We’ve been assessing the merits of political leaders in (more or less) democratic countries, illustrated by a single board game each, on this blog for a few years now. Today’s subject is another US president – domestic reformer turned foreign policy prophet Woodrow Wilson. And which game could be more appropriate for him than Versailles 1919 (Geoff Engelstein/Mark Herman, GMT Games)?

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The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The presidents will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as president, but includes their life after holding the office (in which they will still be regarded in the public eye as (ex-)presidents).

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A president can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the president is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the president increase US influence in the world and the security of Americans at home? Did the president wield US power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected (the latter counting for a greater deal in times of US power being great)?

Domestic policy: Did the president increase the liberty of Americans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the president promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the president facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Americans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the president’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the president have an idea of what the United States and the world (the latter counting for more in times of US influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the president’s policies steer the United States (and, if applicable, the world) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the president succeed in seeing his policy through from inception to completion? How well did the president manage the support from Congress, society, the administration, the media (the latter counting for more in more recent years)?

Integrity: Did the president understand the office as a means to benefit himself, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the president respect the boundaries of the office?

Wilson’s Life

Receiving and Providing Education

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born on December 28, 1856 as the son of a Presbyterian pastor in Staunton, Virginia. Wilson grew up in several states of the American South before, during, and after the Civil War. He would be the only American president who had been a citizen of the Confederacy.

Wilson became a lawyer, but found it not to his liking. Instead, he pursued graduate studies in political science with a dissertation on Congressional government at Johns Hopkins University. His PhD, awarded in 1886, makes him to this day the only US president with such an academic distinction. Even though Wilson had never bothered to take a trip from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., to see the object of his study in action, his dissertation was well received. Atypically for a southerner, he advocated for a strong federal government. At the end of his graduate studies, Wilson married Ellen Louise Axson, who came from a southern clergy family like himself.

Wilson’s academic career led him to teach at several universities. Eventually, he became president of Princeton University in 1902. He took the university out of the grip of Presbyterian traditionalists, appointed the first Catholic and Jewish professors, but worked vigorously against the enrolment of Black students. Wilson turned Princeton into one of America’s leading teaching and research institutions, fueled by the large contributions of outside donors which he attracted. At the same time, Wilson advocated – in often fiery rhetoric – for the independence of the university; a contradiction he could never resolve. Both his administrative reforms and his powerful oratory aroused interest in him political circles; and Wilson put out feelers to the Democratic Party.

To the Presidency

The Democrats, perennially shut out of national office since the Civil War, were in dire need of fresh candidates. Wilson seemed like an ideal fit to party bosses due to his reputation as a natural conservative with progressive credentials. He ran for governor of New Jersey in 1910 and was the first Democrat to be elected to the office in 18 years.

Anyone who believed Wilson to be a conservative at heart was swiftly disabused of the notion once he took office. He directed his energy to labor, electoral, and education reform. Within his first two years in office, Wilson had gained nationwide fame as a progressive leader.

That made him a contender for the 1912 presidential election. His campaign was ably run by the Texas businessman Edward M. House, and Wilson entered the 1912 Democratic National Convention second only to Speaker of the House James “Champ” Clark. When Clark gained the support of New York’s Tammany Hall political machine, that threw the liberal wing of the party, led by three-time presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, into Wilson’s arms. Wilson gained his party’s nomination and went on to run against a split Republican Party in the general election: Incumbent president William H. Taft represented the party’s conservative wing, former president Theodore Roosevelt mounted a progressive challenge. As the Republican vote split, Wilson’s 42% of the popular vote were enough to give him a landslide victory in the electoral college.

Reforms and Interventions

Wilson started the presidency where he had left off the governorship – with an ambitious domestic reform program. To clinch the reforms, he broke with the tradition that separated the executive and legislative branches of the American government: Wilson was the first president to appear before Congress since John Adams, a precedent which has since become standard practice. In another momentous move, Wilson focused his efforts to build legislative majorities on mobilizing his own party (which held both the Senate and the House), ignoring the Republican opposition. With these measures, Wilson enacted far-reaching economic reforms:

• He replaced tariffs with a federal income tax as the chief source of federal revenue.
• He established the Federal Reserve system to stabilize the heretofore decentralized, fragile American finance world.
• His Antitrust Act clarified that unions and collective bargaining did not constitute a breach of freedom of contract.

Other Wilsonian reforms were less progressive: Wilson introduced segregation in several federal institutions including the Navy Department and the Post Office.

Wilson’s belief in a racial hierarchy also carried over into his foreign policy. During his presidency, the United States intervened in Mexico (twice), Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti (where a new constitution imposed on the country reintroduced the forced labor of corvée). The most momentous of these interventions took place in Mexico, where a US-backed coup had brought the authoritarian Victoriano Huerta to the presidency shortly before Wilson’s own accession to power. Wilson opposed Huerta and first imposed an arms embargo on Mexico, then landed forces in the Mexican port of Veracruz. The intervention did not shift the political situation in Mexico, and US forces left Veracruz after seven months of occupation in November 1914.

Wilson’s rhetoric accompanying the intervention was based on lofty principles, but he applied them rather flexibly: He argued both for imposing and for lifting the arms embargo with the “standards of neutrality”; and he justified both beginning and ending the intervention on moral grounds – the former with his commitment to constitutional government, the latter with Mexico’s right to national self-determination.

Neutrality, Honor, and Prosperity

While the United States had been busy in Mexico, a much bigger conflict had erupted in Europe – the Great War. Over the next years, Wilson pursued a course which would allow the United States to maintain three competing objectives – neutrality, honor, and prosperity.

Wilson was driven by an honest desire to keep the United States out of the war. That did not mean that he was indifferent to its outcome. His sympathies lay clearly with the Allies. Every few months, his administration launched a peace initiative which would invariably come to nothing as they demanded very different things from the belligerents: The Allies were given the idea that Wilson wanted them to win victories before a peace should be negotiated, the Central Powers presented with unacceptable demands (like the cession of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany to France as a precondition for a peace conference).

Honor was an even trickier business than neutrality. Wilson demanded that the belligerent parties adhered to the London Declaration concerning the Laws of Naval War (which none of them had ratified), but in practice complied with the British violations of the Declaration – the harassment of neutral (including American) trade and the blockade of the German coast – while he denounced the German violations – submarine warfare. When a German submarine sunk the British ocean liner Lusitania shortly before it arrived in Liverpool with its cargo of ammunition for the Western front as well as over a thousand passengers – 128 of them American citizens – Wilson was outraged. He declared in a note to the German government that he would hold Germany responsible for any damages to American citizens and property. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned after the incident, believing Wilson endangered American neutrality with his hardline insistence on German (but not British) respect for trade rights.

That brings us the third leg on which Wilson’s stool rested: While he never mentioned prosperity (much unlike neutrality and honor), it was a major motive for his wartime policies. In August 1914, Wilson had publicly opposed bonds for the Allies to be raised by American banks, but when the banks started issuing them, he did not contest it. Consequently, the American economy was effectively mobilized for the Allied cause: US goods were bought with money from US bonds. Allied victory thus became a national interest for the United States to see the bonds repaid.

In the short term, Wilsons’s hard line was successful. He forced Germany to comply with his notions of naval law while the American economy boomed from the war trade to the Allies. America reaped all the benefits of the war at none of the costs.

That made Wilson a strong contender for re-election in 1916. The Democratic Party touted his foreign policy success with “He Kept Us Out of the War” (a slogan which had been adopted without consulting Wilson). Still, Wilson’s main advantage of 1912 – the split Republican field – had evaporated. To beat his Republican opponent Charles Evans Hughes, he had to make inroads in states where Democrats had not fared well over the last decades. As Wilson feared that the new women voters in many of the western and midwestern states might take objection to his marriage to Edith Bolling Galt – just a year after his first wife Ellen had died – he tried to balance it out with publicly supporting women’s suffrage. While we do not have electoral statistics by gender for 1916, Wilson’s strong showing (for a Democrat) in the West and Midwest indicates that his strategy worked. In the end, Wilson’s victory in California by the hair’s breadth of 3,773 voters decided the presidential contest in his favor.

