The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914; Barbara W. Tuchman's Great War Series by Tuchman Barbara W

Author:Tuchman, Barbara W. [Tuchman, Barbara W.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307798114
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

By the time the Second Conference met in 1907, again at The Hague, war, revolution, new alliances, new governments, new leaders and most notably a new century had intervened. The Twentieth was already unmistakably modern, which is to say it was absorbed in pursuit of the material with maximum vigor and diminished self-assurance; it had forgotten decadence and acquired doubt. Mechanical energy and material goods were redoubling and dominant, but whether beneficent had somehow become a question. Progress, the great certainty of the Nineteenth, no longer appeared so sure.

People felt awe at the turn of the century, as if the hand of God were turning a page in human fate. Cannons were fired at midnight in Berlin to mark the moment and one listener heard the sound “with a kind of shiver: one knew all that the Nineteenth Century had carried away; one did not know what the Twentieth would bring.”

To begin with, it brought violence. The new century was born brawling, in the Boxer Rebellion, in the Philippines, in South Africa, although the brawls were still on the periphery. In 1900 France was restless and so filled with frustrated rage that Punch predicted her first act on the day after the International Exposition closed would be to declare war on England, “for they have been held in for so long it will be necessary to do something desperate at once.” In 1900 the Kaiser exhorted German troops embarking on the punitive expedition to Pekin to emulate Huns in ruthlessness. In the course of the Boxer Rebellion he experienced the inconvenience of too much zeal in the munitions business. Learning that a German gunboat had suffered seventeen hits in a duel with Chinese forts equipped with the latest Krupp cannon, he sent Fritz Krupp an angry telegram: “This is no time when I am sending my soldiers to battle against the yellow beasts to try to make money out of so serious a situation.”

Money and bigness governed. Morgan in 1900 bought out Carnegie to form with Rockefeller and a hundred other firms the corporate colossus, U. S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar holding company. King Leopold of Belgium, the Morgan of Europe, a builder too big for his country, created a moneymaking empire out of the Congo while British and Americans, busy killing Boers and Filipinos, loudly deplored his methods. Three hundred men, it was said, “all acquainted with each other, controlled the economic destiny of the Continent.”

In 1900 Oscar Wilde, a bloated ruin at forty-four, died in Paris, and Nietzsche, aged fifty-five and mad, died at Weimar. “Then in 1900,” wrote W. B. Yeats, “everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth no one went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church or if they did I have forgotten. Victorianism had been defeated.” Some welcomed, some regretted the defeat but the fact was clear. As if to mark the event, the Queen herself incredibly was no more.

The year 1900 conveyed a sense of forces and energy running away with the world.

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