The Super Summary of World History (47 page)

Dreadnought
,
Robert K. Massie
, 1992, Ballantine Books. Massie reviews the entire era leading up to WWI in grand style. He gives fairly complete biographies on each major personage of the times from Cecil Rhodes to Queen Victoria.

Wizard:
The
Life
and
Times
of
Nikola
Tesla
:
Biography
of
a
Genius,
Marc Seifer, 2001, Citadel Press Books

 
Chapter 12

1900: The Dividing Line
to the Modern World

Since a new era is dawning, we need to
review
what was going on around 1900.

Industrialism
and
the
Machine
Age

The years between 1880 and 1900 were an era of great prosperity and a belief in a glorious future.
Progress
was everywhere. Trains were moving people and goods faster than ever and at reduced prices. Transportation influenced prices on all kinds of goods and services so as transportation prices fell prices on nearly everything fell. Mass production became common, and this made textiles and a wide array of manufactured goods available at lower prices. At sea, fast ships traveling around the world brought goods to Europe and America from across the globe. As Europe thrived, the third world prospered by supplying the Europeans with their needs and wants which consistently grew. New factories were constructed, and new factories meant better machines and more competition, driving prices down. It also upped employment numbers. International trade was booming, and the future looked brilliant. Machines seemed to be the key to the future. They made everything better.

In terms of warfare, the last ninety years were good because very few large wars between major powers occurred. Since Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, European nations cooperated as never before in preventing war. If events in Europe appeared to be moving toward an armed clash, the ambassadors gathered and started working out terms to prevent a conflict.
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Overall, the world seemed to work well; however, underneath it all a growing angst presided. Philosophy started predicting an irrational world, one ruled by harsh reality, power, and greed. Art was coming undone. Reality evaporated, and modern painting started taking over wherein the minds of artists turned to images of wilting watches and fantastic scenes never glimpsed before. Even this degenerated into darker paintings of worlds without recognizable features. Literature followed suit with stories of meaningless existence overlain by horror. Music also echoed the tune of no rhyme or theme and began to declare there was no unity in music or in life. It all came together in
science,
where the world people thought they knew melted away with incomprehensible theories that failed to fit everyday experience. The theory of relativity (Einstein) told the world that the universe was a strange place where the speed of light never changed, and events changed depending on a person’s viewpoint in space. Plank’s quantum theory postulated a world of atoms where “certainty” was a calculation which stated only the possibilities—NOTHING was certain here. Freud displayed the power of hidden areas of the human mind and proved rational decisions were anything but rational. Decisions and ideas were not based on systematic thought (logic and reason), but on the emotional, and very irrational, part of the mind he called the subconscious. Freud made the mind irrational and thus the world irrational. Where could this be leading?

Little did anyone realize how close this placid Victorian world was to the ultimate irrationality;
World
War
I
.

Machines

By 1900, machines ran the modern Western world. Machines took jobs and created jobs. Machines ruled nearly every aspect of work and life. From the factories to the fields, machines performed more and more work under the oversight of humans.
Trains
made hauling people and possessions faster and cheaper. Railroads were crisscrossing continents other than Europe by 1900. From England to India, trains were the center of modern urban life and the center of economic life everywhere in Europe, America, and the colonial empires.
Ships
began running on coal-fired engines, and a new product—the
automobile
—ran on gasoline (mostly). The automobile became the foundation of the machine age when
Henry
Ford
(1863-1947) introduced the Model T Ford October 1, 1908. Using assembly line methods he cut the cost of production making the vehicle affordable. The price was $825 when it rolled off the assembly line in 1908, and the price fell as Ford improved his manufacturing methods. The first
airplane
flew in 1903 when, at Kitty Hawk, the
Wright
brothers
made the world’s first powered flight using a gasoline engine. The need to fuel the machines began dominating business and governmental decisions worldwide. Oil was the key to both fueling and maintaining the new mechanical world. Without a large supply of oil the machines would die. As electricity became more useful, ways to generate electricity became more valuable. Falling water runs electric generators, but not everyone lives near a big river. Once more, power from burning coal or oil became the answer. As machines came of age,
coal
and then
oil
became the gold of the machine era.

Politics

Figure 43 The British Empire in 1923

Britain ruled the sea and an exceptionally large part of the world. She was the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world long before 1800, and her position seemed unassailable. Britain desired free trade and, as a nation, committed herself to keeping the oceans open to shipping, and keeping trade barriers low. All in accordance with
Adam
Smith
’s ideas as set forth in his book,
The
Wealth
of
Nations
, published in 1776. Britain believed the goods and raw materials flowing to England strengthened her as a nation, and strengthened the colonies producing the goods and raw materials. As a whole, Britain ran her colonies well and relatively free of corruption. India, the crown jewel of Britain’s colonial empire, attracted many English citizens to live in the comforts of the imperial possession.

England also advanced on the social front. Under
Queen
Victoria
(
1819
to
1901
), the second and third
Reform
Acts
passed giving more classes of people the vote, and better labor laws passed to protect working people. In the United States, amendments to the Constitution passed ensuring voting rights and citizenship for blacks and minorities, and social welfare programs expanded to help the poor, the uneducated, and the insane. Powerful business interests operating to the detriment of small enterprise, such as railroads, at last began to face serious regulatory threats from state governments.

