This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part Two begins early in the twentieth century, as older ways of doing things and habits of thought give way. What follows is an era of cataclysmic struggles over what ideas and institutions will take their place. The course concludes in the present day, as communities everywhere are transitioning into a new era of world history. Again we work hard to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? Again we are drawn to pivotal choices made at key moments by individuals and communities.
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From the course by University of Virginia
The Modern World, Part Two: Global History since 1910
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From the lesson
Crackup (1905-1917)
Meet the Instructors
Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Hi. Welcome back.
In the presentation today, I'm going to try to zoom in on some choices
made, especially in late 1916, about whether to continue the war.
When we talk about the continuation of World War I,
you see theses nightmarish horrors that are going on in 1914, 15, 16, so how
could people continue, how could statesman let their countries go on?
Well they made choices; it helps to really try to understand their choices.
These were not stupid people, so to understand their
choices, as we talked very early on, choices are stories.
They're stories in which people confront a Situation; they try to make sense of it;
they see their problems there; and they try to figure
out what's the best way I can solve these problems.
Which then may create a new situation.
So, then what we're going to try to do is look
at how some of the key players saw the situation
by the late summer of 1916, in order to understand
why their choices merged together so that this terrible war continued.
Let's turn our attention back to the United States of America,
led by Woodrow Wilson, and its attitude toward all of this in 1916.
One of the first things to understand
about Wilson's America is that it was neutral.
It was out of the war,
and it was doing extremely well as a result.
The United States was becoming a supplier mainly
to the British and French because the British and
French mainly controlled sea lanes and could
buy and ship stuff from the United States,
and American farmers and merchants were making a
huge amount of money out of the war.
These were good times for American agriculture.
Also Wilson doesn't want America to be involved in the war.
And Wilson, the American president, really has
a firm grip on controlling American foreign policy.
Really to an almost
extreme degree, American foreign policy in 1916 was the policy of Woodrow Wilson.
Who was Woodrow Wilson?
The son of a minister. Former president of a university.
A high minded intellectual.
But also, a very willful and skillful politician.
Forceful orator.
What were his positions about the war? First,
he was pretty scornful of the great power
rivalries that had led these countries into the war.
He had no sympathy for what they were
trying to achieve and would have been happy if
the war had just gone back to the territories
and situations that had existed before the war started.
He didn't strongly sympathize with one side as
being right and another side as being wrong.
He wanted America therefore to stay out of the war.
[SOUND] But here's the rub.
He knew that if the war continued,
America was likely to be pulled into it. If he wanted to avoid war,
he had to look for ways to stop it.
Because as the war escalated, the Germans could not tolerate the United
States being the supplier of goods and money to only one side.
Nor did Wilson feel the United States could
tolerate having its trade cut off by either side.
The freedom of America to be allowed to trade with the world
was regarded by many Americans as something
that was just essential to their prosperity.
Here's a wonderful photograph of Woodrow Wilson.
We have this kind of caricatured image
of him today as this somewhat unworldly idealist.
He was indeed quite idealistic, but he was also a highly practical person.
So if Wilson wanted to bring the war to
an end, did he have any leverage over the combatants?
He did. First, he was regarded, with some cause,
as being genuinely neutral about which side was right and which side was wrong.
And there was a precedent, going back to
the Russo-Japanese War, of when another
American president, that one Theodore Roosevelt,
had actually been called upon to serve as
an arbitrator in bringing the war to an end.
He had a lot of leverage from the German
point of view because if they escalated their submarine attacks,
if the US goes to war, that would be bad for the German side.
He had a lot of leverage over the British. Not
because he was going to declare war on the British.
That was inconceivable by this time.
The British and the Americans had gone a long way toward
making up their differences, especially in the 1890s and early 1900s.
The real leverage America had over the British:
The U.S. was loaning them the money and selling them the means.
And indeed,
the U.S. was loaning the British the money that they could use to buy
the goods they needed from the United States to continue to wage the war.
If the United States threatened to choke off that flow of funds to Great
Britain in some way, that would be
immediate substantial leverage over the British side.
And the British, in turn, were the key financiers of the whole Allied war effort.
So, in theory, Wilson had a lot of potential leverage.
One problem
was: Was the US entering the war scary enough to the German?
Because Wilson would not build up the American army. So
some German generals discounted how dangerous the Americans might be or
thought it would take too long for the Americans to
make their presence felt if they got involved in the war.
And there was some question as to: Were the Americans
really willing to use their theoretical financial leverage against
the British?
Would they have the nerve to use it against
the people who are buying so much of their stuff?