Into the War

In Wilson’s second term, his three-way balancing act between neutrality, honor, and prosperity became ever more precarious. One of them had to give – and the most likely candidate seemed neutrality, whose meaning Wilson had stretched beyond recognition anyway. Ironically, that happened just as Wilson made his first attempt to put pressure on the Allies (by withholding bonds if they did not agree to a peace conference).

Germany, unaware of any rifts between the US and the Allies, played the elephant in the diplomatic China shop again in January 1917: The German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann secretly instructed the German embassy in Mexico to sound out the Mexicans for an alliance in case the United States entered the war. Two weeks later, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in the British home waters again. Wilson felt he could not honorably back down from his hardline position of American trade and travel rights which he had taken in 1915, and broke off all diplomatic relations to Germany. A few days later, British naval intelligence relayed the contents of the “Zimmermann Telegram” to Wilson. Its release helped inflame American public opinion against Germany, but the essential decision had been made already: America would enter the war as an “associated power” on the Allied side. Congress voted in favor of a declaration of war at Wilson’s request on April 6, 1917.

Militarily, the United States was a dwarf in 1917. Safe itself due to large oceans and weak neighbors, its armed forces had been minuscule since the end of the Civil War. Expanding and training them would take time. And economically, the awesome might of America had been mobilized for the Allied cause anyway. Thus, the American war entry mattered little for the course of the war in the short term.

It did, however, have immediate domestic repercussions: On the one hand, government spending exploded. The expenses which the federal government accrued in the 19 months of war from April 1917 to November 1918 would exceed those of almost 130 years since the founding of the country. And Wilson cracked down on perceived opponents of the war: The Espionage Act made interference with military operations or recruitment illegal, which in practice meant that any kind of anti-war activism could – and often did – send the protester to prison.  “Illoyal” publications were banned from postal transport which made them practically unavailable at any distance from their printing.

Preparing for the Post-War World

In the meantime, the war raged on. Wilson’s initial lofty rhetoric of a “war without victory” by which the world would be “made safe for democracy” had been largely superseded by the gritty requirements of military buildup and diplomatic compromises with the Allies. The day-to-day realpolitik of the Allies suffered a heavy blow when the October Revolution took Russia out of the Allied coalition in late 1917; and Wilson was subsequently also replaced as the leading visionary by a certain Vladimir Lenin whose radical rejection of imperialist war (along with capitalism as a whole) proved popular with the European masses after three years of carnage – and they set Russia to seal a deal with Germany and leave the war for good.

Wilson countered by laying out his vision for the post-war world before Congress on January 8, 1918: The Fourteen Points contained a mix of specific territorial changes and universal principles – the freedom of navigation and trade, disarmament, the rejection of secret diplomacy, and the founding of a “general association of nations”.

By summer 1918, American forces had arrived in Europe in substantial numbers. They contributed to turning the tide on the Western Front, and their ever-growing numbers (which matched the British and neared the French) and excellent supply situation convinced the German High Command that the war could not be won anymore. The German generals abandoned the sinking ship. Their civilian successors applied for a peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

Wilson, meanwhile, urged the American voters to consider the 1918 midterm elections as a plebiscite on his policies, especially the post-war order he had formulated. The voters soundly rejected him by giving majorities in both houses to the Republicans for the first time in eight years.

Germany and the Allies agreed to an armistice on the Western Front on November 11, 1918. While Germany’s new parliamentarian leaders dealt with the turmoil in their new republic, the Allies met on the outskirts of Paris to negotiate the peace treaty, chief of them the “Big Four” France, Britain, Italy, and the United States. Wilson attended the Versailles negotiations in person, which made him the first US president to leave the country on official business. After he had alienated the Republicans by his adversarial rhetoric before the 1918 midterms, he snubbed them even further by not including a single Republican senator in his delegation.

Versailles 1919

All of Wilson’s political goals merged at the Versailles peace negotiations. He wanted a new world order which would provide for long-term peace: “I am playing for a hundred years hence”, he told those who asked him why he would forgo short-term American gains. And the US was indeed different as the country did not angle for territorial enlargement – unlike the other major countries, which sought colonial expansion (especially Britain and France in the Middle East and Africa) or direct annexations of regions bordering their mainland (especially France along the Rhine and Italy in the Alps and on the Dalmatian coast). Wilson held mixed views on the territorial changes in Europe, but supported colonial expansion, especially where it benefitted European imperial powers rather than imperial Japan (another expression of his racial views).

Make no mistake: The US had direct material interests at stake as well. On the one hand, Wilson’s interest in free trade aligned with American business wanting to sell goods in the European markets, on the other, American finance expected the war bonds to be repaid. In the view of the European debtors, that required large reparations from Germany, so that the vanquished would pay for the costs of the war.

Wilson’s most cherished goal, however, was the establishment of that “association of nations” outlined in the Fourteen Points. In an ironic repudiation of the other principles of the Fourteen Points, Wilson engaged in the secret diplomacy horse-trading of Versailles, making large concessions to the wishes of the other Big Four nations for territorial enlargement, to get them to agree to what would become the League of Nations.

In June 1919, the negotiations were concluded and the Treaty of Versailles presented to Germany. The Germans engaged in some naïve protests and then signed anyway, as the only alternative of resuming hostilities was utterly impossible for the country. Wilson’s task now was to convince his own countrymen that America must join the League of Nations.

The Struggle for Ratification

Initially, popular support for the League was high in America. However, the Senate which needed to ratify the Treaty for America to join the League was not on board with Wilson:

• A small part of the senators, the “Irreconcilables”, was adamantly against the Treaty. Some of the Irreconcilables were adherents to America’s traditional isolationist foreign policy, others came from (or were supported by) groups which had been against the United States’s entry into the war (chiefly German-Americans and Irish-Americans), a third subset were Republicans eager to get back at Wilson for the hostility he had shown them at least since 1918.
• A larger, but not sufficiently large group were Wilson’s loyal supporters, who wanted ratification of the Treaty without any changes.
• Lastly, the largest group were not opposed to the Treaty as such, but wanted changes which would confirm Congress’s sovereignty on foreign policy decisions, ensure that no territorial mandates could be forced on the United States, and that the Monroe Doctrine would be confirmed and its interpretation left to the United States alone.

Wilson once more relied on public pressure. He embarked on a speaking tour to advocate for the Treaty. When a bipartisan majority of senators, led by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, put forward a proposal for a Treaty with amendments in November 1919, Wilson rejected it, and the proposal could not find a two-thirds majority in the senate against Wilson’s allies and the Irreconcilables. By then, Wilson had suffered a stroke and was physically unable to partake in competition for hearts and minds in either the Senate or the public arena. The Treaty of Versailles would never be ratified, and America never joined the League of Nations.

The Final Years

Wilson prepared for another presidential run in 1920 (the Twenty-second Amendment limiting presidents to two terms would only be passed under Harry S. Truman). His party, however, had enough of him and chose Ohio governor James M. Cox as their candidate – a mixture of a turn from Wilson’s policies and the simple truth that his poor health made him barely able to discharge the duties of his office in the present, let alone for another four years. Wilson, undeterred by his defeats in 1918 and 1919, framed the 1920 election once more as a plebiscite on his policies, specifically the League of Nations. The American voters had enough of them and gave the Republican party in the person of Warren G. Harding the presidency and enlarged its majorities in both the House and the Senate. The end of Wilson’s presidency also marked the end of the Progressive Era of sweeping in the United States.

Four years later, Woodrow Wilson considered another presidential run. Yet just a few days after he had laid out his program, he died on February 3, 1924.

