A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  In many respects the embodiment of art during this period was not the astounding architecture of the three giants, but the work of a painter—a Spaniard named Pablo Picasso. Born in 1881, Picasso dominated art in the twentieth century, and no artist was able to escape his influence. Whereas other artists, such as his friend Henri Matisse, tended to stay within certain bounds of their schools and techniques, Picasso forged ahead, entering new periods, developing new techniques, and innovating throughout his long life (he died at the age of ninety-one). A child prodigy, Picasso entered art school at thirteen, but at the age of sixteen went out on his own. His early works were divided into distinct periods: the Blue Period (1901–4), Rose (1905–7), African-influenced (1908–9), Cubism (1909–12), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–19). No sooner would an artist join Picasso in a period and follow his style than Picasso moved on to another one. A man of many contradictions, a scandalous personal life, and socialist/communist views, Picasso seemed to be the universal representative of those plying his craft and setting the standard of behavior, political involvement, and bohemianism for artists throughout Western Europe and even America. Not unsurprisingly, he remained neutral during World War I, sat out the Spanish Civil War, remained in Paris under the Nazis where he was unmolested, but toward the end of his life joined the Communist Party and took a hostile stance toward the United States. That much of his prosperity in fact derived from America and American patrons, and was repaid with antipathy, no doubt would have greatly interested his contemporary, the psychologist Sigmund Freud. Picasso was decadent and bourgeois to the core, refusing a divorce to protect his fortune, and running through a succession of young mistresses, then younger mistresses, until at last his energy gave out. His life acutely encapsulated the story of Europe in the first decades of the new century.

  Grand Illusions

  Virtually no artists, architects, or musicians in 1914 anticipated what would happen that August, and in their views of a challenging but largely peaceful future they were scarcely different from most, for whom the prosperity of the age, combined with the seeming deep appreciation for the horrors of modern weapons, rendered future warfare inconceivable. Voices of the “war-is-impossible” view are well known. The leading proponent, Norman Angell, saw his book The Great Illusion (1910) attain cult status. Angell clubs and organizations, more than forty in the major universities, took root and The Great Illusion was translated into eleven languages. Lectures on Angell’s thesis resounded in the halls of Cambridge and the Sorbonne, although whether Angell’s influence extended to kings and ministers remains a matter of debate. There could be no new war, Angell insisted. The cost was simply too great, even for the winner. National conflict would result in “commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering,” and the major powers knew it. So “pregnant with restraining influences” and so intertwined were the economies of Europe that war “becomes every day more difficult and improbable.”127

  Angell was lauded for his revolutionary views, except they were hardly revolutionary. Almost a decade earlier, a young member of Parliament, Winston Churchill, had likewise predicted that “a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors.”128 Churchill noted that in previous ages, such factors as undeveloped transportation and the length of growing seasons limited conflicts, but in the modern age, he dourly warned, there could be no winners. Even with the recent memory of the Boer War fresh, “We do not know what war is. We have had a glimpse of it [and even] in miniature it is hideous and appalling.”129 (Twenty-first-century readers should remember Churchill whenever someone tries to use economic interdependence as an argument for why another world war is not possible.) No less than the highly respected economist John Maynard Keynes had claimed European interconnectedness had reached such remarkable levels that war was inconceivable. Should it come, however, he prophesied that such a war would not last more than a year after the first shots were fired. International bankers, however, trembled at the thought of markets torn asunder and debtors unable to repay.

  The bankers were right. After August 1914, when the first shots of World War I were fired, the Rothschilds, the hardest hit firm in the world, lost 1.5 million pounds sterling and watched the company’s capital fall by half over the next four years. Nor was the United States immune from the economic disaster war posed to the financial markets. Upon the Austrian declaration of war against Serbia, Wall Street values fell by 3.5 percent; the London market had to close on July 31, not reopening until the following January. The fact that the markets dropped so suddenly has led some to contend that capitalists were surprised, deluded by the prospects of peace. Were they? The evidence points to businessmen and financiers being overtaken by politics and events beyond their control, and the answer must be a very qualified yes.

