“The first World War, boys, it came and it went
The reason for fighting, I never did get”
- Bob Dylan, “With God On Our Side”
Even given the monumental stupidity of war in general, World War I was particularly inexplicable.
More than 15 million lives were lost in a war that was essentially over nothing.
But any conflict of that size obviously would have enormous ramifications, both for the European continent on which it was mostly fought and for the reluctant United States.
It’s the consequences for the U.S. that are explored over six hours in the solid and sweeping The Great War, a PBS series running Monday through Wednesday, 9-11 p.m. ET (check local listings).
The series roughly coincides with the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entering the war, which it did only after three years of heated debate and fervent wishes that Europe would settle the whole bloody mess on its own.
When it finally became clear that was not happening anytime soon, the U.S. started sending doughboys over there. Some 113,000 would die in the 18 months before the war ended, a tiny fraction of total war casualties, but enough to convince the alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire that they should seek peace.
The unintended consequence of this relatively brief intervention was that America, heretofore an isolationist country with a tiny military, suddenly was catapulted into a world leadership role.
Proud as Britain was of its empire, it was clear the U.S. was rising while other lands fell.
This new preeminence was something America had trouble grasping, which meant it spawned a new round of angry debate back home. The U.S. Senate ultimately refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war and which President Woodrow Wilson saw as the path toward preventing future wars.
After this inauspicious start, the first U.S. term as a world leader didn’t work out so well, and The Great War traces many of the seeds of that failure – not all under America’s control.
You’d like to think they were rookie mistakes, except that over the next hundred years we repeated a good number of them.
The Great War focuses, however, on a different set of mixed results: America’s response to the socio-political changes set in motion by World War I.
Women developed a louder voice, particularly through the peace movement. Many African-Americans who fought got a taste of a more equitable world and started to ask why it wasn’t possible back home.
When America finally did enter the war, the decision sparked a wave of heavily hyped “patriotism” that encouraged the country to define certain people and beliefs as “true American” and vilify everyone and everything else.People who opposed the war were arrested. People of German heritage were persecuted.
Blacks became fair game for savage attacks largely because in many areas they weren’t considered full Americans in the first place. Wilson, whose previous actions had included resegregating U.S. government offices, wasn’t much help there.
In many ways, then, The Great War suggests, this European bloodbath over little more than rulers’ egos caused chaotic upheaval in America.
Our newly discovered military power, the decimation of other powerful nations, and the internal changes the war set in motion or fueled inside America all helped put us on the path we’re still trying to navigate a hundred years later.
One of the few good things that could emerge from the slaughterhouse of World War I would be if we learned some of its costly lessons. By sorting out the insanity and its multiple consequences, The Great War could teach us some of them.