The Rating

Foreign policy:

Woodrow Wilson really pushed America on the global stage with the entry into World War I. From then on, no matter of great importance in the world has been decided without the United States, very much in line with Wilson’s programmatic thinking. His practical policies, however, were disjointed. His interventionism in Latin America infringed on the locals’ freedoms (up to the point of practically reintroducing slave labor in Haiti), but did not come at a high cost for the United States. The entry into World War I, on the other hand, prioritized export opportunities and especially the travel rights of the affluent few over the lives of the American soldiers who then had to defend those rights and opportunities. Despite all these costs, it is hard to find a positive foreign policy outcome for the United States besides its increased global stature.

Domestic policy:

By 1920, most Americans were less free than they had been eight years before. Wilson’s expansion of segregation shut down opportunities for African Americans, his wartime policies of censorship and oppression limited the traditional American freedom of expression. Women’s suffrage, the great enfranchisement, was brought about during Wilson’s time, but his support for the cause was minimal.

Economic policy:

Wilson’s early economic reforms (federal income tax replacing tariffs, the Federal Reserve System, and the Antitrust Act) benefitted consumers, workers, and the economy as a whole. Later, Wilson’s interpretation of neutrality meant that the United States enjoyed a long war boom as a supplier of goods to the Allies. This prosperity came with risks, as it relied on the Allies winning the war and eventually being able to repay their loans, which would become a major matter of contentment after the war and endanger both the American and the global economy.

Vision:

Wilson redefined the presidency. He strengthened the executive and established the president as lawmaker-in-chief, a change which has held up until today.

He looked far beyond the day-to-day issues of politics. While his idea of a liberal internationalist global order was discredited when he left office, and remained so for the next twenty years, it was rehabilitated by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. As these later presidents had more political common sense than Wilson, they were able to form them into a bipartisan consensus which only eroded in recent years.

Pragmatism:

Wilson parlayed his electoral triumph in 1912 into a sweeping reform agenda, which he got through Congress by mobilizing his own party and cowing the opposition with the force of his public oratory. He later found out that there were limits to speaking from the bully pulpit. His electoral success ran out in 1918, and his stubborn intransigence made it impossible for him to reach compromise in Congress. Wilson would rather be right and achieve none of his goals than concede a little and receive a lot – a distinctly unpolitical trait for a politician.

Integrity:

Wilson was driven by an honest commitment to better his country, and through the means of it, the world. His practical politics were not always this clean. His appointments were often based on loyalty rather than merit, he treated his political opponents as enemies and traitors, and he clung to power even when his health limited his ability to discharge the duties of his office to the point that even his cabinet pondered if to declare him unfit.

Overall:

Woodrow Wilson was one of the greatest visionaries in the White House. The completion of his visions was left to others due to his own lack of political skills. The great principles for which he strove – prosperity for all, free trade, eternal peace – were mixed with his authoritarian tendencies and his hostility to his political opponents as well as non-whites. His presidency contains the sublime and the ignoble, and calling it middling is charitable.

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Wilhelm Marx 17/30
12. Woodrow Wilson 15/30
13. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
14. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Wilson? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

The most recent full-length biography of Wilson is O’Toole, Patricia: The Moralist. Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, Simon & Schuster, New York City, NY 2018.

For a snappy, but nuanced biography, see Berg, Manfred: Woodrow Wilson. Amerika und die Neuordnung der Welt. Eine Biographie [Woodrow Wilson. America and the Reshaping of the World. A Biography], C.H. Beck, Munich 2017 (in German).

As always when it comes to American presidents of the 20^th century, see the respective chapter in Leuchtenburg, William E.: The American President. From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, pp. 70-116.

2026, what a year. Here’s what my board gaming looked like in the first half of it.

Let’s start with a statistical overview (as of June 30):

• I’ve played 20 different games (slightly down compared to last year at this point).
• Only 3 of them were new to me (massively down compared to last year’s 9).
• These 23 games resulted in a total of 57 plays (slightly up compared to last year)
• The month in which I played most games was June (with 16 plays), the months with the fewest plays April and May (5 each).
• Of the 23 different games, 8 are historical. These account for 29 of the plays (half the games, around three quarters of the plays compared to last year).
• 7 of the plays were solo (up from last year’s single play).
• 31 of the 57 plays were digital, continuing the strong digital bent of 2025.

The changes are partially due to a changed event schedule – I did not attend any conventions this year, so I played fewer new and fewer historical games.

Here are some of the games I enjoyed most this year so far:

Pax Pamir (Cole Wehrle, Wehrlegig Games)

As said, I didn’t play a lot of new games this year. But among them, Pax Pamir is the absolute standout. Cole Wehrle’s first design is a thoughtful exploration of the roles of small power brokers having to deal with big ones, skillfully seizing opportunities and avoiding pitfalls, using loyalty and betrayal as necessary tools in their struggle for security and power. It is also an incredibly clever game blending planning, chaos, and negotiation into a tight, low-scoring affair which usually sees several players reaching for victory until the very end.

At eight plays, Pax Pamir is my most-played game so far this year. I predict a few more plays will follow – facilitated by the excellent digital implementation at Rally the Troops!

Imperial Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games)

New discoveries are great. So are re-discoveries. I was enamored with Imperial Struggle in 2022, getting it to the table (and to Vassal) a few times. Since then, however, I hadn’t played it a single time… until it came to Rally the Troops! this year.

With that, I got in no fewer than seven plays. I delight in the diplomatic, economic, and military opportunities all over the globe and despair when my opponent snatches a key advantage. I carefully plan out the investment tile selection, but sometimes I go with my intuition about what’s the area of contest in which my play will have the biggest impact. And I love both the sheer might of the French juggernaut and the plucky resilience of the British underdog.

If you have also started (or re-started) playing Imperial Struggle and need some strategic pointers, have a look at my strategy post! And if you need the right music to play in the background, here’s my immersive playlist of period tunes.

Julius Caesar (Grant Dalgliesh/Justin Thompson, Columbia Games)

A game which I had only played online (also on Rally the Troops!) before… but finally, I had the chance to break out my physical copy! I must say, it is a very different experience – the perfect documentation of the digital implementation allows for a lot more analytic play. On the board, you need to rely on your memory – and on your intuition, which suits the bluffing-heavy style of the game anyway.

In our game, I led the Caesarian forces against the Pompeians of a newcomer. Antony and Pompey clashed aggressively in Italia; Scipio and Caesar in Asia. All four leaders barely survived their initial battles. After Antony had chased Pompey out of Italia, he rested on his laurels… but old Pompey still had some fight in him and returned with a fresh legion and some elephants to retake Rome! When the Caesarian advance in Hispania was turned into a rout by Jupiter’s divine intervention, Pompey won after only three years of civil war – also proving how accessible the game is to new players who are not burdened with too much rules overhead and can just focus on their schemes and ruses!

The Legends of Andor: The Eternal Frost (Michael Menzel, KOSMOS)

Games are fundamentally about people. Legends of Andor is a great series of cooperative games, but I am under no illusions that its main staying power for me comes from with whom I’ve been playing it: My good friends F. and M. started the Andor base game with me in 2014, and since then, it has become one of the mainstays for the three of us – and, since F. died in 2020, for M. and me. We have been steadily playing through the main series and have just finished the fourth big box instalment The Eternal Frost – the first one which M. and I played entirely without F. Legends of Andor is a game, but it is also a celebration and commemoration of our friendship. I can’t wait to start the next instalment: Legenden von Andor: Das ferne Land (The Distant Land – as far as I know, there won’t be an English edition).

What was remarkable about your 2026 gaming so far? Let me know in the comments!

