December 31, 1912

(What does the future hold? Let's turn back the clock to the end of a year over a century ago.)  

By Daniel Greenfield  December 31, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

(Posting this article has become an annual tradition ever since the grim end of 2012. It's a reminder that the end of each year ushers in unknowns, but also opportunities for heroism. History does not stand still, and we should never assume that we know how it will come out.)  

The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.

While the year makes its first pass around the world, even if it doesn't feel like there is much to celebrate, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.

December 31, 1912.

The crowds are large, the men wear hats, and the word 'gay' means happy. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year has fallen on a Sunday. 

There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today's urban metropolis.

The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York's Finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.

On Ellis Island, Castro, a bitter enemy of the United States, and the former president of Venezuela, had been arrested for trying to sneak into the country while the customs officers had their guard down. Gazing at the Statue of Liberty, Castro denied that he was a revolutionary and bitterly urged the American masses to rise up and tear down the statue in the name of freedom.

Times Square has far fewer billboards and no videos, but it does have the giant Horn and Hardart Automat which opened just that year, where food comes from banks of vending machines giving celebrating crowds a view of the amazing world of tomorrow for the world of 1912 is after all like our own. We can open a door into the past, but we cannot escape the present.

The Presidential election of 1912 ended in disaster. Both Taft and Roosevelt lost and Woodrow Wilson won. In the White House, President Taft met with cabinet members and diplomats for a final reception.

Woodrow Wilson, who would lead America into a bloody and senseless war, subvert its Constitution, and begin the process of making global government and statism into the national religion of his party, was optimistic about the new year. "Thirteen is my lucky number," he said. "It is curious how the number 13 has figured in my life and never with bad fortune." 

In Indianapolis, the train carrying union leaders guilty of the dynamite plot was making its secret way to Federal prison even while the lawyers of the dynamiters vowed to appeal.

The passing year, a century past, had its distinct echoes in our own time. There had been, what the men of the time, thought of as wars, yet they could not even conceive of the wars shortly to come. There were the usual dry news items about the collapse of the government in Spain, a war and an economic crisis in distant parts of the world that did not concern them. The Federal Reserve Act would be signed at the end of 1913, partly in response to the economic crisis. 

Socialism was on the march with the Socialist Party having doubled its votes in the national election.  All three major candidates, Wilson, Roosevelt and Taft, had warned that the country was drifting toward Socialism and that they were the only ones who could stop it. 

"Unless Socialism is checked," Professor Albert Bushnell Hart warned, "within sixteen years there will be a Socialist President of the United States." 

Hart was off by four years. Hoover won in 1928. FDR won in 1932. 

At New York City's May Day rally, the American flag was torn down and replaced with the red flag, to cries of, "Take down that dirty rag" and "We don't recognize that flag."

The site of the rally was Union Square, one of the locations where Black Lives Matter hangs out, taking over from Occupy Wall Street and generations of radicals.

There was tension on the Mexican border and alarm over Socialist successes in German elections. An obscure fellow with the silly name of Lenin had carved out a group with the even sillier name of the Bolsheviks. China became a Republic. New Mexico became a state, the African National Congress was founded and the Titanic sank.  

There was bloody fighting in Benghazi where 20,000 Italian troops faced off against 20,000 Arabs and 8,000 Turks. The Italians had modern warships and armored vehicles, while the Muslim forces were supplied by voluntary donations and fighters crossing from Egypt and across North Africa to join in attacking the infidels.

The Italian-Turkish war has since been forgotten, except by the Italians, the Libyans and the Turks, but it featured the first strategic use of airships, ushering in a century of European aerial warfare. 

There was a good deal going on while the horns were blown and men in heavy coats and wet hats made their way through the festivities.

World War I was two years away, but the Balkan War had already fired the first shots. The rest was just a matter of bringing the non-phosphorus matches closer to the kindling. The Anti-Saloon League was gathering strength for a nationwide effort that would hijack the political system and divide it into dry and wet, and, among other things, ram through the personal income tax.

Change was coming, and as in 1912, the country was no longer hopeful, it was wary.

The century, for all its expected glamor, had been a difficult one. The future, political and economic, was unknown. Few knew exactly what was to come, but equally few were especially optimistic even when the champagne was flowing.

If we were to stop a reveler staggering out of a hotel, stand in his path and tell him that war was five years away and a great depression would come in on its tail, that liquor would be banned, crime would proliferate and a Socialist president would rule the United States for three terms, while wielding near absolute power, he might have decided to make his way to the recently constructed Manhattan Bridge for a swan dive into the river.

And yet we know that though all this is true, there is a deeper truth. For all those setbacks, the United States survived, and many of us look nostalgically toward a time that was every bit as uncertain and nerve-wracking as our own.

December 31, 1912 was a door that opened onto many things.

Our December 31 is likewise a door, and if a man in shiny clothes from the year 2120 were to stop us on the street and spill out everything he knew about the next century, it is likely that there would be as much greatness as tragedy in that tale.

As the year sweeps across the earth, let us remember that history is more than the worst of its events, that all times bear the burden of their uncertainties, but also carry within them the seeds of greatness. Looking back on this time, it may be that it is not the defeats that we will recall, but how they readied us for the fight ahead.

 

America has not fallen, no more than it did when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1912. Though it may not seem likely now, there are many great things ahead, and though the challenges at times seem insurmountable and the defeats many, another year and another century await us.

Daniel Greenfield is a columnist, an investigative journalist and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Blast From the Past, April 6, 2017: Why we entered World War I 100 years ago today

By Christopher Kelly 4/6/17 

Editor's  Notes:  For some reason this has been hit recently, which appeared here in P&D, and with interesting comments, so be sure to go to the original post.    Considering current events, I thought it worthwhile to re-post it.  RK

One hundred years ago this month, Woodrow Wilson ended America's longstanding policy of isolation and led us into World War I on the Allied side. Over two and a half million Americans were shipped "over there" to Europe and served in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). By war's end, more than 100,000 Americans would join the ranks of what British Prime Minister Lloyd George termed, without a trace of irony, "the glorious dead."