In 1916, Wilson's foreign policy situation was this: He tried a
peace move in the first half of the year; it had
Failed, but it had failed because all of the different sides
still had their big war plans to try to win in 1916.
They weren't going to be interested in peace until those plans failed.
Those plans had not clearly failed until the second half of 1916.
Until August or September.
Internally though, by August and September, Wilson is running for re-election.
That will concentrate his attention.
He's in a tough election campaign against the Republican candidate:
Charles Evans Hughes.
The election will be at the beginning of November 1916.
The chronology's important.
Now, let's swing our attention to Berlin, and look at how
the German leaders analyzed their situation by the late summer of 1916.
[NOISE] They are feeling great strain at this point.
Tactically, their position is okay.
Their armies are, after all, on French
and Belgian territory, not on German territory.
But strategically, they can't see any clear path to how they win the war.
The one panacea they can think of is to rely
on submarines to cut the ties of Britain and
her allies from the rest of the world. But
use the submarines, you bring the United States into war.
So, a lot of strain, tactically okay but
the overall outlook grim.
And as the war goes on, Bethmann increasingly feels like
if we go into this all-out submarine warfare,
all-out war domestically,
I'm going to lose control of the situation.
We're going to have to become a different kind of country.
The military is going to take over.
In effect, Bethmann, the civilian chancellor for the Kaiser thinks:
If we don't settle this war pretty soon,
it's going to escalate in ways in which it's
pretty much going to pass out of my hands,
and Germany's going to turn into a military dictatorship
dedicated to trying to wage an all-out war.
He doesn't want to go there unless he has to, but they
have to settle it soon. If they don't get something done soon,
then by late 1916 they're going to have to start writing their
plans for an all-out submarine attack in 1917 that will bring the United States
into the war. So the Germans reach out,
looking for urgent US mediation
to try to end the war.
Let's take a look for instance at some
of the interesting telegrams that were exchanged between
Bethmann-Hollweg and the German ambassador in Washington.
The ambassador for example is pointing out that the
Americans do not want to get involved in the war.
As the German ambassador observes in the summer of 1916, when
all is said and done, the American people are pacifistically inclined.
It becomes clearer day by day, how difficult
it is to arouse a feeling for preparedness
for war, et cetera.
Whoever has lived here for a long time cannot avoid the
conviction that the Americans' aim in life is the peaceful acquisition of wealth.
It is only when he believes that a deep injustice has been done him that
he allows himself to be carried along
in the current of an hysterical war sentiment.
Bethmann-Hollweg's answer.
Writing from Berlin in early September 1916, he talks
about the situation.
The fronts are holding fast, but hope to conclude peace before winter,
as the exhaustion of Russia or France by the war is lessened by this development.
He's referring to the entry of Romania into the war on the side of the Allies.
In case no major catastrophe should occur in the East, would peace
mediation by Wilson be possible and successful if we were to guarantee
Belgium's unconditional restoration?
Otherwise, the unrestricted U-boat war, those are their submarines, U-boats, U-boat
war will have to be carried on in dead earnest.
Bernstorff believes President Wilson will make a peace move, but he's
worried that it may be delayed until after the presidential election.
That really worries Bethmann-Hollweg, who writes back to his ambassador that the
supreme high command of the army is
already looking at the unrestricted U-boat war.
That situation would change if President Wilson will make his move.
But, some action of this kind must occur before long since we are not in a position
to remain quiet any longer. That's in late September of 1916.
In other words, they're anxious to end the war quickly
before matters escalate in a way that will not
only take the war in a new direction but
maybe be the end of normal civilian rule in
Germany, as the military high command gets its way.
Now let's switch the scene to yet
one more absolutely key player: the British leadership.
The British Government in the summer of 1916 is headed
by the last great Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith.
The war's increasingly overwhelming him as a politician and as a person.
As he looks at these issues of war and peace in the late summer of 1916, Asquith
and his wife are distraught by the news that
their own son has just been killed in France.
Britain too is under enormous strain,
not clear what else they can do to bring the war to a successful conclusion.
The British public through the popular press
is getting encouraging news about what's happening in
the Battle of the Somme, but little can hide that the front line has not advanced
and that the cost is simply terrible.
This photograph gives you one illustration of the devastation.
As you can see that practically every
bit of vegetation has been destroyed. When these shells explode, the metal
fragments, the shrapnel, shreds anything that's more than a foot above the ground.
Here are some of the walking wounded heading back from the front.
In this case, what appears to be a German Prisoner, possibly blinded
by poison gas, is being helped back by one of the British wounded.