Back to the history and board games of New York City! Last time, we’ve looked at the city’s humble beginnings all the way to the destruction wrought on the city by the Revolutionary War. Today, we’ll cover the first century of New York City as a city in the United States – how it established its primacy in the country, how it was at the same time very attractive and a horrible place to live in, and how it took shape as a modern metropolis. As always, board games will guide us.

American Capital

When Britain had recognized American independence in 1783, the young country gave itself a constitution – the Articles of Confederation. The United States were organized on strictly confederative principles. New York City became the capital. The advocates of broad independence for the states and minimal federal government, however, lost ground over the next few years as the United States struggled to deal with the post-war challenges, chiefly the states’ tremendous debt. Thus, over ferocious public debate, a new constitution was adopted in 1787, and according to it, a strong chief magistrate elected – George Washington, the first president, who was inaugurated in 1789 at City Hall, New York.

One of the fiercest proponents of a strong federal government was New Yorker Alexander Hamilton who became the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. In this role, Hamilton advocated for further government centralization, especially in regards to financial and economic affairs, based on his experience in the commercial hub New York. Hamilton succeeded in having the federal government take over the remaining states’ debts, but his opponents – chiefly rural southerners – demanded a price: The federal capital would move away from New York. Philadelphia would fill the role temporarily, before a new capital to be constructed in a southern swamp would be ready – the future Washington, D.C.

Even though New York City ceased to be America’s capital, it was still the prime center of American capital. In 1792, the New York Stock Exchange was founded. Its location – Wall Street – is synonymous with finance until today. The city’s booming harbor also attracted more and more commerce. By 1804, New York City had overtaken Philadelphia as the largest city in the United States at around 70,000 inhabitants. As growth did not slow down, the city’s leadership embarked on a scheme which must have seemed megalomaniac at the time: In 1811, they adopted a development plan which laid a regular grid of avenues and perpendicular streets over Manhattan Island, encompassing areas large enough to house a million people at the contemporary population density. That was the blueprint for modern New York City.

New York’s growth, however, was not pre-ordained. It relied chiefly on the city’s status the nation’s premier port. Yet as the United States grew westward, New York lay farther and farther away from many of the new towns and states. Goods could only flow to or from the Great Lakes or the Great Plains by arduous land journeys – or down the Mississippi. New Orleans, located at the mouth of the great stream, seemed poised to take over New York’s role as America’s port. That’s when the governor of New York state, DeWitt Clinton, proposed an ambitious engineering scheme: Nature might not have connected New York City with the great inland waterways of America. But men could. The 350-mile Erie Canal, completed in 1825, connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie and thus allowed uninterrupted ship transport from New York all the way to the western frontier states.

Packet Row (Åse Berg/Henrik Berg, White Goblin Games) is set in the bustling port of New York in the 1840s. Players need to find the right combination of trade goods (so, supply), contracts (demand), and ships to grow rich as merchants. Money alone will not be enough for victory: The game embodies the ethos of the magnates of the 19th century, which held that wealth came with responsibility for the community. Thus, the money earned in Packet Row needs to be spent on projects which benefit the city (say, the university) for victory points.

When the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, 89% of New Yorkers had been born in the United States. By 1860 that number had fallen to less than half. Let’s take a look at this great social and political transformation.

Immigration, Death, and Politics

New York’s status as America’s port made it incredibly attractive for immigrants: Its booming trade hungered for willing workers, and even if immigrants had different dreams – say, farming on the wide prairie – they would probably arrive by ship in New York. In the mid-19^th century, an astounding 70% of all European immigrants to the United States entered the country through New York. The absolute numbers are even more breath-taking: In the decade after the Great Famine, a million Irish alone arrived in New York, along with German, English, and Scottish immigrants.

Despite this massive population influx, New York City had only around 800,000 inhabitants by 1860. That was partly because many immigrants moved on further inland, but also because of the astonishing mortality: For example, during the year 1856, 4% of all adults and 20% of all children in New York City died. The cramped living quarters in which most immigrants found themselves and the inadequate medical infrastructure made New York a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of epidemics, while the high cost of living forced the immigrants into long working hours at often dangerous jobs.

Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that the immigrants turned to anyone who promised them a helping a hand. And as they were so many (and usually gained citizenship after two years of residence), courting them became a viable electoral strategy. Fernando Wood became the first New York mayor whose election had been largely achieved by his success with Irish-American and German-American voters. His recipe for success – mobilizing various immigrant communities – would be copied for decades by his successors in Tammany Hall, the local Democratic Party’s political machine which traded patronage for votes.

Tammany Hall (Doug Eckhart, Pandasaurus) is centered on this political strategy: The basic move which players take is to select one immigrant token (Irish, German, English, or – inspired by the later 19^th century – Italian) and place it in one of the wards of New York. That gives the player both some influence with the respective immigrant community and some potential strength on the ground in that ward, come the next election. Whichever player wins most wards in an election round becomes mayor of New York and thus gets to dole out City Hall jobs to their allies.

Tammany’s success in the 1850s was based on organizing various disparate communities. The Civil War brought ruptures to this alliance: Mayor Wood called for New York City to secede from the Union and become a “free city” in order to maintain trade relations with the treasonous southern states. The majority of Tammany Democrats, however, were staunchly in favor of the Union, but less enthusiastic about the cause of abolitionism. Thus, many of the German immigrants (often veterans of the 1848/49 revolution) abandoned the party in favor of the Republicans, and the German-Irish voting bloc split (although it would remain firmly united in its opposition to the temperance movement).

The split caused a Republican-led fusion ticket to win the mayoral election of 1862. It would be a short break from Tammany rule, as the new mayor faced growing racial tensions: On July 13 1863, protests against the continued draft erupted in violence. For the next three days, a mob (mostly consisting of Irish-Americans from the Lower Manhattan slums) rampaged through the city, targeting Black neighborhoods. The Draft Riots would only be put down once regiments returning from Gettysburg reached the city. Many Black New Yorkers left the city afterward, so that they amounted to barely over one percent of New York City’s population in 1865.

Tammany rule was restored in the 1864 mayoral election… not that it mattered much who exactly the mayor was, as long as he was a loyal follower of the Tammany machine. The unbridled access to power allowed the Tammany leader William “Boss” Tweed to become one of the richest men in New York – and public money also lined the pockets of many public servants and private contractors (especially in the construction business). The most outrageous example of this corruption was the construction of the County Courthouse. Tweed himself bought a quarry to supply the marble for the project at egregious prices, and the subcontractors had a field day, too, billing amounts like $360,000 for one carpenter’s month of labor or $7,500 per individual thermometer. The Courthouse’s final cost ran up to $13 million – almost twice the price of the contemporary Alaska Purchase!

Tweed, however had cranked the levers one too many times. Even New York Democrats (at least those set aside by him) distanced themselves from him. A court found Tweed guilty of embezzlement and sentenced him to a year in prison. He escaped and made his way to Spain, but was discovered and extradited to the United States, where he would die in prison. Tammany would rule New York politics for almost another century due to the machine’s continued ability to organize new immigrants (Italians and Eastern European Jews in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries), but the worst excesses of its corruption ended with Boss Tweed. Indeed, for a 20^th century New Yorker, it would be almost impossible to imagine how political office could be mostly sought to enrich a few powerful individuals and their willing helpers.

The Dawn of the Modern Age

New York City in the mid-19^th century was squalor and corruption, but it was also the place where the innovations of the modern metropolis first took shape. The explosive population growth and the crowded living conditions were countered with a massive park development – Central Park, until today New York’s finest place to breathe fresh air and surround yourself with the peace of grass and trees. Construction lasted from 1857 to 1876.

New technology also sprung from New York – literally and figuratively. When Thomas Edison looked for the first city in which to broadly distribute electricity, New York was the obvious choice. And the transformational impact of the railroad on America would not have been possible without the finance hub New York raising and directing the capital for the investments. So, all of you 18XX gamers, you can thank New York!

