Well Mumby's use of the Astors is terrifyingly serendipitous, allow me to present:
The Destined Manifest
The voyage of the Titanic, and the birth of American Empire
1909-1913:
William Howard Taft (Republican)
1908 (with James S. Sherman) def. William J. Bryan (Democratic)
1913-1919:
Theodore Roosevelt (Republican)
1912 (with William Howard Taft) def. Woodrow Wilson (Democratic)
1916 (with William Howard Taft) def. George B. McClellan Jr. (Democratic), Hiram Johnson (Progressive)
1919-1921:
William Howard Taft (Republican)
Having returned from a stay in Europe aboard the maiden voyage of the indestructible ship, RMS Titanic, Major Archibald Butt returned to a disaster in the Republican Party. Once cordial and supportive relations between his close friends former President Theodore Roosevelt and sitting President William Howard Taft had broken down, and President Roosevelt had announced his intention to run as a third-party 'Progressive' candidate against the Republican Party, virtually ensuring a Democratic victory in November. Butt was the only man who had any hope of restoring unity to the fractured party, but against all the odds he succeeded. Through weeks of torturous negotiations, the Major was able to forge a deal between Roosevelt and Taft in which they would serve as
de facto 'co-Presidents': Roosevelt would compromise with Taft over domestic issues, and the latter would speerhead a middle way between Roosevelt's trust-busting national populism and his own pro-business conservatism, whilst Roosevelt would take the helm of US foreign policy, pursuing expansion abroad and ensuring the open market for American goods which had been the hallmark of Taft's stance on the world stage. With the return of Roosevelt to the top of the ticket, the re-energised Republican Party would eek out a fourth Presidential election victory against the Democrats under the leadership of the stiff and anonymous Governor of New Jersey and former academic Woodrow Wilson.
The terms of the compromise between Roosevelt and Taft would very soon become nothing more than an academic curiosity. Just over a year after the new co-Presidency came into being, war broke out in Europe, and divisions immediately resurfaced in the Republican Party over how to respond, including between the two Presidents. Taft, the outspoken internationalist favoured peace, and US mediation between Britain and France and Germany. whereas Roosevelt was a gung-ho militarist and favoured immediate intervention on the side of the Entente. And despite the informal co-Presidency, Roosevelt
was technically President... But even the Bull Moose couldn't go to war without congress, so he lay in wait, and when The Lusitania went down even Taft couldn't resist the President's call to war. The Democrats fell in line behind the war effort and a compromise candidate, and only a gaggle of Socialists, Bryanite Populists, and Republican Progressives united behind Hiram Johnson mounted an effort against Roosevelt's headlong rush into the abyss. Over 150,000 young American men died in the struggle to liberate Europe, but in January 1919, the Kaiser abdicated, and a peace was signed at Versailles. But Teddy wouldn't live to see that, dying a week before the Kaiser's abdication.
The two years of Taft's second administration were dominated by the politics of the peace. Whilst Taft was an early proponent of the Congress of Nations proposed by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes at Versailles, his congressional Republican colleagues rejected it, whilst the Democrats rode a wave of isolationist sentiment back to popularity. With the United States overextended, having annexed Germany's Pacific Empire, and waging a counterinsurgency in New Guinea, Taft was deplored as an imperialist and a warmonger. Dragged down by the blood on Roosevelt's hands, even the creeping popularity of empire-building in the Pacific within the GOP and business community couldn't stop these attacks from bringing the President down.