This is part of the debris of war.
This is simply used shell casings from some of
the artillery that's been firing into the front lines.
Asquith makes his move, too. In August 1916,
he asks all the leaders of his Cabinet to ponder
what the aims would be for a continuation of the war.
One answer to Asquith's question comes
from the most dynamic politician in his
cabinet, a Welshman named David Lloyd George.
Here's a photograph of Lloyd George.
Lloyd George was a Liberal politician, but He had very much seen himself as a man
representing the Welsh miners, representing the working class,
a spokesman for social insurance, for government help.
When it came to war, Lloyd George presented
himself as the dynamic man, the man who
could lead Britain to victory.
And indeed, Lloyd George begins to see this moment
as the one when he will become the war leader.
He will become prime minister. He's smart.
He doesn't see any panacea for a big breakthrough on the Western Front.
He's also highly critical of the quality of British generalship.
He has some ideas for using a blockade, for trying
to attack Germany and its allies at the margins somehow.
But he's determined that Britain just has to continue, and his
answer is to go public in September 1916, and tell journalists that
what Britain needs to do is to plan on a knockout
blow and be willing just to fight it all the way through.
He sets himself out to the public as the
man who is willing to do whatever is needed.
In contrast to Lloyd George, inside the Cabinet discussions,
Asquith gets an extraordinary memo from one of
the senior statesmen in his government, Lord Lansdowne.
Lansdowne has held several of the highest posts the British
government can give, even going back to the late 1800s.
This elder, conservative statesman, this sober stalwart of British
foreign policy, now writes a remarkable secret memo to his
Cabinet colleagues.
Lansdowne puts his views down in a memo to his colleagues in November 1916.
I'm actually reading from the reprinting of this memo
in Lloyd George's own memoirs, because Lloyd George regarded
what he called this courageous memo, as the key
opposing view to the one that he was putting forward.
Lansdowne argued: I do not suppose for an instant that there
is any weakening in the spirit of the people of this country.
And that he hoped that the same might be said of our allies.
But neither in their interests nor in ours can
it be desirable that the war should be prolonged, unless
it can be shown that we can bring it
to an effectual conclusion within a reasonable space of time.
So, what does the prolongation of the war mean?
Our own casualties already amount to over 1.1 million.
We've had 15,000 officers killed, not including those who are missing.
There's no reason to suppose that as the force at the front and
the different theaters of war increases, the
casualties will increase at a slower rate.
We are slowly but surely killing off the
best of the male population of these islands.
As for the Allies the total must be appalling.
Financial.
The financial burden which we have already accumulated is almost incalculable.
We're adding to it at the rate of over 5 million pounds per day.
Generations will have to come and go before the country
recovers from the loss which it has sustained in human beings
and from the financial ruin and the destruction
of the means of production which are taking place.
Fundamentally, Britain is
about to go bankrupt.
You've seen some of the charts showing the
scale of British foreign investment around the world.
Britain had been the financial hub of modern capitalism.
That era is coming to a close, and Lansdowne is feeling it,
because Britain is running out of money.
Its public and private finances are strained to the limit.
Lansdowne even perceives, presciently, that if the war continues, some of Britain's
Allies may themselves implode.
Looking over at Russia, and remember this is written in the fall of
1916, he points out that already the domestic situation is far from reassuring.
There have been alarming disorders both at Moscow and in Petrograd.
If the war continues, Britain will change in some permanent, fundamental way
that it can never recover and so might the rest of the world.
These are Liberal politicians who are seeing the world they grew
up with disappearing before their eyes with the continuation of this war.
And they hope to bring it to an end.
So look at the way the elements have converged in the late
summer and early fall of 1916. [SOUND] The USA needs to bring the war to
an end to keep it from engulfing them. And it has leverage over the two sides.
The Germans urgently want US mediation,
and are, for their own reasons, interested in getting
a cessation of hostilities before the end of the year.
And the leadership of the British government
is clearly looking at all their options.
So then.
Why did the moment pass?
For the USA, Wilson couldn't act quickly
because he was consumed by his re-election campaign.
Just the timing of the American election cycle.
He ends up not making his peace move until December 1916.
By that time it's too late.
In Germany, they're already moving towards preparing their 1917 war plans.
The military will have the upper hand. And in Britain, the advocate of total war,
David Lloyd George, had already out
maneuvered his opponents in the British Cabinet.
Lloyd George's policies are going to drive the British approach.
By the end of 1916, when the
Americans make their move, German domestic politics, British
domestic politics have already closed the window of opportunity.
