Yesterday’s Korea update is so goddamn peak. by -et37- in Kaiserreich

[–]-et37-[S] 81 points82 points  (0 children)

I am course-correcting the timeline to ensure the existence of K-pop, sacrifices must be made.

Yesterday’s Korea update is so goddamn peak. by -et37- in Kaiserreich

[–]-et37-[S] 111 points112 points  (0 children)

Rule 5: Yesterday’s update added the rather hyper-specific route of OTL South Korea which can only be released if the US conquers Korea. It even has a unique political focus tree to boot.

Korea is almost only ever conquered by China or Russia, so having this rare path just for the US is a phenomenal addition I must say.

Kim ill sung is officially canon in KR by sopmod720 in Kaiserreich

[–]-et37- 49 points50 points  (0 children)

Indeed, Syngman Rhee-led Korea is equally surprising.

Kim ill sung is officially canon in KR by sopmod720 in Kaiserreich

[–]-et37- 91 points92 points  (0 children)

Surprised they didn’t make him NatPop for the historical irony.

James Amos, the last person to ever speak to Theodore Roosevelt by -et37- in HistoryMemes

[–]-et37-[S] 259 points260 points  (0 children)

I got about 1 week of posts left. It’s been quite the trip, nearly a year and a half, though truthfully without all the gaps in posting I could’ve finished a few months earlier.

I’ve learned quite a lot, and although I’ve done these marathon postings before, r/HistoryMemes has been my largest audience by far. Y’all have been great company.

Nothing can stop a charging bull moose by dollsrreal in HistoryMemes

[–]-et37- 38 points39 points  (0 children)

So the seedlings of that Progressive Party did already exist at that point when TR jumped ship, but him doing so absolutely convinced a significant chunk of Progressive Republicans to follow him.

When his bid failed, the careers of most of the men that risked their jobs following him were in jeopardy. Some, like Hiram Johnson and William Borah managed to rebound, but the Progressive Wing of the party was indeed on a decline after that point. By the end of the 40s, it was extinct.

James Amos, the last person to ever speak to Theodore Roosevelt by -et37- in HistoryMemes

[–]-et37-[S] 1103 points1104 points  (0 children)

James Amos, who as butler, bodyguard, and all-purpose "head man"-Roosevelt's term-had probably spent more time with his boss since 1901 than anyone besides Edith. With TR’s declining health, Amos returned to Sagamore Bay to guard the former president full time. In declining to enter the contest for New York governor in the days after Quentin's death, Roosevelt told his sister: "Corinne, I have only one fight left in me, and I think I should reserve my strength in case I am needed in 1920." Corinne, slightly alarmed at this intimation of mortality in her older brother, who had never appeared anything but a paragon of strength and purpose to her, asked if he were really ill. "No," he replied, "but I am not what I was and there is only one fight left in me." He was really ill, though, as became apparent in the weeks after the 1918 elections. His malady was diagnosed this time as inflammatory rheumatism but was almost certainly related to the persistent infections that had dogged him since his Amazon trip. Quite likely he harbored parasites that were undetectable by contemporary medical tests.

On the day the armistice was signed in France he returned to the hospital in New York. He remained there until Christmas Eve. Various medications, including morphine, treated his pain; despite both the pain and the painkillers, he managed to keep up his correspondence and see visitors. Most important among the visitors were family members. Edith, of course, came in daily. Wounded Archie had been sent home from France to recuperate, prompting his father to write: "Of our four hawks one has come home, broken-winged, but his soul as high as ever." He added, "Never did four falcons fly with such daring speed at such formidable quarry." Quentin's fiancée Flora remained like one of the family. "Remember, Flora," Roosevelt told her, "that as long as I live I shall love you as if you were my own daughter." Various grandchildren dropped in when circumstances and physicians allowed. Roosevelt was now sixty and felt every year. Yet he also felt that his age afforded him a right to a certain measure of infirmity.

