A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror by Schweikart Larry

Author:Schweikart, Larry [Schweikart, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Patriot Bookshelf
ISBN: 9781595230324
Google: igOXnmTZ_wIC
Amazon: 1595230327
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-11-06T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

War, Wilson, and Internationalism, 1912–20

The Dawn of Dreams

At the turn of the century, the United States had joined much of the industrialized world in expecting that the fantastic progress and wondrous advances in science and technology would produce not only more affluence, but peace and brotherhood. That, after all, had been the dream of the Progressive movement and its myriad reforms under Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Unions continued to press for government support against business, women maintained pressure for the franchise, and blacks examined ways to reclaim the rights guaranteed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments that had been suppressed after 1877. The slow realization of some of these dreams offered a strong lesson to those willing to learn: human nature changes slowly, if at all.

Such was the case in Europe. The euphoria of goodwill brought about by international scientific exchanges in the 1890s, combined with the absence of a European land war involving the major powers since 1871, provided the illusion that conflict had somehow disappeared once and for all.

Was peace at hand? Many Europeans thought so, and the ever-optimistic Americans wanted to accept the judgment of their Continental friends in this matter. British writer Norman Angell, in his 1909 book Europe’s Optical Illusion—better known by its 1910 reissued title, The Great Illusion—

contended that the industrialized nations were losing the “psychological impulse to war.”1 One diplomat involved in a commission settling a conflict in the Balkans thought the resulting 1913

peace treaty represented the end of warfare. Increased communications, fear of socialist revolutions, resistance of taxpayers, and international market competition all forced the Great Powers to the point where they were manifestly unwilling to make war.2

A young Winston Churchill, then a member of Parliament, rose for his first speech and agreed with this assessment. “In former days,” he intoned, “when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies…it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other…when the resources of science and civilization sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the…commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors.”3 Churchill, who had seen combat at Omdurman as a lieutenant in the 24th Lancers, witnessed firsthand the lethality of modern rapid-fire rifles, Maxim machine guns, and long-range artillery.

Other military experts chimed in, including Ivan S. Bloch, who, even before the Boer War had concluded, predicted that the combination of automatic weapons and trenches would give a decided edge to the defense, so as to increase the bloodshed in a subsequent war to unfathomable levels.4 Is War Impossible? asked the subtitle of Bloch’s book. Many thought so. Americans knew from the losses in the Spanish-American War that the slightest technological advantage, such as smokeless powder, could translate into massive combat losses.

Two factors obscured the horrendous reality of conflicts. First,

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