  Moreover, while military spending made up a smaller share of the state budget, the state sector of the developed nations’ economies had grown substantially large, and was increasing rapidly. In Germany, it was 18 percent of GNP in 1913; in Britain, 13 percent; and in Russia, Japan, and France, even more. Russia, hoping to force-feed industrialization, had two thirds of the railroads under government control, along with most of the gold and coal fields, factories, agriculture, and a state bank. Long before Japan had its Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), Czar Nicholas II had a Ministry of Trade with agents on the boards of all trading companies and which dictated freight charges and set profits. One could say that long before the Communists took over, Russia was where the Progressives in America wanted to be.

  As the winds of war grew irrepressible, the sense that nothing so terrible could happen to the Continent continued to reassure nations that some last-minute agreement would magically materialize. A dark, conspiratorial version of the “Dell Theory” also emerged: a handful of money men just would not allow a war to interrupt their profits. According to German banker Walther Rathenau in 1909, “Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of Europe and choose their successors from among themselves.”130 (This view would prove quite durable: in 1921, the Financial Times still maintained that “half a dozen men at the top of the Big Five Banks could upset the whole fabric of government finance by refraining from renewing Treasury Bills.”131) Whether because of the notion that people would never sacrifice their material pleasures to larger ideas, or because a handful of nefarious bankers controlled “the system,” it was easy for Europeans to delude themselves into thinking war would not come.

  Looking around Europe’s major cities, the thought that anything would—could—interrupt the prosperous, relatively carefree lifestyle that had emerged in the late nineteenth century seemed ridiculous. John Maynard Keynes commented on this first era of “globalization” in 1901, noting that an upper-class Londoner could order food, products, and entertainments from around the world and expect they would be delivered to him. He could, as Keynes observed, “secure forthwith…cheap and affordable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality,” could send his servant “to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals that might seem convenient,” and could order by telephone “the various products of the whole earth [for] delivery upon his doorstep.”132 And with England at nearly full employment (there were only 100,000 registered paupers, mostly in London), it seemed all material needs were met.

  The conquest of the poles left man dominant over all the globe; the death of poverty placed him above such mundane issues as daily existence. Through architecture and dance, art and song, it seemed as though man had transcended mud and blood, moving into a golden age. And yet disturbing evidence abounded that showed the harsh realities of war, political strife, revolution, poverty, and inadequacy not only remained, but had bubbled to the surface with jarring frequency. Whether through the steady buildup of great power alliances, the continued fracturing of the Ottoman Empire and the Young Tur
k revolution, or the cauldron boiling in the Balkans, “old” Europe was crumbling.

  No nation was in more desperate straits than Russia. Despite attempts to modernize and create a Duma (the Russian parliament) in 1905 with a constitution that could pave the way for change, the Russian colossus had drifted too far behind its European cousins, leaving an opening for radicals to short-circuit a peaceful evolution. Count Sergei Witte, who advanced from stationmaster to the minister of finance from 1892 to 1903, had worked feverishly to bring Russia into the modern world. His greatest achievement, the Trans-Siberian Railroad, ran over 6,300 miles from the Polish border to Vladivostok. Constructed between 1891 and 1905, the railroad greatly facilitated the reinforcement of Moscow in 1941 when the Nazis were at the gates. Thus, it is a high irony that the Soviet Communists owed their survival to the man most responsible for bringing capitalism to Russia. By the time Witte was finished, railroads bound together one sixth of the earth’s surface into a single—if dysfunctional—political unit.

