Max's election maps and assorted others

[Alex Richards]

Was that an intentional dril reference?

In any case, this is excellent work. I honestly never knew NYC had this system. Plus it gives me interesting vibes of Dublin electing lots of fairly fringe left-wing candidates through its STV system.

I think after 10 years that's safely become amalgamated into 'common online phraseology.'

 

[Ares96]

I've returned to the 1970 US intercity rail services map.

Believe it or not, Chicago used to be more insane - there was a sixth major terminus, Grand Central, which was just west of LaSalle and closed in 1969. And every one of the six (except maybe North Western - the B&O and C&O using it was a temporary solution because of Grand Central's closure) used to have multiple companies serving it. I honestly think it might've been worse than London pre-Grouping, and that's saying something.

 

[Ares96]

1912

It's been almost a year and a half (!) since I posted the 1912 House map, but at the time I also made one of 1914, and I've now made a 1916 one as well, so it feels like I should post them.

Woodrow Wilson took office in March 1913, with a Democratic supermajority to back up his policies, and set about implementing them. Notably, for the first time in US history, he set out a coherent domestic policy agenda ahead of time, and after his inauguration held a line speech to Congress, the first time in over a century that any President had addressed the legislature. This had been widely regarded as a threat to the separation of powers, but Wilson made it into a tradition, and the modern practice of delivering an annual State of the Union speech began here (although there hasn't been one every year since 1913). In general, Wilson took a very practical view of political traditions - he was the first and so far only political scientist to serve as President, and in his time as an academic he'd even argued in favour of a parliamentary system, which he believed would make governance more efficient and solidify the already-dominant position of Congress in domestic affairs.

Wilson's domestic policy consisted of three major pillars, each of which changed the political landscape of the US in its own way. The Revenue Act of 1913, better known as the Underwood Tariff Act, slashed tariffs and compensated the lost revenue by instituting the first federal income tax - initially with a top marginal rate of 7%, although this would quickly rise for reasons we'll get to in a bit. The Federal Reserve Act established the Federal Reserve system, giving the US a central bank of sorts for the first time in decades, although it was and is organised very differently from most other central banks. Finally, the Clayton Antitrust Act expanded the pre-existing Sherman Antitrust Act and was accompanied by the Federal Trade Commission Act, which created the first federal agency dedicated to enforcing antitrust laws.

In foreign affairs, Wilson was less successful. He appointed William Jennings Bryan to the State Department, and the two attempted to chart a less imperialist course than the previous Republican administrations, but not a whole lot came of this in practice. The European powers were uninterested in Bryan's appeals to Christian pacifism, and during Wilson's first years the US launched several armed interventions in Latin America - most infamously the occupation of Haiti, which would last almost twenty years, and the seizure of the port of Veracruz following the overthrow of President Francisco Madero and the ensuing civil war in Mexico. In spite of Bryan's protestations, the First World War broke out in July 1914, and Wilson's only major foreign policy achievement thus far was keeping the US neutral. This would become harder and harder to do, but as of the 1914 congressional elections, there was not much impetus for the US to involve itself in European affairs, and the war was not a major part of the election campaign.

Aside from Maine, which continued to hold its elections in September, all 48 states now held their congressional elections on November 3, 1914. This was the first time members of both houses of Congress were up for direct election, the 17th Amendment having been passed just after Wilson's inauguration in 1913. I contemplated putting the Senate on the map as an inset, but decided against it because a) the US is too square to make something like that work, and b) Senate elections are too square for me to want to map them. There wasn't anything like the same sort of change to House elections, though a number of states that hadn't redistricted in 1912 despite gaining seats did so now. Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas, Alabama and West Virginia still held at-large elections by this point, and Montana and Idaho continued to elect their two-man delegations statewide as well.

While a few incumbent congressmen stood for re-election as Progressives, there was really not much of a Progressive Party by this time, and most of the local politicians and activists who had supported Roosevelt's run in 1912 were now back in the Republican fold. In other words, there was a united opposition, and much of the gains made by the Democrats in 1912 were clawed back by the GOP in 1914. The Democrats kept their majority, but lost sixty-one seats. Six of the ten Progressives elected in 1912 kept their seats, while the Socialists, despite losing nearly half their votes, succeeded in getting a member elected where they'd failed in 1912. Meyer London would now represent the Lower East Side of New York, while the tiny Prohibition Party got Charles Hiram Randall elected as a fusion candidate in Los Angeles, displacing incumbent Progressive congressman Charles W. Bell by a narrow margin. Independent "small-p" progressive William Kent also won re-election in his Northern California district.