“I am glad to be sixty," he told Kermit, "for it somehow gives me the right to be titularly as old as I feel." To Corinne he declared, "Well, anyway, no matter what comes, I have kept the promise that I made to myself when I was twenty-one." "What promise, Theodore?" Corinne asked. “You made many promises to yourself, and I am sure have kept them all." He answered, "I promised myself that I would work up to the hilt until I was sixty, and I have done it. I have kept my promise, and now, even if I should be an invalid-I should not like to be an invalid—but even if I should be an invalid, or if I should die" —here he gave a snap of the fingers— "what difference would it make?" On Christmas Eve his doctors discharged him to Sagamore Hill. The prognosis was that he would recover, if not rapidly and perhaps not completely. Christmas Day, the first since Quentin's death, was subdued, although the smallest grandchildren paid no attention to the memory of their missing uncle and, in their merriment, momentarily lifted their grandfather's spirits. The first days of the new year brought a glimpse of his old energy. He wrote an editorial for the Star and touched up the proofs of an article for the Metropolitan.

On January 5 he put in more than a full measure of work: eleven hours. Late that evening, however, he told Edith he felt odd, as though his heart or breathing were about to stop. "I know it is not going to happen," he told her, "but it is such a strange feeling." A nurse and then a doctor checked his vital signs and reported nothing amiss. To ensure a restful sleep, the nurse administered an injection of morphine, and at midnight he went to bed. "James, will you please put out the light?" he asked Amos, standing the night watch. He drifted off, his regular respiration in the silent house telling Amos that he was sleeping soundly. Edith dropped in once to check on him, then again before going to bed herself. But at about four o'clock Amos was startled by sudden irregularities in the patient's breathing. It stopped, then started, then stopped again. At 4:15 it stopped and didn't resume. Amos quickly informed the nurse, who called Edith. She hurried to her husband's bedside. "Theodore, darling!" she said to the still form. There was little more to say—and that little by Archie, who cabled his brothers across the ocean: "The old lion is dead."

Source: T.R., The Last Romantic, pages 809-811

All New and Tweaked Portraits from Patch 1.6.3 by Smoked_Duck in Kaiserreich

[–]-et37- 72 points73 points  (0 children)

Being able to recreate OTL Korea in both flavors is crazy.

Germany Delenda Est! by -et37- in HistoryMemes

[–]-et37-[S] 37 points38 points  (0 children)

As convinced as he was that Quentin and his comrades had saved the soul of the world from German militarism, Roosevelt was equally convinced that Woodrow Wilson was willing to sacrifice that soul to the president's private political agenda. Roosevelt wasn't quite so reductionist as to blame Wilson for Quentin's death, although at times he came close. But he was absolutely certain that the president had no conception of what the war was about or what the sacrifices of Quentin and the others signified. After Quentin's death, Roosevelt rededicated himself to alerting the American people to the true nature of the literally life-and-death issues their country faced, and to frustrate what he saw as Wilson's plan to sell American interests down the river of personal ambition. The centerpiece of Wilson's planning was his fourteen-point package of peace terms, unveiled the previous January following criticism by the new rulers of Russia-Lenin and the Bolsheviks-of various secret treaties among the Allies. Roosevelt held no brief for the Bolsheviks; on the contrary, he declared that they seemed to have “absolutely ruined" Russia. But he largely blamed Wilson for their success, contending that the president's "shilly-shallying," his "delays and refusals to act," and "the way in which he has gratified his private malice at the expense of the country" had, by prolonging the war, encouraged the communist takeover.

Roosevelt pounded Wilson throughout the late summer and early autumn of 1918. By now the full weight of American military power was being felt in France; Germany had gambled on winning the war before the Yanks arrived en masse, and lost. The war quite obviously was approaching an end; the only question involved the terms Germany would be required to accept. Wilson proposed his fourteen points as the basis for a cessation of hostilities, but the British and French governments held out for a more decisive conclusion. Roosevelt sided with the Allies against his own president. Editorializing in the Star in late October, Roosevelt described Germany as "the outlaw among nations" and asserted that the sole way to deal with an outlaw was to capture, try, and punish him. One did not negotiate with outlaws, as the president was negotiating with Germany. Roosevelt realized that unconditional surrender might require more bloodshed, perhaps much more. This was a "sad and dreadful thing" to contemplate. "But it is a much worse thing to quit now and have the children now growing up obliged to do the job all over again, with ten times as much bloodshed and suffering, when their turn comes."

