow but you can read it'.
Like this for example.
Like this for example.
- Location
- Albany, NY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
For those of us who use the Dark Background its effectively invisible though. Which isn't as big a problem because there's probably fewer people using it but still kind of funny.
If we're going to talk about colors though a better color option pallet for the site would be the thing I'd go for anyway. I don't like having to go dig up hex guides. Rabble rabble.
Thanks mate, I suppose it’s fair enough that those trying to explore a German Med strategy would try plot a successful outcome but as I was only really using it in the original article as a feasible means for Barbarossa not to happen I didn’t feel bound to avert such a strategy colliding with reality.
The problem with the idea of everything being plain sailing after El Alamein is that it just means that everything will be even further away from Tripoli. There’s only so much you can do with a single road even with Tunis and more trucks available. I feel pop history has to shoulder some of the blame here, 2nd El Alamein is often characterised as a crucial battle for some grand objective rather than the point at which the Axis advance had ground to a halt in an area where they were badly exposed to a counter-offensive.
I envisaged ITTL’s Battle of Alexandria to be something more climactic; a desperate Axis attempt to break a Torbruk style defence followed by a demoralising retreat once they ran out of steam.
- Location
- Albany, NY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I was hoping to get the write up together but its looking more and more like something that would be a fun Vigenette or TLIAD but the idea is that the old man doesn't die in 1919, be it because he didn't go to South America or that Quintin didn't die. His 1916 securing of the GOP nominee in a hard pro-war platform precluded him from what IOTL would have been his inevitable 1920 run had he not died and thus finds himself shut out in the 1920's. In 1932 there was some talk about the Republicans nominating Roosevelt and solving the Depression with Emergency Powers but a battle with Herbert Hoover at the convention meant that the party instead nominated a compromise ticket with lackluster results. TR became a regular in DC speaking with President Reed as he battled the Depression but more and more became a grand old man, half forgotten and mostly a relic of an older time.
Until 1940. With War underway in Europe and Isolationism on the march in the GOP and across the nation at large, the Old Bull Moose returned to the national forfront with his own take on what needed to be done, and a desperate, final, and in many ways flawed race to the White House from Sagamore Hill began again.
My own Note: The idea was basically WI TR lived as long as David Lloyd George? He's a bit older but much like all of the bad DLG in 1940 TLs that have floated around over the year I figured it would be fun to at least set up a TR story.
- Location
- Albany, NY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I certainly intend to. Shame I can't combine it with my "TR in Petrograd" story idea without it being massively disjointed.
- Location
- Albany, NY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
In a surprising little detail I found while footnote diving in some boring ass books: Oscar Underwood the Anti-Klan but High level Segregationist Senator from Alabama and a man on the line that separated the Populists and the Progressives who made several "More then Favorite Sons but less then National Frontrunner" attempts at the Democratic nomination for President: His parents were Kentucky Unionists who during the ACW moved to Minnesota where he was raised and became a lawyer before moving to the booming post-war city of Birmingham as an adult.
I feel like such an idiot, I think I used him as a Confederate President once.
I feel like such an idiot, I think I used him as a Confederate President once.
- Location
- Albany, NY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Correction: I texted my girlfriend about this and she told me that I'm insane if I feel like an idiot about this.
Critical support for your girlfriend here, you know more about that period of American history than I ever will.
- Location
- Albany, NY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That girlfriend doesn't exist. All I get is someone who is supportive but does not get my passions.
Speaking as a heredodichromatic (Brunner for colourblind), I can't read in Dark Background or yellow to pantone in default. I have to select-all to read most posts on this thread
Portcullis
New member
Wow, the lack of effort here is astonishing. You got some good ideas, but you don't explain what's happening in Europe, who the American presidents are (assuming Wilson loses to some isolationist) and the specific policy details of the different governments would be great. Maybe several wikiboxes. And a full list of candidates defeated. Meat to the bone, y'know?
Don't you know ANDREW (So many people forget his full name...) Bonar Law resigned and was dead by 1923? What happens to Baldwin? Why is Churchill a Liberal? He was a Tory through and through. Imo it's ASB that a Liberal government survives past 1918, really, the Labour Party was unstoppable. So your bias is showing here. No way Snowden is leaving the Labour Party, either. And, Edward Wood was Lord Irwin by this point. Some nice ideas, but you really need to choose a professional formatting and think about what your narrative is. Not bad for a first list, but you need to work on it.
This is much better but it's pretty clear that you've taken a totally ASB idea and ran too far with it. Why doesn't Petain resign straight away? He was in his 80s by this point, how does he survive so long? And I'm not impressed de Gaulle takes that long to become President. He was the most important leader in exile the French had. But the shift to Bucard is an inspired choice. I don't see many Vichy Frances fighting in the Axis powers. Overall some good ideas but again, a proper formatting is needed to really make this stand out. The scenario could really be fleshed out with better written footnotes, a list of British and American leaders, a rough timeline of the war, more meat to the bone, y'know?
But not bad, definitely one of the better lists imo.
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
You do know he was jointly responsible for the People's Budget, yes?
I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt because you’re new here, but lists don’t have to be fully fleshed out timelines. Taking a stroll through the rest of the thread shows lists with a similar amount of footnotes. Not every list has to include multiple countries either.
lol