Finally, in 1886, New York City received its most iconic landmark: The people of France gifted the United States a large statue, symbolizing liberty, the chief value of the American Revolution. Once the Americans had succeeded at funding the pedestal for the statue – encouraged by campaigns of the New York newspapers – the Statue of Liberty was proudly displayed in New York harbor, welcoming newcomers and promising them a free life. In the words of Emma Lazarus, whose poem adorns the a plaque inside the pedestal of the statue:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The Statue of Liberty is such an icon that it got its own promo card in 7 Wonders: Duel (Antoine Bauza/Bruno Cathala, Repos Production) – even though your definition of antiquity must be very wide to include the Statue of Liberty. But nothing is impossible in board games!

In the years after the Statue of Liberty was erected, New York shape-shifted… upwards. The age of the skyscraper began, and nowhere more so than in Manhattan. But that’s a story for next time!

Games Referenced

Packet Row (Åse Berg/Henrik Berg, White Goblin Games)

Tammany Hall (Doug Eckhart, Pandasaurus)

For the People (Mark Herman, GMT Games)

Tesla vs. Edison: War of Currents (Dirk Knemeyer, Artana)

1846: The Race for the Midwest (Thomas Lehmann, GMT Games)

7 Wonders Duel: Statue of Liberty Promo Card (Antoine Bauza/Bruno Cathala, Repos Production)

7 Wonders: Duel (Antoine Bauza/Bruno Cathala, Repos Production)

Further Reading

For a concise introduction, especially focused on local politics, see Lankevich, George J.: New York City. A Short History, New York University Press, New York City, NY/London 1998.

If you want a treatment which is both more in-depth and more journalistic (and lavishly illustrated) and don’t mind its history practically ending around 1970, see the book version of the 17-hour PBS documentary from 1999: Burns, Ric/Sanders, James/Ades, Lisa: New York. An Illustrated History, Knopf, New York City, NY 2001.

We’ve been assessing the merits of political leaders in (more or less) democratic countries on this blog for a few years now. Today, we’re returning to German chancellors… but not the way you know it. After a few chancellors from the Federal Republic of Germany (founded in 1949), we’re assessing for the first time a chancellor from the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first attempt at parliamentary government – Hermann Müller. And which game could be more appropriate for him than Weimar (Matthias Cramer, Capstone Games/Skellig Games/Spielworxx)?

The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The chancellors will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as chancellor.

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A chancellor can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the chancellor is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the chancellor increase German influence in the world and the security of Germans at home? Did the chancellor wield German power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected?

Domestic policy: Did the chancellor increase the liberty of Germans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the chancellor promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the chancellor facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Germans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the chancellor’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the chancellor have an idea of what Germany and Europe (the latter counting for more in times of German influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the chancellor’s policies steer Germany (and, if applicable, Europe) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the chancellor succeed in seeing their policy through from inception to completion? How well did the chancellor manage the support from parliament, society, the administration, the media?

Integrity: Did the chancellor understand the office as a means to benefit themselves, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the chancellor respect the boundaries of the office?

Note: If you have read my UK prime minister or US president ratings, you will remember that I rated them on the global impacts of their vision as well. As the rating system is only really applicable to democratic leaders and no democratic German leader ever had the chance to conduct a truly global policy, I only assess their vision on national and European grounds.

Müller’s Early Life

Hermann Müller was born in Mannheim (in the southwest of Germany) on May 18, 1876. His father ran a small sparkling wine company, but died when Hermann was still a teenager. Thus, instead of taking over the company or going to university, the young Hermann Müller trained to become a clerk. He soon became involved with the socialist movement and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1893. After some years working for social democratic newspapers, he was elected to the leadership board of the SPD in 1906. Müller was often charged with liaisons to other socialist parties in Europe – including a doomed trip to Paris in July 1914, trying to negotiate a joint refusal of French and German socialists to support their respective countries’ impending war with each other.

Müller was elected to Imperial Germany’s parliament in a by-election in 1916. Soon after, the German Social Democrats split between the Majority Social Democrats (MSPD, including Müller) who supported the war effort, and the Independent Social Democrats (USPD), who did not. When the war was lost in November 1918 and the monarchy swept away by revolutionary soldiers and workers, the MSPD soon took control of the revolution and steered a moderate course towards parliamentary democracy.

The New Republic

The revolution of 1918/1919 transformed the (M)SPD from the pariah party of Imperial Germany to the most important pillar of the new republic. As the Social Democrats were no longer barred from the positions of power, they needed scores of cadres to fill them. The general upswing also brought a promotion for Müller, who was elected co-chairman of the MSPD in 1919. Government came with its own challenges: The lost war, the ongoing Allied naval blockade, and the weak position of the new government made it imperative to conclude a peace treaty with the Allied powers. The provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, with which the Allies presented Germany, seemed unacceptable to most Germans – including many Social Democrats. Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann resigned rather than take responsibility for the treaty. He was succeeded by Gustav Bauer (also SPD) whose new administration Müller joined as foreign minister in June 1919. In this role, it fell to him to sign the treaty. From there, Müller sketched the outlines of a new foreign policy – one in which Germany would cooperate with the Allies, use its economic and cultural rather than its military strength to influence world events, and thus overturn the harsh provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.

The Bauer administration resigned after the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup of March 1920. Müller took over the chancellorship as a caretaker – elections were scheduled for June 1920. He was unable to tackle most of the many challenges which beset Germany (chiefly the agreement with the Allies on the details of the German reparations, the tensions over the German-Polish border, and the threat of right-wing terrorism and insurgency (as in the Kahr coup in Bavaria)). The only crisis which was dispelled during his time in office was the dissolution of the Red Ruhr Army, a left-wing militia which had formed in opposition to the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup and, after its failure, had continued their struggle for a council republic on the Ruhr. Their uprising was put down by army and Freikorps units and over a thousand workers (with more or less connection to the uprising) summarily executed.

The first one and a half years of democratic government in Germany had proven a disappointment for many voters, including those who generally were in favor of the new republic. The three government parties (the SPD, the Catholic Center (Zentrum), and the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP)) all suffered heavy losses in the 1920 election. The SPD was particularly hard hit, as its handling of the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup and the Ruhr Uprising disenchanted many left-leaning workers. Both the USPD and the pro-business, conservative-liberal German People’s Party (DVP) gained a lot of votes.

With the majority for the government coalition lost, Müller attempted to broaden the government by including the USPD. Due to his handling of the aftermath of the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup, he was brusquely rebuffed. As he did not see potential to cooperate with the DVP, he led the SPD into opposition.

Opposition and Return to Government

Müller’s own inclination was to return to government responsibility, but he prioritized first the reunification of the SPD with the USPD (concluded in 1922) and then the prevention of another rupture. However, the SPD supported the bourgeois minority government (Zentrum, DDP, and DVP) in matters of foreign policy, which was conducted by the guidelines which Müller had laid out as foreign minister and chancellor in 1919 and 1920.

The reparations issue, however, remained unresolved. As tensions over it with the Allies heated up, France occupied the Ruhr again, to which the government responded with encouraging the population of the Ruhr to cease cooperation with the occupiers. This “passive resistance” relied on the national government funding the livelihood of millions of people and thus fueled inflation. As these interconnected crises escalated, it became clear that the government did not have the parliamentary and public support to deal with them. Government needed to rest on a broad basis. The first “Grand Coalition”, led by DVP chancellor Gustav Stresemann and including SPD, Zentrum, DDP, and DVP was inaugurated in August 1923. Four Social Democrats became ministers. Hermann Müller, however, was none of them as he was deemed indispensable to maintain control of the fractious SPD parliamentary group (whose vote to join the government had been on the narrowest of margins).