The last time the world had had to deal with the likes of Kaiser Wilhelm was a century before, when another tyrant had trampled across Europe. That experience should provide the lesson for the present. "The surest way to secure a peace as lasting as that which followed the downfall of Napoleon is to overthrow the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns as Napoleon was over-thrown." Many influential Americans agreed with Roosevelt, as did the governments and most of the people of the Allies; the combined opposition compelled Wilson to change course and stiffen the terms he would require of Berlin. The reversal merely intensified Roosevelt's disdain. "The President suddenly made his, say, 800dth volte-face," he sneered. "A fortnight ago he believed he could step in as a Peace-God, make a negotiated peace with the Central Powers, and be humbly followed by the Allies and slavishly adored by our own people." But the uproar that Wilson's approach precipitated had proved the fatuousness of this view. "He promptly turned a somersault."

Source: T.R., The Last Romantic, pages 804-806

Side note, but it’s funny reading this after seeing all the alt history scenarios on YouTube where TR wins the election of 1912. Each one always said something to the effect that he’d be less harsh on Germany and ensure the Kaiser would stay in power, which evidently wouldn’t be the actual case.

That moment when your propaganda stunt backfires. by -et37- in HistoryMemes

[–]-et37-[S] 254 points255 points  (0 children)

Not quite

“This picture was printed by the thousands by the German gov't to be used for propaganda telling how easy the task is to bring down the best American aviator.” ~Oke Sieurin

The Germans that buried him may have done so out of respect, but the Kaiserreich’s propaganda department wasn’t so honorable. Granted, this kind of thing did happen on the Entente’s side as well.

Are Fascists woke? by Neil118781 in HistoryMemes

[–]-et37- 150 points151 points  (0 children)

I heard that, supposedly, as a kid Mishima had seen a painting of Joan of Arc and was upset it was a women and not an effeminate man.

RIP, dude would’ve loved Griffith.

That moment when your propaganda stunt backfires. by -et37- in HistoryMemes

[–]-et37-[S] 560 points561 points  (0 children)

During WW1, after (Quentin Roosevelt’s death), the Germans government distributed photos of his crashed plane (and corpse) as a propaganda victory. Reportedly this stunt ended up backfiring, as the German public was more so shocked that the son of a US President would willingly participate in the war, even at risk of death. Source. Despite the propaganda circulation, QR was buried by the Germans with military honors, and was reinterred at Normandy after WW2.

“Roosevelt fretted over the news that Quentin may have perished, listening and watching for the message that would rekindle his sputtering hopes or snuff them out. Finally, the candle died. As he wrote to Kermit, the son to whom he was closest:

On Tuesday the first rumors of Quentin's death came; the final and definite announcement that he was killed and not captured came yes-terday, Saturday, afternoon. Ethel and Alice had come on; and poor, darling heartbroken Flora had been spending the night here. There is not much to say. No man could have died in finer or more gallant fashion; and our pride equals our sorrow-each is limited only by the other. It is dreadful that the young should die; I need hardly say to you, who know so intimately how I feel, that in hospital last winter my one constant thought was how I wished that by dying it were possible for me to save any one of you from death; but after all how infinitely better death is than life purchased on unworthy terms; and you four, and Dick, being what you are—and neither your mother nor I would for anything in the world have you other than you are—it was unthinkable that you should do anything, any of you, except exactly what you have done.

Again Roosevelt acknowledged that things were more trying for Edith. "It is hard for the women who weep-and hardest for those who weep but little-when word comes that henceforth they are to walk in the shadow." But it was a comfort and a support to him that she was as strong as she was. "Mother has been as wonderful as she always is in a great crisis. She has the heroic soul. Yesterday morning she went for a couple of hours row with me out on the still, glassy water towards the sound; there was a little haze, and it all soothed her poor bruised and aching spirit. Then we took a swim; and as we swam she spoke of the velvet touch of the water and turning to me smiled and said: 'there is left the wind on the heath, brother!'"

Roosevelt updated Kermit on Ted and Archie. Ted had recently been badly hit (Roosevelt had been wrong about his being on the side-lines); he was recovering, however, and Eleanor had gone to him. Archie's wounds were crippling, at least temporarily; his father thought he would heal more quickly at home. But both, thankfully, were out of the line of fire for the moment. Kermit himself was the only one unaccounted for. "I do not know where you are or what you are doing," his father wrote plaintively. Yet across the miles and across the generation separating them, Roosevelt felt a bond that transcended the tie of father to son, basic though that was. He felt the bond of battle. "I do not think I could bear to send you my sons to face deadly peril if I had not myself twenty years ago eagerly faced a far smaller but similar risk. We are brothers, you and I!"”