France also possessed a great worldwide colonial empire, but it did not add as much to the economy of France as English colonies did for Britain. The French empire was rife with corruption and incompetence. France and England viewed their empires differently. England built schools, hospitals, railroads, and the like for its colonies. Overall, the English colonies received much from the mother country. France did build railroads and generally improved its colonies, but the British did more. France viewed the colonies as benefiting France and little else. Britain viewed the colonies as a two-way exchange where the mother country owed the colonies, and both benefited from the colonial system. While the French did not acutely oppress people in their colonies, they let them know about French superiority in all things.
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Holland, Portugal, and Germany held colonial empires, but they were a shadow of the English empire. Germany was especially desirous of obtaining more colonies to equal England, its rival for world power. Germany’s numerous problems included coming very late to the colonial game, and being a land power in Central Europe—not a sea power. Sea power brought colonies, and Germany was nowhere near the equal of Britain at sea.

Germany’s ship building program pushed Britain’s policy of having a fleet twice the size of any other nation to the limit. Germany was making headway by building more ships than England. Nevertheless, England’s outstanding naval architects pulled a rabbit out of the hat, outperforming Germany in innovation. Britain’s navy under the First Sea Lord, Fisher, invented a new kind of battleship,
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the
HMS
Dreadnought
(1906). This revolutionary ship made all other battleships obsolete the instant it hit the waves, because it had more large guns and greater speed than anything else afloat. The Dreadnought’s new turbine engines made the ship amazingly quick. All those many ships Germany constructed to catch up with England became useless. As England constructed more
Dreadnought
type battleships Germany retreated into the doldrums of naval power, but Germany strained every muscle to keep up. The very costly
Dreadnoughts
resulted in England and Germany spending piles of money on an arms race that increased world tensions and damaged their economies in the process. By World War I Britain had 21 Dreadnoughts and Germany 13.

Large
standing
armies
impoverish
the
people.
—Sun Tzu,
The
Art
of
War

At a fundamental level, Germany was a land power. She beat France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 rather easily and obtained Alsace Loraine from France as a result. Germany’s population was outpacing the population of France, and Germany’s industry out produced France in key economic areas. France recognized these facts, which were terrifying the French government and people.

Germany needed to rethink copying Great Britain as its strategy for gaining world power. Enjoying a central position so as to benefit from trade with France, England, Russia, Central Europe, and others, Germany could grow her economy without preparing for war at sea or an aggressive war on land. Germany could position herself to gain allies rather than cause others to seek treaties to isolate her. Germany’s aggressive Prussian military heritage impaired her in the international arena since Prussia’s renown was its formidable army.
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Had Germany chosen to spend money on industrial infrastructure rather than warships it would end Britain’s worries about German sea power. Britain would have no pressing reason to ally with France. If Germany constructed defensive lines and reduced the size of her army France could have relaxed, and alliances with Russia would be unnecessary. By befriending the nations around her Germany’s economic power could grow immeasurably, and Europe—and the world—would benefit owing to no arms race and the positive influence of a good trading partner. All this is speculation, because Germany would challenge France and Britain for world power and prestige with appalling results for Western Europe and the world.

France decided its best protection against Germany was alliances, especially with England and Russia. Once France secured the alliance with Russia, Germany was facing a two-front war.
Otto
von
Bismarck
, Germany’s leader for years, made it a point to keep his nation from encirclement by co-joined enemies; however, by early 1900 Bismarck was gone, and the new German leader,
Kaiser
Wilhelm
, was irresponsible in foreign policy. By allowing Bismarck’s alliances to ebb away he gave France the opening it needed to gain an alliance with Russia, proving again that heredity and competence are not synonymous.

England
also
became
an
informal
ally
of
France
. This was most unusual, in that Britain and France were consistently at war with one another for over four hundred years. From before Agincourt (1415) to Waterloo (1812), England and France fought over ownership of Europe and the world. Even in the late 1800s, the antagonism remained strong, particularly over colonial issues. Nonetheless, in 1900 French policy changed, as did English policy, and the two became informal allies. The man behind this change, and probably the man who saved France from conquest in WW I, was the Minister of Foreign Affairs for France,
Theophile
Déclassé.
For years Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of England, had been trying to hammer out an alliance with the Germans to forward England’s policy of containing Russia. Failing at that endeavor, he managed to gain an alliance with Japan to limit Russian expansion in the far east. Déclassé saw his chance after Salisbury finally soured on his chances with Germany. The French Foreign Minister knew the major difficulty with an alliance was the colonial competition with the British, however, he saw that the real issue was the fate of only two areas, Morocco and Egypt. Déclassé negotiated a deal where Egypt went to England and Morocco went to France. The deal was cut and finalized on April 7, 1904. Germany objected because she had an interest in Morocco, and under pressure Déclassé resigned; nevertheless, Germany was not satisfied and called for a large conference of the major powers to work out the fate of Morocco. The conference did not go well for the Germans and their constant threats of war disturbed England and France. The net result was a stronger relationship between Britain and France, just the opposite of what the Germans wanted. The fear of Germany drove England and France to partnership. As the ancient enemies came together as friends, it was certain the world was a much-altered place in the era of 1900.