It was 100 years ago tomorrow that Gavril Princep, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. It’s an event that your junior high history teacher told you started World War I. Your teacher was right, in the same sense that a buckling road “causes” a sinkhole.
And if you’ve been following my “World War II – Fact And Myth” series marking the seventieth anniversaries of key events in World War 2, you may not be shocked to know that First Ringer and I – frustrated historians, both of us us – are going to be rolling out a similar series, “World War I – Fact and Myth”, touching on the same sorts of events in the First World War at their 100th anniversaries. The series will obviously overlap for the next 15 months or so – which makes perfect sense, since they really were two different phases of the same war. Indeed, much of what is going on in the Middle East, Eastern and Southern Europe today is directly tied to what happened in World War I.
So that works.
Of course, it also means a fair amount of re-reading World War I history for both of us!
As a palate-cleanser before the series starts? Austin Bay on the ways in which World War 1 is still going on.
I’m really glad that you and FR are doing this — WWI is a fascinating and horrifying topic.
World War One changed everything. It brought us command economies and keynesian economics, for one thing. John Maynard Keynes The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1921) shaped the modern world as much the Versailles Treaty.
http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Keynes/kynsCP.html
Keynes argument was that hard work, thrift, and investing in children created the wealth of the Victorian era, but the post-war world needed a a new economic theory. Why work and save when the government will inflate away the value of your savings? Why sacrifice to send your children to good schools when they may die in battle?
Post war, the vital economic actor wasn’t the individual, the banking system, or corporations, it was the State.
It goes back well before WW1, with the big issue being major European power meddling into the failing Islamic caliphate that ruled the eastern Med. Heck, Osama was complaining about the defeats of that caliphate in Spain as a justification for what he did.
If nothing else, WW1 was solid proof that European aristocracy had ossified by the late 19th century and was unable to adapt to the world as it was rather than as they wanted it to be. Much of the idiocy and slaughter that was WW1 would have disappeared under more plebeian leadership.
The fed’l gov’t took over the US railroads during WW1. It was a disaster. They learned their lesson. So in WW2, the gov’t passed and let private enterprise run the rairoads. All that Minnesota iron ore, West Virginia coal, Detroit trucks and tanks, Texas oil, and millions and millions and millions of soldiers were able to move to fight and win a world wide war that was several times larger for the US than WW1 was. Imagine trying to get steel and supplies to all of those shipyards to build the thousands of ships with the railroads of WW2 would have been run like the VA or IRS?
Chuck-
If I remember my history correctly, the government commandeered all existing coal and future coal production in 1917. The idea was they would need it for troop ships. Trains run on coal, however, so once all the coal was delivered to the government, the rail system shut down. The winter of 1917-1918 was especially cold in the NE, but they had no coal to fuel the trains to bring government coal to the NE.
And as it worked out, they weren’t ready to ship doughboys to Europe until 1918 anyhow.
The perfect Progressive war.
The chapters on the US mobilization will be fun indeed.
The coal crisis? Yep.
The US arms industry never quite getting up to speed, so that the US Army went to war with British and French tanks and machine guns, French artillery, and in many cases French uniforms? (And only mostly American rifles?) Yep – we’ll have that…
Nick Hayes had a pretty good history in MinnPost earlier this week. The only thing is he took a cheap shot at neocons, a very cheap shot, just makes a really irrelevant comment, bad historical comparison.. It’s like you’re reading a really good book and suddenly there’s a goat scream. Why do good historians make stupid comments. Anyway, WWI is fascinating and horrifying.
The ‘neocons’ gripe is more than gratuitous, it’s bad history. Apparently the ranks of the neocons include every person who believed regime change in Afghanistan was a proper response to 9/11, about 99% of the population, including large majorities in the House and Senate.
A real historian would have known better than to write such nonsense.