  Attempts by the Czars to push Russia into the modern age resulted in massive exports of such products as sugar, where Russian per capita consumption of 10.5 pounds per year compared with England’s 92 pounds. Russia exported one quarter of its sugar in 1900 and 12 million pounds of cotton, even though its domestic per capita consumption was only 5.3 pounds compared with England’s 39 pounds. Thus, the Russian monarchy was busy distorting the market as badly as the Communists would. The nation exported 60 percent of its domestic production of kerosene, and showed the folly of obsessing over a “favorable balance of trade,” because the Russians constantly had a trade surplus, yet their people were falling further behind. Czars did encourage the growth of corporations—whose dollar value nearly doubled, thanks to foreign investment; and coal production rose more than twenty-fold from 1870 to 1900. But mechanical power remained almost unknown, standing at 1.6 horsepower per 100 persons in 1912 to twenty-five times that in the United States or twenty-four in England. Government-sanctioned cartels also kept production down: a dozen iron and steel firms controlled three quarters of all Russian production. In short, Russia abandoned free trade in 1891, and it was a smaller step to communism economically in Russia than was generally thought by most Westerners.

  Russia’s leading intellectuals did not help, either. The “slavophile” Russian writers, such as Alexei Khomiakov (1804–60), rejected reason completely, regarding it as “the mortal sin of the West.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81) wished to destroy all logic (and all arithmetic), seeking to “free humanity from the tyranny of two plus two equals four.” Sex, many thought, was sinful. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) “considered all property and sex to be evil.” Tolstoy denounced “most art and literature, including his own novels, as vain, irrelevant, and satanic.” Tolstoy hated his own wife, “whom he came to regard as an instrument of his fall from grace,” but he praised marriage without sex while other Russian authors praised sex without marriage!133

  Russia’s precarious structure was set on course for a revolution, a destination virtually ignored by the rest of the world, which similarly paid no attention to the Eurasian giant’s alliances and connections with other hotbeds of unrest, particularly in the Balkans. The golden age dreams and the grand illusions of 1900 turned sourly dark by 1910 for those who chose to look. Expressions of optimism and unity that had fallen so effortlessly from so many lips and dripped so easily from the ink of so many pens began, in the second decade of the twentieth century, to appear hollow. Instead, by 1914, Europe stood on the edge of a precipice, while American Progressives busied themselves attempting to manipulate, reform, and perfect what was already the world’s preeminent nation. Even the cataclysm that followed would not deter them from attempting to remake society. Instead, they would expand their horizons to remake the world.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cataclysm

  Time Line

  1914: Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated; World War I begins (August 3); Battle of the Marne; Russians defeated at Battle of Tannenberg; United States declares neutrality

  1915: Stalemate and trench war in the West; poison gas first used; Gallipoli campaign against Ottoman Empire; Italy joins allies, Bulgaria joins Central Powers; Lusitania sunk; Henry Ford sells Model T for under $500

  1916: Battles of the Somme and Verdun; Brusilov Offensive on the Eastern Front; Battle of Jutland

  1917: Zimmermann note; Czar Nicholas abdicates; Russian (March) Revolution; United States declares war on Central Powers; Russian (October) Revolution; Bolsheviks seize power

  1918: Russia leaves war; last German offensives; French and American offensives in Ardennes; November 11 armistice; worldwide flu epidemic; Russian civil war

  1919: Versailles Conference; Prohibition passed in United States

  America emerged at a time when Europe, pacific and stable on the outside, was fraying on the inside. The internal upheaval, which would soon overtake the entire world, unfolded in many ways because European society and government lacked the traits that made the United States—for all its flaws—“exceptional” and different. The American abhorrence of titles and nobility, the widespread availability of property to all who had even the smallest savings, and social strata that permitted easy ascension (and fall) provided the United States with moorings that European nations not only lacked, but which, by their absence, created tensions that could not be mitigated except by violence on a massive scale. Given the still-dominant and inbred system of monarchs, along with militaristic aggressiveness by second-rate countries, both exacerbated by invisible alliances that could suck a great power into a mortal struggle with an enemy of equal might, the stage was set for a European cataclysm.