Now I'm spotlighting this moment not because I'm sure there was a panacea here.
Maybe if you run a counter-factual experiment, you say:
Hmm, there are all sorts of reasons this might not have worked out.
Even if the Americans had mediated, it might have failed.
And there's no sure
thing, especially when you're speculating about might-have-beens.
But it does seem to me there is
a significant possibility that fruitful negotiations might have happened,
given the confluence of positions among these critical
countries and the alternative they were looking at.
As that windows closed, World War I transitions to a new stage.
In the winter of 1916 and 1917, the direction of
the war took a dramatic new turn.
The leading powers have new people in charge.
In Britain, the new prime minister is David Lloyd George,
determined to lead the British people to achieve that knockout
blow he talked about to the press back in September of 1916,
when he'd been outmaneuvering his Liberal rivals for the leadership.
Lloyd George forms a national coalition between Liberals and
Conservatives, who will join together to win the war at all costs.
In France, their leadership too was swept aside
the new premier is this man: Georges Clemenceau.
Clemenceau was a formidable figure.
He comes from what I classify as one of the Liberal parties,
in France it would be called the Radical Party.
Clemenceau has been a strong
advocate of liberty, an opponent of the
Church, a fierce spokesman for the underdog.
He's a tough fellow.
His nickname is: The Tiger (Le Tigre).
He'd spent some time in the United States in his younger days, and
also had been involved in more than one duel.
In Berlin, Bethmann-Hollweg's worst fears come to pass.
The German High Command decides it'll adopt
its approach to win the war.
The key figure in the German General Staff, its
military master planner, is this man: Erich von Ludendorff.
Ludendorff becomes, in effect, the military ruler of Germany.
Bethmann-Hollweg will soon step down from the chancellorship.
Ludendorff will really run the day-to-day management of the German Empire.
As these new teams move into
place in Britain, France, and Germany, Woodrow Wilson, newly re-elected
in November and by a very close margin, does make his move to try to end the war.
Wilson's peace message of December 1916 calls for a peace without victory.
But the moment in which the British and German leaderships
would have been open to that kind of move has passed.
Now Wilson would have to use a lot of leverage.
He actually does pull the British lion's tail a little bit
by showing just how vulnerable the British are to American financial pressure.
But the American army isn't built up to the point
where the German High Command is very frightened of it.
Instead, the Germans decide that they're going to undertake their gamble.
What is their gamble?
The German High Command's theory is this:
Yes, the Americans may come into the war if we wage all-out submarine warfare.
But we'll starve the British and knock them out
of the war before America can slowly build up
its army, train its troops, get them to France,
and really make their weight felt on the battlefield.
And who knows whether the Americans will be that tough an opponent anyway.
They aren't used to war like we are. The result, then,
is a new phase in the First World War,
one that'll push some of the countries over the brink.
In one case, in the Russian Empire, the war pushes
the government of Tsar Nicholas II over the brink.
They simply can't sustain the war effort anymore.
The Russian people rise up and overthrow the monarchy.
At first it's not clear what's going to happen with Russia's
role in the war.
This protest, for example, features a banner on the left that
simply says: Feed the children of the defenders of the motherland.
This banner over here, on the right: Increase payments to
the soldiers' families, the defenders of freedom and world peace.
They just want a better government.
So the Russian Empire, one of the last of the old-style governments,
Traditional-style governments, cracks.
Another factor that helps create some emotional
momentum for war is the Germans, anticipating that
America might come in, send to the Mexican government an offer that if the Mexicans
will ally themselves with the Germans against
the Americans, why, the Germans will help the
Mexicans get back all that territory they lost to the United States in the 1840s.
Texas, California,
and so on.
[LAUGH] That German offer to the Mexican
government was intercepted by British intelligence, which then
finds a way of leaking it without their
fingerprints being on it into the American press.
You can imagine how the American public reacted to that German move.
Even so, it's not a sure thing that America's going to come into the war.
A lot still turns on what President Wilson is going to ask.
Wilson decides that America does need to come in.
Why?
He is increasingly convinced that to end the war in
the right way offers the only hope to really save civilization,
that he needs to join with other countries in doing what
America can to make the world safe for a democratic future, and
that America won�t be able to have any voice on
the future shape of the world unless it joins in the
war to be able to be at the table and contribute.
So, Wilson decides that America has to come in.
He asks the Congress to declare war in early April 1917,
and the United States, for the first time in its history, joins in a full-scale
European conflict. The final phase of World War I and
its aftermath will be our topic next week.
I'll look forward to seeing you then.
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