Wilson's policies did not change substantially following the 1914 midterms, but that may have done him more harm than good, as the war in Europe became more and more dominant on the agenda. Cultural ties to the UK combined with the democratic nature of it and France as well as the highly publicised brutality of the advancing German armies meant that public opinion in the US favoured the Entente side of the war, and a large popular movement arose during 1915 calling for the US to strengthen its armed forces and cultivate a willingness to defend the country. On the other hand, a lot of people had come to the US during previous years to avoid the militarism of their European homelands, and to them the idea of "preparedness" was completely anathema. This was particularly true of the German community, which was strong in the Midwest in particular, and strongly opposed the idea of going to war with their cousins in Europe regardless of what they might think of the Kaiser. The Midwest included several key swing states, then as now, and one of the strongest Democratic constituencies there were German Catholics, so Wilson found himself in an awkward position. It was only made more awkward when Germany announced its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, which made merchant vessels military targets and led to a number of high-profile US casualties - most famously the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in May 1915, which killed over a thousand people including 128 US citizens.

The reunified Republican Party were convinced they could use this to throw Wilson out of office - after all, hadn't they won every presidential election between 1896 and 1908 by wide margins? There was the issue of the ideological divide between progressives and conservatives, which was still there even if the party was back together, but they solved this by nominating a compromise candidate in the form of Supreme Court justice and former New York governor Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes was known as an anti-corruption crusader and had voted to uphold most social and economic regulations, but his personal views weren't necessarily all that progressive (for instance, he was known to oppose the federal income tax). On the issue of the war, Hughes stopped short of calling for the US to join the war (unlike Theodore Roosevelt, who was fully in the interventionist camp), but supported the Preparedness Movement and attacked Wilson for not doing enough to defend American interests.

Hughes went into the election as the clear favourite, because, as mentioned, the Republicans were regarded as the natural party of government at this time. The Democrats ran a strong campaign, though, and they had a popular economic agenda to campaign on. In addition to the Solid South, Wilson swept most of the West, including taking California by a margin of just under four thousand votes. Aside from Ohio, most of the Midwest and the East went for Hughes, but this did not turn out to be enough - by a 277-254 margin, Wilson won a second term in office.

The accompanying congressional races were no less dramatic. Once again, the Democrats sustained losses, though they weren't as dramatic as those in 1914, and these were primarily concentrated in the Midwest. The exception was Ohio, which saw four seats flip to the Democrats - I have no idea why, but it is worth noting that Wilson also did much better there than in any of the neighbouring states. The nationwide result was even closer than that of the presidential race, returning a House with no overall majority for the first time since the 1850s. In fact, if we look at official Republican candidates only, they and the Democrats were perfectly tied at 214 seats each, though this is slightly misleading given that two candidates elected as independents were members of the Republican Party and sat with them in Congress. With this in mind, you'd expect the Republicans to be able to take control of the House, but not so. The Democrats were able to come to an agreement with Meyer London and the three remaining Progressives, giving them a razor-thin majority in the House that was able to re-elect Champ Clark as Speaker.

A couple of other notes - Alabama and West Virginia redistricted for this election, leaving only Illinois, Texas and Pennsylvania with at-large seats, and Idaho and Montana electing their delegations statewide. The latter would make history during this election, as one of the incumbent Democratic congressmen retired and was replaced by Republican Jeannette Rankin, the first woman ever elected to Congress and the only woman ever elected to Congress from Montana. At this point in time, only a few states even let women vote in federal elections, though that would soon change. Rankin was also notable as one of the most committed pacifists in Congress at this time, voting against the declaration of war in 1917 as well as that against Japan in 1941 (the latter as the sole dissenting vote).

 

[Caprice]

Very impressive of that one Progressive in Louisiana to hold on as the only non-Democrat in the Deep South - a bit of looking into it says he won by less than a hundred votes in 1916!