1921-1921:
Champ Clark (Democratic)
1920 (with William J. Bryan) def. William Howard Taft (Republican)
1921-1925:
William J. Bryan (Democratic)
1924 (with Francis Burton-Harrison) def. Leonard E. Wood (Republican), William Borah (Progressive)
1925-1929:
Francis Burton-Harrison (Democratic)
1929-1933:
Newton D. Baker (Democratic)
1928 (with Franklin Roosevelt) def. Gifford Pinchot (Republican), Andrew Mellon (Sound Money Republicans)
After their split in 1912, Champ Clark and WJB had seemed an unlikely duo, but eight years later the changed politics of the postwar era had allowed an unexpected reconciliation. Both bitterly opposed to Rooseveltian imperialism, they had united behind a pro-peace and anti-internationalist baker at the 1920 convention, defeating Wilson's attempt to mount a pro-Congress of Nations comeback. Clark wouldn't get to enjoy the fruits of victory, dying not long after inauguration. Bryan was little more successful - he was yesterday's man, and the populism of the previous century was outflanked by both the new Progressivism and Socialism, whilst his conservative Christian views were mocked as antediluvian by a hostile press. Prohibition proved divisive, and the postwar economic recovery was sluggish after a crisis in agriculture. Yet in 1924, faced with another Republican imperialist, and a tepid Progressive challenge, the American people voted for Bryan again.
But the Great Commoner wasn't long for the world, and died in the summer of '25 amidst negotiations with the Congress of Nations for the United States to withdraw from New Guinea. His Vice President, Francis Burton-Harrison was even more eager to shed the United Stats of its newfound colonial appendages, but negotiations with the Congress collapsed, and support amongst the American people was shifting towards a pro-imperialist position. Meanwhile, orthodox fiscal policies pursued by the Treasury, and the rollback of wartime regulations after the caution of the Bryan years proceeded unabated under the inexperienced new President, and the economy began to shudder to life. Fortunes were won, parties thrown, speakeasies frequented, and day by day the bubble came closer to bursting.
Luckily for Burton-Harrison, that wouldn't be his problem. Bowing out before the '28 convention, he was succeeded by the reformer Newton Baker, and in a two Progressive horse race mainly fought over the issue of imperialism, the Democrats only clung on by the skin of their teeth. Then came the deluge. In 1930, the economic bubble popped. President Baker was quick to respond, and his stimulus efforts deserve credit for preventing the collapse of American capitalism. But to most Americans that didn't matter: as the world descended into economic chaos, the Kaiser was restored in Berlin, the socialists came to power in France and Russian democracy fell in a military coup within a year of one another, and the Congress of Nations collapsed. Baker was blamed for the lot, and his prevarication over the United States' role in stabilising the global system became an easy attack-line for Republicans. He left the White House without credit for his successes, and all the blame for the crash.
1933-1941:
John-Jacob Astor IV (Republican)
1932 (with Henry A. Wallace) def. Newton D. Baker (Democratic)
1936 (with Henry A. Wallace) def. William G. McAdoo (Convention Democrats), Al Smith (Manhattan Democrats), Upton Sinclair (Sacramento Democrats)
1941-1945:
Henry L. Stimson (Republican)
1940 (with Ed Martin) def. Wendell Willkie (Liberal Democrats), John H. Bankhead (Conservative Democrats)
1945-1949:
John-Jacob Astor IV (Republican)
1944 (with Henry L. Stimson) def. Harry S Truman (Democratic), Charles Lindbergh (Stars and Stripes Committees)
Exeunt Baker, enter Astor. Another name from the illustrious manifest of the RMS Titanic, the multimillionaire businessman John-Jacob Astor IV had turned his hand to politics as a supporter of Taft in the fight over American entry into the Congress of Nations. In 1920 he had elbowed his way into the Governor's mansion in Albany, and his defeat two years later only served to set up his run for the Senate in 1926, beating back both the Republican incumbent and popular challenger Robert Wagner. In the Senate, his fierce internationalism was matched only by a mercurial populism on domestic issues, unwilling to commit to anything of substance. But in 1932, Americans were looking for a new way, and Astor was willing to pour his millions into making it seem like he had what it took: in alliance with the party's progressives, yet backed by the business elite, he entered the White House, promising a 'Square Deal for all', and with his eye on forging an American empire.
