Imagine if McKinley had not been assassinated and we never had the progress---ive GOP Roosevelt .
Here is the real irony of President Roosevelt.
Like his cousin, he was a lifelong Democrat. But for the time he was a Liberal Nationalist Democrat, not to be confused with the modern Democratic Party. But in both is running for Governor and later Vice-President, he picked the Republican Party more for reasons of practicality than blind party obedience.
Later in life he would try to make the Republicans more Progressive, which failed and led to a schism that floundered the party for years and created a short lived third party, the Progressive Party (commonly called the "Bull Moose Party").
And I am surprised nobody has yet to mention the reason the US got into the war in the first place, the Zimmermann Telegram.
We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President's attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.
Signed, ZIMMERMANN
This was from Arthur Zimmermann, Foreign Secretary of the German Empire to the Mexican President, through the German Ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt. The two threats (unrestricted submarine warfare and promoting an invasion from Mexico) was the match that lit the outrage of the US and caused it to enter the war.
And while I do believe that the war would have ended the same way without the US joining in, it would have likely added another 2-4 years to the duration of the war. And if that had happened, the death toll would likely have been much-much higher.
That is because in the wake of the Great War, you had a scourge sweep the world that would kill far more people than the war ever did. The Spanish Flu Outbreak of 1918 came right as the war was winding down, and it was the worst plague in history.
It is estimated that over 500 million were infected, and with 100 million dying, that gives it a mortality rate of 1 in 5. The flu is one of the great unknown tragedies of the 20th century, many never having heard of it. A great many older cemeteries in the US and around the world have mass graves for the victims of this disease. And much of the aid in recovering was ironically from soldiers. A great many fighting in the trenches had caught an earlier strain of the disease, and were immune after it mutated to it's more deadly version.
Much speculation that it first jumped to humans on the battlefield, likely from pigs kept near the battlefield for food (the Spanish Flu, Swine Flu, and H1N1 are different names/strains of the same disease). And it was an illness that swept both sides of the conflict, but likely mutated when it started to spread in the more densely populated cities.
Now imagine what the death tolls worldwide would have been like if the huge numbers of immune soldiers were not available to fight it through the rest of 1918 and 1919.
This is why when I examine history, I see it as a chain of cause and effect. And one of the biggest changes to come out of the war ultimately was the start of modern military medicine. The advances in just the prior 50 years were huge.