While the Stresemann government successfully ended both the passive resistance (and French occupation) and the inflation crisis, the way there was rocky. It included challenges from both the left wing in Saxony and Thuringia (which were put down by the armed forces once the Communist Party entered a parliamentary government) and the right wing (a nationalist power grab in Bavaria was left unanswered as the loyalty of the army to the republic seemed suspect; an attempt to radicalize Bavaria even further led by a young demagogue named Adolf Hitler collapsed when it met resistance by the nationalist authorities). This uneven treatment convinced the SPD to leave government after only three months. Stresemann, thus without a majority, soon was toppled as chancellor, but remained foreign minister.

The SPD, despite being the largest party in parliament (and being confirmed in this status in 1924), would spend the next five years in opposition. Attempts to form another Grand Coalition failed in 1924 and 1925 (because the DVP preferred to cooperate with the nationalist DNVP and the new, monarchist, president Paul von Hindenburg), and in 1926, because Müller’s SPD engaged in the fool’s quest of pursuing a plebiscite to expropriate the former princes – the plebiscite failed to meet the quorum as expected, but it set the SPD on a path of confrontation with the bourgeois parties which ruled out any cooperation with them.

That did not mean that cooperation was impossible: The SPD continued to back the cooperative-revisionist foreign policy of the government, and also supported budget compromises. Thus, the party agreed to a budget for the year 1928 which included a first payment for new armored cruisers to modernize the navy. It then campaigned for the March 1928 elections on the slogan “Meals for Children instead of the Armored Cruiser”. The electorate returned the SPD with its best showing since 1919. Müller was able to form a government (once more including Zentrum, DDP, and DVP) and was elected chancellor for the second time.

The Second Chancellorship

The contradiction between parliamentary action and campaign promises immediately backfired for Müller. The budget for the new fiscal year was due, and as agreed, included funds for the naval modernization. Müller belatedly realized that the decision had been made already, that the SPD had agreed to it, and that his government partners would expect the SPD to stick to its previous course. While Müller and the SPD ministers voted in favor of the budget in cabinet, the SPD parliamentary group revolted against the budget and forced them to vote against it in parliament. It did the rebels no good, as they could not find another majority for an alternative budget, but the revolt was a catastrophe for Müller’s authority.

The economic situation was similarly unpromising: When the trade unions of the Ruhr heavy industry proposed a pay raise by 15 pennies per hour, the employers responded by pre-emptively handing hundreds of thousands of workers their notice. Unions and employers then agreed on mediation, but when the employers did not like the result, they backtracked and disputed the legality of the process. Thus, 240,000 iron workers were laid off. Müller had a second mediator make a new proposal, which was suitably employer-friendly (with pay raises ranging from one to six pennies per hour). The employers contentedly saw that playing hardball paid off. Their confrontational stance would increase with the growing unemployment after the 1929 stock market crash.

For the time being, Müller enjoyed the greatest success of his tenure: He negotiated a new reparations agreement (without Stresemann, who died in October 1929), the Young Plan (named after Owen D. Young, who represented the American side). The negotiations were a great step forward for Germany (as the reparations were much reduced and payment put on a realistic basis), but a mixed blessing for Müller: On the one hand, the agreement was very unpopular (as it stipulated German payments for the next 58 years) and thus maligned by the right wing (which campaigned against it on the slogan “Enslaved for three generations). On the other, the combination of the undoubted necessity of the negotiations and their unpopularity meant that the moderate right-wing parties held off their assault on Müller for the moment, as they wanted him to take the blame.

It was only a short reprieve. By January 1930, the Young Plan negotiations were concluded. The same month, the DVP, not being held back by the pro-government Stresemann anymore, had secretly decided to break the coalition if the SPD did not agree to radical pro-business reforms. The party had received encouragement from president Hindenburg, who also intimated to Zentrum leader Heinrich Brüning that he would support a Brüning-led bourgeois minority cabinet with presidential executive orders.

The showdown came in March 1930 over the reform of unemployment insurance. Müller had negotiated a compromise with Paul Moldenhauer (DVP), the minister of finance. However, the DVP parliamentary group refused to accept the compromise. Müller then tasked Brüning to work out another proposal which would be acceptable to all parties in government. Brüning’s suggestion – which would have postponed the issue by another year without solving it – found agreement in the DVP, Zentrum, and DDP parliamentary groups, but, despite Müller’s urging, not that of the SPD. The second Müller administration thus ended on March 27, 1930.

Müller had hoped that president Hindenburg would support an SPD-led minority government with executive orders. Instead, Hindenburg turned to Brüning whose chancellorship began the slide into government not backed by parliamentary majorities. The SPD, however, supported Brüning on key issues of economic and foreign policy lest the president find excuses to turn even more authoritarian. It was to no avail: Hindenburg and his camarilla got tired of Brüning in 1932 and replaced him in turn with Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher who enjoyed even less parliamentary support, before it seemed like a smart move to them to ally their nationalist elites to the popular movement of the Nazis in January 1933, ending German democracy altogether. Müller did not live to see his democratic republic destroyed: He had never been of strong health, had campaigned and governed against the advice of his doctors who counselled rest, and died on March 20, 1931.

The Rating

Foreign policy

Müller developed Weimar’s foreign policy in his first term in government (as foreign minister and chancellor), which aimed at proving to the Allies by faithful cooperation that Germany was willing to do its part in reconciliation (but had economic limits in what it could do) and would thus be re-admitted on an equal footing to the international community, which would allow the country to revise key portions of the Treaty of Versailles. While the theory was sound, its application ran into practical problems – for Müller as well as the other chancellors and foreign ministers of the Weimar Republic: French revisionism of the Treaty (France felt short-changed in the matters of annexations and would have liked to incorporate the entire left bank of the Rhine as under Napoleon), and the constant charges from the German right that international cooperation under the Treaty of Versailles was akin to betrayal of the nation.

Domestic policy

Müller never gave much attention to the existing inequities during his two terms as chancellor. That he was aware of them is proven by his record as foreign minister, in which he massively overworked the diplomatic service (which had been almost exclusively staffed by nobles heretofore), opening it for applicants from all backgrounds. Similar reforms of the judiciary or the military, two other institutions still personally and mentally clinging to Imperial Germany, did not make it to Müller’s chancellor agenda, even though the atrocities committed on the Ruhr in 1920 while the army could not be used to deal with the Bavarian regime at all showed the necessity of these institutional changes.

Economic policy

Müller’s handling of economic policy was incremental and cooperative – a bad fit to deal with his counterparts in business and the government (DVP) who wanted radical changes through confrontation. Müller’s stance may have been the more reasonable. But Müller lost.

Vision

Müller’s vision of a Germany based on constructive parliamentary debate and government compromise, cooperating with other countries on an equal footing, is compelling. However, Müller was not always successful in advancing these goals, as he prioritized party unity over compromise with others at times.

Pragmatism

Müller failed to see most of his policy initiatives through. He kept neither his coalition nor his own parliamentary group in check. However, Müller prevented another rupture of his party, and as a skilled electoral campaigner, achieved the first place for the SPD in every national election with him at the helm of the party.

Integrity

Müller was fair and even-handed in his conduct as a chancellor. As a Social Democrat, he considered the workers his natural constituency, but was always willing to include the interests of other groups in the compromises he forged. His only fault was to hope for the a-parliamentary executive order minority government which, in the end, was given not to him, but Brüning.

Overall

Hermann Müller’s chancellorship is traditionally considered a failure based on the collapse of the Weimar Republic soon after. Yet the Republic did not end with his tenure, and it was destroyed not by his actions, but by those of others. Müller’s most enduring contribution was the invention of the Weimar formula of foreign policy, his biggest weakness his inability to impose authority on his friends, partners, rivals, and foes. He failed because he was a middling chancellor in a hostile world.

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Wilhelm Marx 17/30
12. Woodrow Wilson 15/30
13. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
14. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Müller? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

For short overview essays on all German chancellors from Bismarck on, see Sternburg, Wilhelm von: Die deutschen Kanzler. Von Bismarck bis Merkel [The German Chancellors. From Bismarck to Merkel], Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2006 (in German).