  The Future of War

  Few doubted the biblical-level destruction that war threatened to wreak on Europe. A sobering portrait of such a landscape came from Ivan S. Bloch, a Polish Jew, banker, and railroad financier obsessed with modern warfare. Still clinging to the Norman Angell/Winston Churchill position that war was obsolete, Bloch produced a six-volume analysis called La Guerre Future (1898), which was condensed and translated into English as Is War Now Impossible? Armed with the new Maxim gun (soon improved upon with Browning’s light air-cooled machine gun), long-range artillery, smokeless powder, and rifled barrels, military forces could decimate units moving in open ground. The bayonet charge was now a thing of the past; cavalry, hopelessly out of date as an offensive force (although it would take multiple military disasters to prove the point). Defensive forces, dug in behind earthworks and entrenchments, fronted by the new barbed wire and acres of land mines, would have a massive advantage. Perhaps war was not impossible, but had not the previous century shown that “civilized powers” rarely fight one another? Between 1879 and 1917, of the 270 wars recorded, fewer than a third of them were fought in Europe, although those that did occur always threatened to engulf the major powers. Another indicator of belligerence, military spending, was also down among the Western nations. Russia, the leader, spent 4 percent of national product on its military, but Germany and Britain spent only 3 percent, and only France and Germany had even 1 percent of their populations in the armed forces (France at 1.5 percent was the leader).1 And, as we have seen, the U.S. Army was minuscule compared with the Europeans’ land forces.

  This in no way invalidates the arguments that “militarism,” however one defines it, did not contribute significantly toward the war. But the proliferation of weapons didn’t dictate the rise of militaristic attitudes—the process is vice versa. Germany had implemented a reserve system that allowed quick access to vast manpower pools, a factor in both the strategic planning of the German General Staff and the belligerence of the Kaiser at opportune times. Many hoped, however, that the hostile attitudes and aggressiveness of the military leadership, particularly in Germany, could be curbed by marriages between Europe’s royal families. But in the end, these blood relationships mattered little. None of Old Europe’s leaders were “men of the people,” few commanded widespread persona
l loyalty, and in any event, the monarchs of 1914 could not veto war plans drawn up by their military high commands. Kaiser Wilhelm II would argue for redirecting the German war effort away from France, but in vain. In Russia, the Czar was insulated from public audit, while at the same time fearing a democratic uprising on the one hand and aristocratic backstabbing on the other.

  Important pockets of optimism could be found across Europe—the Germans had an annual growth rate of almost 3 percent in their GDP—but in many cases this represented a recent burst, not as in the United States, where the GDP had averaged almost 4 percent growth annually since the Civil War and occasionally approached 7 percent. Nevertheless, European growth constituted a continuing trend. Land reform had begun in Russia, slowly, to be sure, but significant in its potential. Inflation in the West was low due to the gold standard, business—especially American business, after the Panic of 1893—was prospering, and wages were rising. Cities, though dirty and crowded, had an air of expectation and hope.

  No city denied the approaching storm clouds of chaos and blood more than Paris, which (aside from Brussels) had the most to lose in a continental conflagration. Paris had recovered from the Prussian invasion of 1870 to stake its claim as the “New Jerusalim,” [sic] although it was hardly holy. To many the city seemed to embody urban perfection by human hands, thanks to its art, culture, and fashion. Journalist William Shirer called the French capital “as near to paradise on this earth as any man could ever get,” and writer Harold Rosenberg described Paris in 1940 as “the Holy Place of our time. The only one.”2 Thomas Appleton said Paris was where good Americans went when they died. By 1900, Paris was not only architecturally interesting, with its Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur, but also morally provocative. Its lenient censorship laws “permitted entertainment and publications that would have had little chance of survival elsewhere in Europe,” and its “ambiguous morality” encouraged brothels, cafés, low-level drugs, and saloons, all mixing with the contradictory odors of fine perfume, auto exhaust, and horse dung.3