“I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made immediately,” said President Woodrow Wilson on April 2, 1917.
Wilson’s somber tone was merited because, having narrowly won reelection in 1916 on a campaign that prominently noted “He Kept Us Out of War,” he was asking Congress to declare war on Germany. He justified this extraordinary step by noting that the Imperial Germany Government, reversing its previous policies, was now carrying out unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Moreover, the US had learned that Germany was trying to make an alliance with Mexico if the US entered the war (with the promise that Mexico could reclaim territory it had lost to the US after the Mexican-American War in the late 1840s).
Wilson—who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 17-cent stamp issued in late 1925, almost two years after he died – went on to describe the significant sacrifices and changes that the war would require, noting, “while we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are….Our object…is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world.” Later he added: “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”
Two days later, the Senate voted to declare water; the House followed two days after that. And about 20 months later, in November 1918, the war ended.
By the time it had ended, it had been the most destructive war in history. There had been about 10 million military deaths from all causes, plus 20 million more crippled or severely wounded. In addition, millions of civilians had died from shells, bombs, disease, hunger, and accidents. Additionally, as Neil Heyman wrote: “Not physically hurt but scarred nonetheless were 5 million widowed women, 9 million orphaned children, and 10 million individuals torn from their homes to become refugees.”
And those figures don’t take into account the people who died in the Russian Civil War which grew out of the war. Nor does it account for the ways that the war effort likely exacerbated the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people. Moreover, the peace treaties that officially ended the war failed to secure the high-minded ideals that Wilson expressed in his declaration and tried to make the basis of the discussions that produced those treaties.
Despite its toll and unsettled ending, the war “remains the least-understood and most-ignored major event in our history,” wrote historian Michael Neiberg in 2014, 100 years after the war began. The war’s relatively obscurity, he contended, “doesn’t fully explain our amnesia about it, nor does its awkward occurrence between two larger conflicts, the Civil War and World War II.” Rather, he argued, we have failed to really grapple with the war’s causes and meaning.
“Is there any war that has been taught in such boring fashion?” he asked. “Consider the focus on the trading rights of neutral nations, on President Woodrow Wilson’s background, or American loans to the Allies. Then compare those dry narratives of World War I to the Civil War’s drama of slavery and emancipation. Or to World War II’s narrative of the Nazi threat of global conquest, America’s rise to world power, and the start of the Cold War. Or even to Vietnam’s narrative of overreach, hubris, social discord, protest, and countercultures.”
The oversight, he contended, is particularly striking given “World War I’s out-of-control militarism” as well as “the tragic incompetence, bloody follies, and, yes, the immeasurable courage, heroism, and sacrifice” that all marked the war effort. Moreover, he contended, the war is worth studying and understanding because “there are some compelling similarities” between the world today and the world in 1914, particularly the ways that the end of the Cold War era has been giving way to an era “of declining and rising great powers, complicated minor allies who could well drag the great powers into a war not in their interests, and moments of terrorism that may or may not have state sponsors.”
Consequently, while Neiberg, like most historians, has a “love-hate relationship with major anniversaries of historic events,” he also believes that its centennial could “provide a literal once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring new attention to a critical historical moment.”
In particular, he lists three questions worth asking about World War I. First, when did the war start? Conventional history is that it started in 1914, when Germany, France and England became involved. But, he noted, many “regional” conflicts in the preceding two decades had set the stage for the later battles.
Second, when did the war end? The easy answer, of course, is the armistice that took hold in November 1918. But that ignores a series of violent disputes – including the Russian civil war as well as one between Poland and the Soviet Union and another between Greece and Turkey – that occurred after November 1918 but also had their roots in the larger conflicts generally referred to as World War I.
Third, why did the war start? Some argue it was due to excessive nationalism; some believe it was due to seismic shifts in the geopolitical balance of power in Europe; and some conclude that “the war resulted from a perfect storm of political and military incompetence, misjudgment, and bad luck.”
These are not just academic questions. Rather, as Nieberg noted in a 2018 piece, answering them will help “underscore the need for constant reevaluation of assumptions through critical thinking. In our time, rapid change in the international and domestic order might mean that crises do not conform to the intellectual preconceptions of the strategists. Without critical thinking, especially about the so-called lessons of history, leaders may not be supple enough to adjust their thinking in time to avert war.”
And, he warned, “as in 1914, once begun, wars often continue until nations and empires lie in ruins without anyone able to explain why.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.