The recovery was faltering at first, the abandonment of Baker's recovery plan setting the country back for the first year, but the ever-adaptable President changed course under his Vice President's influence, and the long road to recovery began. In Europe, Socialist governments in Britain and France, leant their support to the Republicans in Spain, as the Kaiser fought desperately to both remilitarise his Reich and support monarchism in Iberia. In the East, the reactionary 'Regency' of General Wrangel cosied up to the dictatorships of Central Europe, including the Kaiser, whilst in Asia, China descended into anarchy. At home Astor continued to pursue economic stabilisation, working with big business whilst establishing work programmes to get America back on the job, but this domestic agenda was mainly spearheaded by Vice President Wallace. The President's focus continued to lie in expanding American involvement in the Pacific, sponsoring colonisation and economic development in the Philippines and Guinea: only long after he left office would the terrible atrocities these colonists committed come to light.
In his own time, Astor's new vision for America proved unshakably popular, and with a split in the Democratic Party in 1936 between the racist supporters of McAdoo opposed to heavy deficit spending, and the liberal, internationalist, and progressive coalition loosely around Al Smith and a small Pacifist and Socialist contingent splitting after McAdoo's nomination at the Convention, the President carried almost every state in the Union. His second term was marked by one event above all: the beginning of the war. In 1937 the Kaiser's attempt to annex Austria amidst the collapse of the republican government's authority provoked Italy, which moved in to preserve Austria's independence: when Germany consequently declared war on Italy in the name of 'stabilising intervention' in Austria, her allies Britain and France declared war on Germany, leading Russia to intervene on the German side. Soon the continent was gripped by war, and in the East Japan took advantage of the chaos to pursue a strike against Britain in the Indo-Pacific. It was this element of the conflagration which would draw in the United States, and with the sinking of the USS Panay in 1938 - the 'Second Lusitania' - President Astor would take the grave decision to declare war on Japan. Two days later, Germany, seeking to regain her Pacific colonies, declared war on the United States, and Russia again followed.
The war that followed was brutal and drawn out. The vast Eurasian mass and the 'Oceanic Powers' struggled against one another for nine years of hard warfare. In that time, President Astor left office in favour of his Secretary of State Henry Stimson, only to return under the 'Roosevelt Precedent', having acted as the power behind the throne as Stimson's own Secretary of State. With the Democrats still divided between the liberal internationalist Willkieites and the conservative southerners, even the corruption of the 'great switch' barely registered with the electorate, whilst in 1944 where the party had reunited under a bland nobody, it was unable to inspire the electorate and its conservative flank abandoned it for Lindbergh's doomed far-right anti-war bid.
War ended in 1946, less because of any great victory by the democratic nations of the world than because of the political collapse of their enemies. Once again the economic ruin of the war triggered socialist revolution and civil war in Germany and Russia, and this time it swept the entire Eurasian continent. Germany fell, then Russia, then as China sank into civil war, French troops turned around and established a workers' republic at home and Belgium and the Netherlands soon fell into the clutches of the Federation of European Peoples' Republics. As Japan's war effort fell apart without her allies' help, Britain and the United States scrabbled to hold onto the now non-Communist world. The US annexed Japan's Pacific possessions and Formosa directly, forming a satellite in Japan and a condominium with Britain in Indochina. In the end this financial strain was too much for the American people to endorse, and Astor sensed which way the wind was blowing, and bowed out in 1948 in favour of his dashing young Secretary of State.
1949-
0000: Bennet Champ Clark (Democratic)
1948 (with Eleanor Roosevelt) def. Nelson Rockefeller (Republican)
But, in a way, Bennet Clark's election was the ultimate and final triumph of Astorism. Nearly three decades after his father's election as an antiwar candidate, Clark would win the Presidency on similar predicates, but would govern from an entirely different playbook. The realities of the geopolitical situation he had inherited demanded continued American involvement in the world - they demanded, or so the brain trust at Foggy Bottom claimed, an empire. So the son of the great pacifist became the proconsul of a nascent American imperialism. Under Bennet Clark the Philippines would be admitted as a state alongside Alaska and Hawaii, whilst US control over her newfound 'territories' in the Pacific and Asia was tightened, French Guiana and her Caribbean possessions integrated into the United States, and efforts made to close America's net around the precariously balanced Dutch state in exile in Indonesia, with an eye to its integration as either an economic and military satrap or even a territory.
The empire of liberty's great providential westward expansion continued, had that not always been her destiny?
(Yes I did come up with the pun first, shut up)
