"...the fundamental premise of "Root-ism," if such an ideology could be said to exist, was that the Republic needed an experienced and sober-minded President for the immediate postwar period, and that Elihu Root was uniquely equipped for such a task both from an administrative and partisan point of view. He had served in every Liberal administration
since the party's foundation and thus retained a singular understanding of the machinery of federal government both in practice and in theory, and knew every major player in both parties across the country.
There was a second piece to this, however, beyond simply running on a vague idea of "experience" - that the Liberals, having won the war, could deliver to the public a worthy peace and a "return to normalcy" away from wartime rationing and the devastation of the front. This would have been a profoundly difficult task to accomplish for any man in this position - historians have generally taken the view that Hughes would have failed in this endeavor, and that a Democratic President such as George McClellan Jr. or a fourth-term William Randolph Hearst would have as well - but those specific choices made by Root, especially by his Cabinet, set his administration up to be particularly dismal. Several of those problems came home to roost as early as the spring of 1917, and were perhaps typified by the chaos of the Minneapolis General Strike, regarded at that time as probably the largest strike in the history of the United States, at least since the "Strikeout Summer" of 1886 or the Pullman Strike of 1894 - both events Root had witnessed himself as a Cabinet officer.
The General Strike's causes were myriad and complex, a mix of wartime and postwar labor grievances, ethnic tensions peculiar to Minnesota, and the economic shock of the end of the war, but whatever else helped cause it was badly exacerbated by the decision on May 5th, 1917 to wind up the Grain Board and suspend price controls. This was not entirely Root's doing; the Grain Board had already relaxed a number of controls since the fall before his inauguration, and by the time he took the oath of office it was probably one of the most unpopular institutions in the United States thanks to its aggressive moralizing policing of the use of grains to make beer in states where alcohol was legal (the cause of the infamous Milwaukee Beer Crisis in 1914), its arbitrary use of price controls and issuing of credit to farmers, and a general sense in the Farm Belt that its governors knew little about agricultural economics and didn't care to. Prairie Democrats like Dakota's John Burke had called for the Grain Board's abolition as early as late 1915, and the general contempt for it was one of the few things that the populist agrarian Western Wall had in common with the
laissez-faire small-government Liberals that populated Root's administration to a much greater extent than Hughes'.
Where they disagreed, however, was on the solution. Burke and other Western Senators were of the belief that the Grain Board should be replaced by a permanent farm support bureau that provided agricultural credit, hail insurance, and other price supports farmers had long called for but which had been introduced piecemeal in the Hearst era and never quite to their satisfaction. Bills to that effect were drafted and introduced; in the meantime, Mellon called for the Board's suspension ahead of the 1917 planting season, of the belief that most farmers would prefer to proceed with their harvest knowing they were not at the mercy of the Board's decisions. Early May was fairly late for such an endeavor, and due to that Stimson argued vociferously that the decision should be punted until
after the harvest, but Root deferred to Mellon for the first but not the last time over the suggestions of his protege, and signed the executive order winding up the Grain Board, with it set to be entirely disbanded no later than July 1st..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...only Ireland produced a proportionately higher level of emigres in the 19th and early 20th centuries than Norway, and the Irish emigrated to a far broader number of destinations than just the United States. The manpower needs of the Great American War and an economic depression in the mid-1910s had driven almost two hundred thousand Norwegians,
[1] more than five percent of the country's population, across the Atlantic in the space of just five years, and unlike the massive amounts of Italians, Serbs and Greeks who flocked to American factories to provide wartime muscle, few if any of them returned to their cold, impoverished home. Norwegians found their way all over the United States, with large communities forming in Seattle, Chicago, Spokane, Dakota's Red River Valley, and Butte, but nowhere saw as many as in such high amounts as Minnesota.
What set Minnesota aside demographically, too, was that while most Norwegians were economic migrants, a huge wave had arrived a decade earlier in the wake of the failed war of independence, the so-called Fivers (referencing 1905), of whom Michelsen was the north star but whom quickly diversified politically, as Norwegian nationalism was a large tent that included not just the conservative classical liberals like Michelsen but socialists and everything in between. This political sentiment was exacerbated by the fact that in Minnesota, the Norwegians found themselves in a place dominated politically by a machine of Swedes and German Lutherans, giving Minnesota an ethnic-based politics both unique to its state and complete opaque to outsiders, who had little understanding what exactly the tensions were all about, with many Americans, despite the long-running stereotype of the "Swedish nanny," not being able to tell the two cultures apart whatsoever.