The only full-length biography of Müller is Reichel, Peter: Der tragische Kanzler [The Tragic Chancellor], dtv, Munich 2018 (in German). Unfortunately, the book suffers from the author’s misguided attempt to assign blame for the end of the republic on the SPD for an alleged lack of willingness to compromise, which runs through the entire book.

A revisionist, but insightful short treatment of Müller is Behring, Rainer: Hermann Müller (1876—1931) und die Chancen der Weimarer Republik [Hermann Müller (1876—1931] and the Chances of the Weimar Republic], in: Brandt, Peter/Lehnert, Detlef: Sozialdemokratische Regierungschefs in Deutschland und Österreich. 1918—1983, Dietz, Bonn 2017 (in German).

For the broader context, see: Herbert, Ulrich: A History of Twentieth-Century Germany, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2019.

Now the year truly comes to a close. Let’s look back at the eighth full year of this blog.

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

The overall blog statistics are pretty meaningless – both last year and this year are skewed by WordPress sending my Farewell 2024 – Historical Fiction! post out to a bajillion people (from Dec 26 to Jan 8), which makes it easily the most popular post of each year (providing more than a fourth of my total views this year). If you factor that out, 2025 has been a good year on the blog, but slightly behind the (organic) record of 2023.

The posts doing particularly well have been the usual suspects, that is, the Most Anticipated Historical Board Games post in January, and the evergreen strategy posts for several games published over the last year. It was nice to see that a few of my research-intensive posts in the American Revolution and the Wallenstein series also did well.

Most of my readers come from the United States (also skewed by the Historical Fiction anomaly, but not entirely), as well as other Anglophone (UK, Canada, Australia) or European (Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and France) countries. Especially the Dutch have made a leap up… maybe because of my post on the history of Amsterdam? Welkom, anyway.

New arrivals in the top 10 of the countries from which most views stem are Sweden and Poland in a joint Baltic effort.

If you compare views with population numbers, there are possibly no more loyal readers of this blog than the fine people of Ireland, closely followed by Hong Kong, whose views eclipse those of huge countries like Japan, Brazil, or India. The Irish have been devoted to history, board games, and history in board games for some years now, for which I am grateful. The Hongkongers are new in their excitement for the blog – welcome! If you are from Hong Kong, leave a comment below!

I can only speculate what brought people to this blog (but maybe you can enlighten me with a comment, especially if read this blog, but don’t comment often or ever). Here is, however, what I think was the finest which I published this year – as per usual, with six instead of three entries, and without crowning a winner. Let’s go!

“Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death!” (American Revolution, #2)

Most of the history articles on this blog are about what people in the past did – the politicians, merchants, soldiers of times past. Yet I also like to dwell on what they thought, and thus I’m very happy to have written this post on the political philosophy of the American Revolution, its core value of liberty, and the promise and limitation of that idea. It was also an opportunity to engage with the still-compelling documents of the Revolution – Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence.

Tariffs, Onshoring, and the Board Game Industry

It’s been a wild year politically. Almost forgotten by now is the Great Tariff Rollercoaster of April 2025, in which the American federal government announced tariffs on imports from almost all other countries and then engaged in a flurry of raising, lowering, and holding off on them that made everyone’s head spin. By now, the 145% tariff on Chinese goods imported by US buyers is long gone, but at the time it seemed like an existential threat to US board game companies manufacturing their games in China (so, almost all of them), and given that the current US administration will still be in office for another three years, one worth revisiting.

Wallenstein: Rise

This blog often gives me the opportunity to learn about new subjects. Wallenstein was one of them. I approached the post about his life with not more than a general knowledge about his role in the Thirty Years’ War… and then was sucked into a research rabbit hole in which I read over 2,000 pages about the guy. The result is a four-part series and the longest, most detailed board game assisted biography I have ever written about anyone.

Frederick the Great. A Military Life / Friedrich

…and this blog also allows me to re-visit topics and games with which I have engaged for years (and sometimes decades) now. Frederick II of Prussia is such a person, and Friedrich (Richard Sivél, Histogame) such a game. Reflecting on their insights on Frederick’s campaigns, the command and control exercised, and Frederick’s psychology was a delight.

Amsterdam in History and Board Games

Amsterdam is one of the iconic cities of the world. It is a symbol of art, commerce, and progress, and unique in its canal-structured urban layout. Unsurprisingly, these characteristics have also inspired board game designers. I have told Amsterdam’s 750-year history through the lens of the many board games set in Amsterdam – which gives a glimpse into what the city stands for in the popular imagination. As both this and my earlier Venice post were so much fun to write, I should do more city histories!

Immersive Weimar Playlist

One of my brighter new ideas was to link historical board games to period music. Of course, that works particularly well from the 20^th century on – the age of the music record. I started with an immersive playlist for your next game of Weimar (Matthias Cramer, Capstone Games/Skellig Games/Spielworxx), full of everything that was hot at the time – from traditional songs to jazz, from movie tunes to workers’ songs. It will surely not remain the only such playlist.

And thus concludes the year 2025 on this blog. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing.

I wish you all an excellent year 2026, full of joy, health, and success!

Last year, I have inaugurated a new irregular series on my blog assessing the merits of UK prime ministers (illustrated through the lens of a single board game each). The rating system seemed robust enough to apply it to other countries/leaders (at least if they are more or less democratic). Thus, I’m branching out! After our first US president earlier this year, we now do a German chancellor – Ludwig Erhard, nicknamed “The Father of the Economic Miracle”. After a quick introduction to the rating system and an overview of Erhard’s life, we go straight into the rating. The accompanying game will be Wir sind das Volk! (Richard Sivél/Peer Sylvester, Histogame).

The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The chancellors will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as chancellor, but includes their life after holding the office (in which they will still be regarded in the public eye as (ex-)chancellors).

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A chancellor can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the chancellor is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the chancellor increase German influence in the world and the security of Germans at home? Did the chancellor wield German power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected (the latter counting for a greater deal in times of German power being great)?

Domestic policy: Did the chancellor increase the liberty of Germans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the chancellor promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the chancellor facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Germans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the chancellor’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the chancellor have an idea of what Germany and Europe (the latter counting for more in times of German influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the chancellor’s policies steer Germany (and, if applicable, Europe) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the chancellor succeed in seeing their policy through from inception to completion? How well did the chancellor manage the support from parliament, society, the administration, the media (the latter counting for more in more recent years)?

Integrity: Did the chancellor understand the office as a means to benefit themselves, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the chancellor respect the boundaries of the office?

Note: If you have read my UK prime minister or US president ratings, you will remember that I rated them on the global impacts of their vision as well. As the rating system is only really applicable to democratic leaders and no democratic German leader ever had the chance to conduct a truly global policy, I only assess their vision on national and European grounds.

Erhard’s Life

Ludwig Erhard was born on February 4, 1897. His parents owned a clothing store in Fürth, a city in the south of Germany. Erhard was initially destined to follow them in the business, but came back from World War I badly wounded and unable to stand for an extended period of time (as we would have had to as a store owner). He thus turned to academia and studied business. After graduating, he managed his parents’ store for a short time before it went bankrupt in 1928. Erhard then succeeded in following his academic aspirations and worked at various institutes and universities. Erhard was no supporter of the Nazi regime which took power in 1933, but conducted advisory research for them. In 1942, he failed in a bid to head his university’s institute for economics (losing to a member of the Nazi party) and was soon after forced out of the institute. He then set up his own one-man think tank, writing on how to re-build Germany’s economy after the war.

