While the Italians and Ottomans were fighting to determine the ownership of Libya, major events were beginning to stir across the Atlantic. In the United States of America, the press was in full force, shifting public perception in favor of their chosen candidate.
That’s right, it was that time again. Every four years, the USA elected a Presidential candidate into office. Normally, Bruno would not be interested in such a dull and dreadful matter—at least not from the perspective of his past life.
But the election in the United States, which would be concluded in November 1912, was a matter of global security. Depending on who won, the USA would either do everything it could to stir the public toward guaranteed entry into the Great War, or it would do everything possible to stay out of it.
Isolationism vs. Globalism—that was what the current U.S. election meant. And Bruno would do everything in his power to prevent Woodrow Wilson’s rise to the Presidency. There were few men in modern history, even among those who waved the banner of Marxism, that Bruno detested more than the 28th President of the United States.
After all, Woodrow Wilson did everything he could to ensure Germany’s destruction in 1918 and in the years that followed. He was the sole world leader who utterly refused any peace in Europe unless the Kaiser abdicated.
In doing so, Wilson effectively forced the Weimar Republic into existence, which, by extension, led to the rise of the Nazi Party—a result of the Republic’s monumental and catastrophic failures as a nation-state.
Since Woodrow Wilson was at least partially responsible for the woes of the German people and their fall from grace, Bruno had a certain level of disdain for him. Preferably, peaceful means could be used to prevent his rise to power. And while peace was preferable, violence was always an effective solution for any problem. Resorting to it when all other options were exhausted was something Bruno had no qualms about.
However, Bruno doubted he would need to take such underhanded and covert actions like assassination. He held significant control over American society, mostly in subtle ways that few truly understood.
The media was a powerful tool for swaying the masses, who were often too ignorant to come to a conclusion on their own. One simple headline was all they needed—no matter how outlandish and beyond the boundaries of truth it was—to fully form an opinion on something.
Once an opinion or bias was formed, even if it was based on mistruths, it was hard to convince someone otherwise. Especially if they were an idiot, which, from Bruno’s perspective, most people were. Hence why he believed democracies and republics were inherently doomed to failure.
And because of this, he had spent the last decade using various means to invest in the American media, especially the newspapers, which were the primary source of a citizen’s news at this point in time.
He had done so through inconspicuous means, using various figureheads, offshore accounts, and backdoor deals to hide the fact that he was the real figure in the shadows controlling these puppets.
This made it damn difficult, especially with the current technological limitations, to trace him to any of the newspapers that printed articles questioning the moral character, intellectual capability, and physical stamina required to become the leader of the United States of America.
Perhaps in Bruno’s past life, there was only one presidential candidate who had ever been so ostracized by the media as Wilson was currently being. Many of the words printed that were outright libelous.
But lawsuits could be settled with money and took many years to resolve. Judges could be bought, and cases could be thrown out with the passing of cash beneath the table. If there was one thing Bruno was not lacking in this world, it was wealth. And with his exceptional amount of wealth, there were only a few individuals who could challenge him in a game of manipulating the masses.
Unfortunately, these individuals were busy vying with Bruno for control of international markets and had yet to understand how easy it was to corrupt a democratic government. On the contrary, this was not the first election Bruno had interfered with in sovereign and “democratic nations.”
In fact, he had learned a valuable lesson from his past life. Though it was a tactic wielded by his enemies, it was an efficient one nonetheless, and Bruno was not the type to believe himself morally above underhanded means if they were practical.
The truth of the matter was that the best way to undermine democracies was to buy out politicians, judges, sheriffs, and other elected officials at the local and state levels. They were much cheaper to bribe into your service than those at the national level.
It was with this in mind that Bruno had spent the past decade using his wealth and ties to many American corporate interests to foster a bipartisan coalition of politicians at every level of the United States.
This coalition was fiercely isolationist and used depictions of atrocities committed abroad, along with the horrors of war German volunteers faced in Russia, as examples of why America should stay out of global wars that did not concern them.
Based on the Committee of the same name from Bruno’s past life, which was initially formed in 1940 for a similar purpose, the America First Committee had significant gains in local and state elections. In addition, they had a large presence in the U.S. Congress and Senate.
Currently, William Howard Taft was the Republican nominee. Out of the four presidential candidates in the 1912 election—those being Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eugene V. Debs, who ran for the Socialists—Taft was the only one supporting diplomacy through trade rather than warfare.
In the election of Bruno’s previous life, Taft had performed poorly, gaining only two states in the Electoral College. But now, he was the favorite. Bruno had spent the better part of a decade shaping American public opinion to reinforce the Monroe Doctrine and keep the nation out of global affairs.
It was, after all, the wish of the Founding Fathers to do exactly that. And because of this, the propaganda Bruno had invested untold fortunes to mass-produce expressed similar patriotic sentiments.
Hence why Teddy Roosevelt and his neo-imperialistic policies were not favored by the public. Nor were Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy ideas, which Bruno had unearthed and brought to the public’s attention. Wilson’s ideas supported armed intervention in foreign nations to spread American ideals of democracy and liberty, as if it were a right given to them by God.
To the more religiously minded, such justifications were nothing more than heretical, and immediately lost Wilson any support from among them. Currently, Woodrow Wilson was sitting in his office, looking at the latest poll figures, which saw William Howard Taft with the largest share of the vote among the four candidates, as the only one with above 33% of the voter base expressing some degree of support for him.
This baffled Wilson, who had been assured by his many backers that he was the guaranteed favorite for the election. This would have been the case if Bruno had not invested so heavily in his downfall, as Wilson had won the 1912 election via a landslide victory in Bruno’s past life.
Hence, he and his campaign manager were currently scratching their heads in disbelief, as he cursed out the public for believing so many lies spread about him in the papers.
“Are we seriously going to sit here and believe that such libel and slander have affected my campaign so thoroughly? Do the people really believe that I want to open the borders for Africans and Latin Americans to come freely into America and intermarry with the good, honest white folk of our beloved country?”
It’s best to note that Woodrow Wilson was a notorious racist, but such a thing was not uncommon in the era. Because of this, Bruno had decided to mock him in a way that he found to be rather ironic.
Much of the propaganda purported lies about Wilson being a cuckold with a particular fondness and support for interracial relationships. It went so far as to claim that if elected, he would legalize such practices nationwide.
Such slander was obviously unfounded, as Wilson would do the exact opposite if elected—going so far as to make even attempting such a thing a felony in the District of Columbia. But even if these words were completely false, all the average American needed to see was a headline claiming such a thing from a “reputable newspaper,” and they would immediately vote against him.
The Wilson campaign fought to sue these newspapers and radio shows, but due to Bruno’s influence in the American courts, the cases were either stalled or thrown out entirely for “lack of evidence.”
Either way, his campaign manager was completely defeated after looking at the current numbers, seeing how Wilson was almost guaranteed defeat at this rate. He made a suggestion that caused the would-be President to throw a bottle at him in response.
“Sir… With all due respect, I don’t believe we have the time or money to refute these allegations. Most of your donors have already withdrawn their support in light of these fallacious accusations. I think it would be best if we just threw in the towel at this point.”
Woodrow Wilson, as described, did not respond kindly to this remark, flying into a violent rage as he chased his campaign manager out of his office. If Bruno had witnessed this event, he would have broken out in laughter at the man’s current suffering.