 

[Ares96]

Very impressive of that one Progressive in Louisiana to hold on as the only non-Democrat in the Deep South - a bit of looking into it says he won by less than a hundred votes in 1916!

It does make sense that he didn’t run as a Republican - I think one of the state constitutions of Louisiana literally disenfranchised Republicans.

 

[Wendell]

It was so nice when congressional districts largely followed county lines generally instead of in just a few states.

 

[Thande]

It was so nice when congressional districts largely followed county lines generally instead of in just a few states.

Though it did come with a fair bit of malapportionment I believe.

Excellent work Max, 1916 giving us America's Last Coalition in the House. I'm surprised there were even that many titular Progressives left in 1914. I'd forgotten or hadn't realised Hughes was a supreme court justice, that feels even dodgier than today in some ways.

 

[Ares96]

I'd forgotten or hadn't realised Hughes was a supreme court justice, that feels even dodgier than today in some ways.

He resigned from the bench when he was nominated for President, but came back in 1931 when Hoover made him Chief Justice. Replacing, of course, William Howard Taft.

 

[Wendell]

Though it did come with a fair bit of malapportionment I believe.

Sure, and some states would sporadically have at-large House seats that did not have to, but there's still a happy medium.

 

[Ares96]

Yeah - a sane country would be able to be trusted with margins greater than 0.75%, but unfortunately this is the United States.

 

[Caprice]

Yeah - a sane country would be able to be trusted with margins greater than 0.75%, but unfortunately this is the United States.

A sane country would be able to be trusted with margins greater than one single person, even.

 

[prime-minister]

I do know it's just because of cross-endorsement, but I find it very funny how LA of all places had a Prohibitionist elected over a Progressive. Then again, was its political culture very different prior to the rise of Hollywood?

 

[Ares96]

I do know it's just because of cross-endorsement, but I find it very funny how LA of all places had a Prohibitionist elected over a Progressive. Then again, was its political culture very different prior to the rise of Hollywood?

It’s always been a stronghold of evangelicalism, it’s just that they’re all in the outer suburbs now - places like Riverside and Orange County.

 

[Ares96]

Don't quote me on it, but this should be everything east of the Mississippi.

 

[Ares96]

I realised there was quite a lot of blue on the map above - in particular, the N&W, MoPac and SCL shades are basically impossible to tell apart even for me - and so I should probably look into changing a couple of those shades. To this end, I decided to have a look at Wikipedia's navbox templates for named trains of specific US railroads, which generally use some kind of official colour taken from the company logo. Three of the carriers extant in 1971 didn't have navboxes, the Georgia Railroad Bank and Northwestern Pacific because they only ran unnamed local trains and the RFP because it was a bridge line that pretty much just carried long-distance trains operated by other railroads. The Burlington Northern also didn't have a navbox, because (with the exception of the commuter service between Chicago and Aurora, which became part of Metra for fare purposes in the 80s but is still operated by BNSF to this day) it only operated passenger service for a little over a year, from March 1970 until April 1971. So for that, I used the pre-BN carrier - the Northern Pacific - whose colour most closely matched that of the merged company.

(The Seaboard Coast Line, contrary to what you might guess from looking at the graphic, did have a box, it's just that its colour was a very light shade of cream. So much for visibility.)

I think what we can say conclusively is that there was a lot of red. Nine out of 22 carriers used some shade of red, and a lot of them were nigh-impossible to distinguish. What is a bit weird is that there's almost no overlap with the railroads I've been using shades of red for on the map - the Rock Island is closest, and the L&N and C of G are both shades of purple on my map, but other than that the red lines I have are all railroads that used different colours officially. There is a reason for this, however, which is that I've previously reserved bright red for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was the biggest railroad in the US for decades and interacted in some way with basically every other carrier east of the Mississippi, so I've wanted to keep the red shades away from most of those. With the Penn Central merger, the colour red became heavily associated with the PRR "side" of the company and green with the NYC "side", and so I've also wanted to avoid assigning either of those to the merged railroad and settled on a shade of gray that I think screams "compromise".

Similar issues arise with the three users of blue - the B&O and C&O are particularly thorny since they were right next door to each other, and would in fact later merge. Both railroads, however, used yellow trim in their liveries, and sometime long ago I decided the B&O should be gold on the maps I make - I'm happy enough to stick with that for now.