These studies – and Erhard’s relative distance from the Nazi regime – recommended him to the post-war authorities. After quick stints on the local and regional level, he was appointed Head of the Special Office for Money and Credit (and soon after Director of Economics) of the Anglo-American occupation zone in Germany. When he was informed by the Allied authorities of their decision to introduce a new currency (the Deutsche Mark) in the three western occupation zones, Erhard went ahead and also announced the lifting of price-fixing and production controls for most goods.

Economically speaking, the monetary reform and abolition of state control over the economy were not an immediate success. Prices shot up (while wages were still fixed) and unemployed quadrupled to 12%, thus, unrest (leading to a general strike) spread in West Germany. However, the abolition of price-fixing all but abolished the previously ubiquitous black markets. Erhard’s reputation thus was stellar, and the newly formed big-tent center-right party CDU (Christlich-Demokratische Union, Christian Democratic Union) invited Erhard to join forces with them. Erhard, who personally was more of a classical liberal than a conservative, joined with the intent of committing a large party to his ideas of free markets, and successfully ran for parliament on the CDU ticket in West Germany’s first national elections in 1949. Erhard then became Minister for the Economy in the new administration, a post he would hold for the next fourteen years.

Early in Erhard’s tenure, economic success blossomed: The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 re-committed the American economy to war production – and West Germany seized the opportunity to produce the civilian goods not made in America anymore. The West German economy boomed. Unemployment fell. Wages rose. Exports grew manifold. And Erhard, who steadfastly (but not always successfully) defended his liberal economic principles against any attempts to introduce more state intervention, became the lucky charm of the German “economic miracle”.

Erhard’s corresponding popularity made him a natural contender for the succession of West Germany’s first chancellor Konrad Adenauer. When Adenauer finally resigned in 1963 (aged 87), the CDU and its allies in government elected Erhard as the new chancellor. Erhard, never a politician’s politician, refrained from domestic initiatives. His foreign policy was based on the attempt to align West Germany closer with the United States and Great Britain at the expense of the cordial Franco-German relationship his predecessor had built. Erhard won a resounding electoral victory in 1965, but his relationship with his own party remained frail. When a mild recession hit West Germany and the budget was threatened by Erhard’s earlier commitment to payments to the United States and Britain to make up for the spending of their troops stationed in Germany (the “offset arrangement”), his government broke down (1966). Erhard was forced to resign. The new government which was based on the CDU and the long-time oppositional Social Democrats elected Kurt Georg Kiesinger as his successor. Erhard retired to a quiet life, but remained a member of parliament until his death on May 5, 1977.

The Rating

Foreign policy:

Erhard’s only field of ambition during his chancellorship – and also the area of his most obvious failure. His pivot away from France damaged the Franco-German relationship and European integration (which he, against his general economic principles, did not seek anyway). On the other hand, Erhard could not make good on his aim to improve German-American relationships – his professed dislike for France took any kind of lever out his hand, and his willingness to accede to American demands (like promising full payment in the offset arrangement) did not result in any favors in return from the United States (the key prize would have been if America had continued to seek a Multilateral Force with nuclear weapons – which would have resulted in Germany’s nuclear sharing).

Domestic policy:

Erhard did not start any domestic policy initiatives and ignored the growing societal pressures beyond his favorite topic of the economy. In the rare cases that such topics were forced onto him, Erhard, to his credit, deviated from the previous course of German policy which had been to largely ignore the Nazi crimes: When he found out that his Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees, and War Victims had been an active Nazi party functionary, Erhard forced his resignation (in a striking difference to his predecessor Adenauer, who kept his Chief of Staff for ten years despite the man’s well-known involvement in drafting the Nazis’ laws prosecuting German Jews).

As German law knew a statute of limitation preventing criminal prosecution after twenty years, all Nazi crimes would have gone unpunished from 1965 on. Erhard was in the minority of government members who wanted to extend the period of prosecution. Parliament passed an extension with a mixed-party majority – Erhard, however, had nor been able to convince his own government colleagues and was not instrumental in securing this majority.

Economic policy:

Another policy field of Erhard inaction – this time, however, by design. Erhard’s liberal economic credo kept him from intervening in the economy. That was defensible in the narrow view – economic activity in the short term – but defective otherwise: Erhard knew (more than a year before the budgetary crisis of 1966) that the economic downswing lowered public revenue while his promises concerning the offset arrangement would raise expenses. Erhard thus brought the budgetary crisis, over which he’d fall, onto himself. In the longer term, Erhard’s torpedoing of European integration denied the German economy export markets and delayed the innovation stimulus of increased competition.

Vision:

Erhard’s overarching vision in life was to allow free individuals to pursue their ambitions in a market economy – but when he entered office, he felt the preconditions for that were already achieved (a debatable claim). Thus, his policy mostly consisted of staying the course. He did pitch a foreign policy plan to refuse the Soviet Union loans and then “buy” German reunification when the Soviet economy collapsed, but was met with (justified) bewilderment by both his domestic and foreign interlocutors. Domestically, his only contribution which went beyond the immediate needs was his idea of a “Formed-Up Society” in which both egoism and pluralism would be overcome – an idea that he brought up during the 1965 election campaign and did not return to afterward.

Pragmatism:

Likely Erhard’s weakest suit. While he did not attempt much, what he attempted usually fell flat because Erhard was unable to secure support for it (or because he wavered and dropped it in the face of resistance). He had lost his own party’s support for his foreign policy within his first year in office. Their support for his domestic activities (or, rather, the lack thereof) withered soon after. Particularly instructive is the aftermath of Erhard’s 1965 electoral victory: Erhard squandered this testament of his popularity with the voters within weeks. He had intended to downsize the cabinet (and thus to get rid of ministers appointed by his predecessor and unfriendly to him) but waited too long to begin that process. In the end, the parliamentary parties of the coalition partners CDU, its Bavarian sister party CSU, and the pro-business FDP prevailed in securing all the posts for ministers they wanted. Erhard was forced to accept a virtually unchanged cabinet. Only one year after his electoral victory, the remainder of his political capital was spent and he resigned.

Integrity:

Erhard came into office planning to abolish his predecessor’s “democracy of favors” which was based on securing the support of powerful interest groups like the churches, the farmers’ associations, the employers’ associations, or the trade unions by passing legislation and channeling government funding in their favor. While Erhard was not above combatting European economic integration (against his liberal credo of open markets and the benefits of competition) to protect the German farmers from their French competitors, he doled out distinctly fewer favors than his predecessor. He also confined himself to the limits the constitution spelled out and did not attempt to shape the state offices to his liking (as Adenauer had done when he tried to move from the chancellorship into the presidency – but, of course, turning the presidency into the more important office). Finally, Erhard’s more collegial government style confirmed that Germany had moved beyond authoritarianism.

Erhard is the rare case of a politician not defined by the highest office he attained: He took the decisive action of his life as Director of Economics for the Bizone. He is best remembered by the public as Minister for the Economy. Looking at his chancellorship, it’s easy to see why: During this short period in office, Erhard did not attempt much, and what he attempted usually failed. His successors were left to respond to pressures resulting from the changing civil society and to repair the damage done to Franco-German relations (only achieved around ten years later). Erhard positions himself on the lower rungs of the leaders rated.

Full ratings so far:

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Wilhelm Marx 17/30
12. Woodrow Wilson 15/30
13. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
14. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Erhard? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

For short overview essays on all German chancellors from Bismarck on, see Sternburg, Wilhelm von: Die deutschen Kanzler. Von Bismarck bis Merkel [The German Chancellors. From Bismarck to Merkel], Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2006 (in German).

For a recent English-language biography (or, rather, a hagiography), see Mierzejewski, Alfred C.: Ludwig Erhard. A Biography, University of North Carolina press, Chapel Hill, NC 2005.

The standard, primary-source based, scholarly biography (which is a bit vitriolic, but generally sound in its judgment) is Hentschel, Volker: Ludwig Erhard. Ein Politikerleben [Ludwig Erhard. A Politician’s Life], Olzog, Munich 1996 (in German).