[2] Within the Twin Cities, however, it was a sharp contrast. Norwegians had their own Lutheran parishes and schools, their own grocers and laundries, and the Sons of Norway, a fraternal organization that quickly became the backbone of Minneapolis society and provided life and health insurance, legal aid and unemployment support. Social intermixing with Swedes, who tended to concentrate either in a different part of Minneapolis or in St. Paul across the Mississippi River, was almost nonexistent unlike in other areas, such as the more diverse Seattle, and Norwegians, regardless of their views on policy and despite the influence of long-tenured Norwegian-born (and Fiver-sympathetic) Senator Knute Nelson, stubbornly refused to vote for the Democratic Party that dominated Minnesota politics if for no reason other than that it was at that time run primarily by Swedes, such as Senator John Lind or the new governor, Charles A. Lindbergh.
Minneapolis thus was a fairly unusual place ethnically with a particular set of grievances and tensions within its public, which exacerbated its peculiar economic conditions as well. The Twin Cities lay at the point where two of the four major transcontinental railroads met after crossing Montana and the Dakotas and also upon the Mississippi River, thus making it one of the most critical junction points for transportation east, west and south in the United States. Its position also placed it where the industrial Midwest met the agrarian Farm Belt, and sat in close proximity to the Iron Range and steel mills of Duluth, possibly the most politically radical city in the country. As such, it had surged in population and industrial production during the war, as shipments passed through on nationalized railroads and barges of weapons and grain were shipped south to the front along with armed gunboats produced in St. Paul. It was a city unusually dependent on farming
and industry
and transport logistics, formerly the headquarters of Great Northern and Northern Pacific before the Rail Nationalization Order and still the headquarters of General Mills, the city's largest and most important employer with its massive grain elevators, warehouses, and mills. The suspension of the Grain Board and its price controls, and the anticipation of the re-privatization of the railroads soon thereafter, thus struck the city hard and suddenly at a time when thousands of veterans were returning to Minnesota only to find that jobs were scarce as factories laid off employees and downsized production needs with War Department contracts expiring, and consumer goods were prohibitively expensive after nearly four years of rationing and a major focus on war materiel being produced instead.
Michelsen was not entirely unsympathetic to organized labor, and indeed in his antipathy for the Swedish-dominated Democrats had endorsed the Socialist Thomas Van Lear for Mayor of Minneapolis in one of the final instances of the strange, era-specific municipal alliance between classic liberals and social democrats opposed to perceived Democratic corruption. Nonetheless, his liberalism was genuinely held, and he had campaigned with vigor for the Root-Garfield ticket in Minnesota even if it was in vain. He was thus not surprised when on June 1st, after General Mills refused a 12% pay raise after three years of wage controls during the war, ten thousand mill workers walked off the job and announced a strike, and in a letter written in the Norwegian-language
Minnesota Norsk-Advokat he urged General Mills to negotiate with the workers as grain, wheat and beef futures absolutely collapsed across the board following the end of price controls. This encouragement fell on deaf ears, and by the end of the week, railroad workers announced they would no longer ship General Mills products out of sympathy, and dockworkers below the Falls of the Mississippi announced similar provisions. The Minneapolis General Strike had begun..."
[3]
-
Andre Sjanse: Christian Michelsen in America
[1] About 800,000 Norwegians emigrated to the US between 1825-1925 IOTL, for reference, so the USA is a whole lot more
Norsk here with these kinds of numbers both heightened and sustained
[2] This happens a lot to me personally, lol
[3] Two notes. Yes, this is basically just an amalgamated version of the Seattle General Strike and the Winnipeg General Strike. Second, this got a bit too into the weeds on Norwegian-Swedish ethnic relations in Minneapolis so I wasn't able to cover the whole strike in one update as I'd hoped, but Part II will be forthcoming soon.
(Also: special thanks to
@DanMcCollum for his thoughts on helping me come up with some ideas for the Minneapolis strike)