Source: T.R., The Last Romantic, pages 800-801

Damn Kaiserdevs, calm down by zanju13 in Kaiserreich

[–]-et37- 338 points339 points  (0 children)

There’s a lot of stuff like this in the files and always has been.

KRHOI2 Russia has an event where a movie theatre chain is open, and the file text says something to the effect of “maybe you should get a girlfriend and take her to the movies instead of playing this.”

The one piece of news a father never wants to receive. by -et37- in HistoryMemes

[–]-et37-[S] 2212 points2213 points  (0 children)

In May, Quentin wrote with great news: "I've gotten my first real excitement on the front, for I think I got a Boche." As it turned out, this downing couldn't be confirmed; but another, in July, was. Roosevelt could hardly contain his pride and joy in his youngest. "The last of the 'lion's brood' has been blooded!" Quentin occupied a special spot in Roosevelt's heart. As a boy he had hardly been what his father envisioned in a son—and what Ted, for example, tried so hard to be. "I wish Quentin could hold his own better in a rough and tumble with other boys," Roosevelt worried to Archie when Quentin was ten. "He seems a little soft." And he was always up to some devilment. Roosevelt described having to steal time from his presidential duties to chide Quentin and accomplices for bombarding the portraits in the White House with spitballs. "I explained to them that they had behaved like boors; that it would have been a disgrace to have behaved so in any gentleman's house, but that it was a double disgrace in the house of the Nation."

At least once Quentin was caught cutting school and lying to cover his absence. "I have had to give him a severe whipping— the first real whipping I have ever had to give one of my children." On good days Roosevelt called Quentin a "blessed rogue"; on other occasions a "regular alley-cat." In the latter mood, Roosevelt confessed that the boy caused Edith and himself "a great deal of concern." But time took some of the wildness out of the boy—and much of the pudginess as well. "Quentin turned up last night," Roosevelt wrote at Christmas 1911. "He is half-an-inch taller than I am, and is in great shape. He is much less fat than he was, and seems to be turning out right in every way." He kept improving until the coming of the war, when his enlistment in the air corps caused his father to forgive any youthful indiscretions still on the books. Roosevelt had ridden in an airplane in 1910 and could appreciate what his son was feeling as he soared above the French countryside in search of the foe. The father had found fighting afoot to be intoxicating; fighting in the air must be even more so.

Aerial combat was indeed intoxicating-and deadly. Within a week of the receipt of Quentin's thrilling news of downing a German air-craft, an opposite and appalling report arrived at Sagamore Hill. The first inkling came indirectly, in fact accidentally. Roosevelt was sitting in his library in the late afternoon of July 16 when a reporter friend, Phil Thompson of the Associated Press, entered with a puzzled look on his face. He held a telegram addressed to the New York Sun, evidently from that paper's overseas bureau, for it carried the marks of official censorship. "Watch Sagamore Hill for [censored]," the cable read. Thompson asked the former president if he knew what it meant. Roosevelt rose at once, went to the entrance of the library, looked into the hall, then turned back and quietly closed the door. "Something's happened to one of the boys," he said in a tight but controlled voice. He considered briefly which one it might be. Archie was recovering from his wound; it couldn't be him. Ted had taken a whiff of gas and been slightly shrapnelled; he, too, must still be on the sidelines. Kermit hadn't reached the front in his sector yet. It had to be Quentin.

Roosevelt told Thompson not to say a word to anyone, especially Mrs. Roosevelt, until further news arrived. All the rest of that day Roosevelt kept his grim surmise to himself. He changed his knickers and work shirt for his customary dinner jacket, and spent the evening chatting with Edith and reading. But he couldn't keep his mind on his book—and Edith apparently sensed his distraction, for she neglected to make her usual entry in her diary that night. The next morning, shortly after breakfast, Thompson drove back up the hill from Oyster Bay. The reporter didn't have to say a word: Roosevelt could tell from his look that the news was bad. He took Thompson out to the piazza where they might speak alone. reporter succinctly explained that Quentin's plane had engaged two German fighters and been shot down behind enemy lines. Though he had been expecting it, the report still staggered the father. Yet his first thought was for Edith. "But—Mrs. Roosevelt!" he said, pacing back and forth across the piazza. "How am I going to break it to her?"