 

[Ares96]

This should be it.




A couple of very interesting choices by McKinsey here (because yes, they were the ones who made the report on which routes Amtrak should keep operating): the Lakeshore corridor got shut down, as did virtually all the routes between cities in the West (as opposed to the ones connecting them to Chicago), but they kept the Texas Chief and the Cincinnati-Newport News George Washington. Also worth noting that some of the lines shown as discontinued here came back once Amtrak found its footing, but there were also a fair few new routes added that were just there because some random politician wanted a train to run through his district. The most infamous probably being the Hilltopper, a train that ran down the Northeast Corridor and then served the N&W mainline through West Virginia's emptiest corners, terminating in the bustling metropolis of Catlettsburg, Kentucky. It got an average of 33 riders per day, but still kept running for two years because the local congressman, a man with the impossibly American name Harley Orrin Staggers, was the chairman of the Commerce Committee.

 

[Ares96]

When the results of the 1884 general election became clear, Sousa Dantas tendered his resignation. The situation in the country was badly inflamed, and the situation in the governing party almost as much so, so the Emperor turned to the one man he knew could steer through a reform as complicated as the current one, because he'd done it before: José Antônio Saraiva. The "new" Prime Minister declared that his government would focus its attention on two issues only: resolving the slavery issue and stabilising the Empire's finances. Neither would turn out to be an easy task, and in fact, the second Saraiva ministry would only get as far as submitting its slavery reform bill before Saraiva resigned in August 1885. His notion was that the reform would more easily pass through the General Assembly if it wasn't attached to the lightning rod of a Liberal ministry. The Liberal Party had been fading for some time, and under the logic of Brazilian "reverse parliamentarism" it seemed about time to let the Conservatives have a go again. So this time, the choice fell upon João Mauricio Wanderley, Baron of Cotegipe, who was then President of the Senate and had been Minister of Finance under the Duke of Caxias in the 1870s.

Cotegipe was actually a committed defender of slavery and opponent of abolitionism, but by the time he came to power the bill proposed by Saraiva was already on its way through the chambers, and so he let it pass without much change and it came to be known by his name as well as Saraiva's. The Saraiva-Cotegipe Law was significantly more moderate than what Dantas had proposed, containing none of the economic or geographic restrictions, and in fact was largely just made up of one change: all slaves above the age of 60 would be freed, and those below that age could be voluntarily manumitted, in exchange for a cash value that scaled with age (from 900 contos-de-réis for slaves below 30 to 200 contos-de-réis for those in the 55-65 age bracket) that would be worked off through service to one's former owner. In other words, the only slaves freed at once by the law were those over age 65, which was an extremely rare age for an enslaved Brazilian to reach. An abolitionist cartoon of the time shows Saraiva digging a black man out of the grave to take his chains off.

With the law passed and his government safely established, Cotegipe decided to go to the country to try to obtain a Conservative majority in the lower house. Contrary to Dantas' experience in 1884, Cotegipe found the provincial bosses quite willing to whip the vote in his favour, and the Chamber returned on 15 January 1886 had a compact Conservative majority. Only in Minas and Ceará did a substantial Liberal element remain, although they held a few individual seats in other provinces, adding up to 22 out of 125 seats. The Republicans were also wiped out.

Cotegipe himself would stay in power for almost three years, and by the time he left office in March 1888, the crises that would lead to the end of both slavery and the monarchy were beginning to show themselves.

 

[Ares96]

A WIP of the USRA's divisions - this is all the ones in the Eastern Region, though possibly with some trunk lines missing from some of them (I based lines shown on the ones marked as "primary routes" by the 1970 National Atlas, which obviously represents quite a different time). You can see why this might need some, uh, some work once the war is over.

 

[Ares96]

Another WIP picture from Discord that's going to vanish in a while (though hopefully I should have the whole thing done and hosted somewhere else before that happens): the mother of all tram networks, and one where I've actually never seen a full map showing all stops. Even Robert Schwandl only bothers to show "major" stops, and after filling them in, I'm starting to realise why that might be...

 

[Alex Richards]

I'd love to do Derby's tram network but I've never actually found a list of the stops.