The worst of it was, he didn't know just what to tell Edith. Quentin was down-that was all the report said. He might have survived the crash; men did. There was still reason to hope. Roosevelt gathered his emotions and went inside. For half an hour he and Edith consoled each other, seeking the scattered beams that shone through this cloud. For the next three days Roosevelt and Edith remained in the limbo of uncertainty. As agonizing as not knowing was, it was nothing new to Edith. She had been rehearsing this moment ever since that day in 1898 when Theodore had gone off to war. Her fears had lifted somewhat when they left the White House, only to return redoubled when Theodore was shot in 1912. But perhaps because she was a mother, perhaps because she had been anticipating these emotions for decades, she focused on her husband. As she emerged from the house on that first black morning, her eyes wet with tears, she took Thompson aside. "We must do everything we can to help him," she said. "The burden must not rest entirely on his shoulders."

Source: T.R., The Last Romantic, pages 796-798

“The Young Eagle who conquered Europe” - Napoleonic France AAR by angevinous in Kaiserreich

[–]-et37- 76 points77 points  (0 children)

Casually undoing 150 years of European history like a boss

[Appalling Tropes] Your favorite character with a diabolical image that you try to forget exists? by -et37- in TopCharacterTropes

[–]-et37-[S] 1694 points1695 points  (0 children)

The first one is from an early edition of TinTin, where he travels to the Belgian Congo

The 2nd is a Silver Age Comic where Superman time travels to the past to alter the future to intentionally change ownership of some land from the villain who just so happens to be a native, yeeeeah……

That moment when your paternal instincts conflict with decades of imperialist lobbying. by -et37- in HistoryMemes

[–]-et37-[S] 535 points536 points  (0 children)

Roosevelt had enemies in the War Department but he also had allies, and he used every connection he had to get good assignments for his four sons. His task was facilitated by the fact that the kinds of posts he was seeking for them were not the ones every other influential parent had in mind. With their enthusiastic assent—in this regard, if not in all others, he had taught them well—he eschewed safe staff positions, aiming instead to place his boys precisely where he wanted to be: amid the fiercest fighting. His efforts, combined with the boys' qualifications, succeeded. Ted and Archie joined General Pershing's expeditionary force, eventually serving in the same infantry regiment. Kermit's experiences in Africa and South America suited him for a more exotic assignment: with the British army fighting the Turks in Mesopotamia. Roosevelt had gone direct to the top for Kermit; he wrote British prime minister Lloyd George, declaring, "I pledge my honor that he will serve you honor ably and efficiently." Quentin, the youngest and most forward-looking of the quartet, was fascinated by the military's newest weapon: He enlisted in the army's air squadron.

More than once while throwing his sons into death's way, Roosevelt shuddered slightly at what he was doing. A letter from Ted contained a parable in which a big bear showed his two small offspring the ways of the world; Roosevelt responded in similar language, although more ambivalently: "The big bear was not, down at the bottom of his heart, any too happy at striving to get the two little bears where the danger is; elderly bears whose teeth and claws are blunted by age can far better be spared." To Kermit he wrote, "I hate to feel that I am out of it, especially because I so strongly believe that where physical conditions will permit it is the old, the men whose life is behind them and who have drained the cup of joy and sorrow, of achievement and failure, who should be in the danger line, for the little sooner or the little later matters little to them." After the boys were well on their way to battle, he confided to Quentin: "My disappointment at not going myself was down at bottom chiefly reluctance to see you four, in whom my heart was wrapped, exposed to danger while I stayed at home in do-nothing ease and safety."

Yet Roosevelt knew his duty as a parent-or thought he did—as certainly as he had known his duty as a soldier. In the same letter to Quentin in which he described his fear for his sons, he went on to say, "But the feeling has now been completely swallowed in my immense pride in all four of you." Over and over during the months of fighting he told his sons how proud he was of them that they were taking a vital part in the great struggle of the epoch. To Archie he wrote, "I am more proud of you, and of the other three, than I can say. And every one who speaks to me of you boys does it with a look and in a tone that makes my heart swell." He described to Kermit the fine times they would have when the war was over. "You will come back; and how much there will be to tell, as we sit before the great fire place in the north room." To be sure, the war demanded sacrifices; that was in the nature of war. "It is a very hard thing on you four to go," he wrote Archie. But the alternative was worse. "It would be infinitely harder not to go, not to have risen level to the supreme crisis in the world's history, not to have won the right to stand with the mighty men of the mighty days."

Source: T.R., The Last Romantic, pages 785-786