Why did Wilson make his fateful decision to enter the "War to end all wars?" Two of the principle reasons behind Wilson's decision were the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman Telegram.  Unrestricted submarine warfare........ the RMS Lusitania, which was destined to be sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland in 1915, killing around 1,200 passengers, including at least 125 Americans.......To Read More.....

It's time to end the progressives' love affair with the Wilson Doctrine

February 14, 2022 By Andrea Widburg

One of the most incongruous things about leftists is that, even as they decry both colonialism and "neo-colonialism," it is they who believe that it's America's responsibility to meddle in every upset around the world — provided, of course, that doing so provides no benefit to America.  The latest to articulate this worldview, albeit in the most ignorant way, is Bill Kristol, an erstwhile "conservative," who has now emerged as a full-blooded progressive.  George Washington, the first and, arguably, greatest American president, famously warned in his Farewell Address against getting involved in Europe's politics and disputes:.......To Read More.....

My Take - Good article I have only one objection.  Woodrow Wilson was an Anglophile, and while he publicly took a position he wanted to keep America out of the war, he was in fact working behind the scenes to push America into the war.  The Lusitania and Mexico/Germany scenarios were excuses, just that excuses.  They knew there was no way Germany could help Mexico and the Lusitania was a British ship illegally carrying contraband to support England, and in no way justified war just because there were Americans on board.  He should have beat up on the Brits who knew this ship was a legitimate target because of it's cargo, not used it as an excuse to help push America into WWI, the greatest disaster of human history as it created the framework for everything that's happened since. 

Never Let Anyone Tell You Something is Too Big to Change

By Rich Kozlovich

I stumbled across this yesterday, and of course my first thought was: "How quickly, and how meaningfully, things can change". This picture was taken in 1910.

 

Here was the caption, and I linked the characters for your perusal.  Some of these characters were, to be polite, unique!

 

On hand to attend the funeral of King Edward VII in 1910 were nine reigning kings. Thankfully, someone realized this was a great photo op and gathered the monarchs together for an historic photograph…most likely, the only photograph in existence that shows nine kings all together. They are, from left to right, starting in the back row: King Haakon VII of Norway, Tsar Ferdinand of the Bulgarians, King Manuel II of Portugal and the Algarve, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Prussian, King George I of the Hellenes, and King Albert I of the Belgians. In the front row, from left to right, are King Alfonso XII of Spain, (Note: King Alfonso XII was dead at this time, so, this must have been King Alfonso XIII, and his pictures testify to that, so that's the person I linked.  RK),  King George V of the United Kingdom, and King Frederick VIII of Denmark.  

 

Little did anyone realize how things would change over the next eight years.  Some would be dead, some wouldn't be kings any longer, some would be lesser kings, but nothing would be the same after WWI.  

 

I am surprised Nicholas II Czar of Russia isn't here, since he and King George were cousins, and were very close.  They also looked very much alike.   They were also both cousins to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who was the first grandchild of Queen Victoria.  

 

All three were grandchildren of Queen Victoria, who had 9 children, 42 grandchildren, (20 grandsons and 22 granddaughters) and as far as I can tell, all those who survived married into royal houses at some level.  She also had 87 great-grandchildren, and I have no idea who they married.  

 

Here's the list, peruse it as you wish, as you can see, it gets complicated and I'm not that interested to work it out.  Especially since I have little regard for royalty, or elitists in any form or discipline for that matter.  As this picture makes clear.  Time and circumstance befall us all!   As a result, no one is really all that "special"!

 

People aren't really special because of their positions.  I treat the janitor like a CEO and a CEO like a janitor.  I treat everyone with a certain amount of dignity and respect, that's what I expect in return, simply because that's what everyone deserves.  At least until people prove themselves unworthy of respect.  What makes people special is what they accomplish and how they accomplish it.

 

King George could have saved the Czar and his family from being murdered by the communists if he had permitted his cousins exile in England, but he refused.  He was more concerned about the German background they all shared being publicly touted.  He decided that might prove embarrassing during the war, so he decided maintaining the family business of monarchy was more important than the life of his Russian family, who were his allies during the war.  

 

Did he know they would be killed?  No, but he had to know by the way the communists were treating them the danger of that was very real, and certainly real enough to not take chances with their lives.   This decision wasn't made out of ignorance, it was made out of selfish self interest, which the other members of the Russian nobility who survived accused him of for the rest of their lives.

 

There's a bigger story there, and it's worth looking up, because it helps explain a lot of why England's royal family does the things it does. It's all about the family business. Nothing else matters to them. 

'They shall not grow old' a box office blowout - for good reason

December 28, 2018 By Monica Showalter

Was there ever a more consequential, war than World War I? As a result of the bickering petty politics of Europe's inbred monarchs, we got communism and the Soviet empire from it, for one. We got 37 million deaths, millions and millions of very bright people, a death toll so high it skewed the demographics of nations such as France.

We got grotesque forms of warfare - trench warfare, chemical warfare, and howitzers, shell shock, tanks, and huge civilian death tolls. We also got the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire - Europe's first truly internationalist empire of tolerance and melting pots - to be replaced by the crummy and oppressive European Union.

We got the creation of the morally relativistic cultural Eurotrashiness of Europe in that war's wake, too - dada art, stupid other kinds of modern art, and a Europe that refuses to fight or stand up for itself no matter what may come down the pike. The death toll allows us to recognize the rationale with sympathy. And as an awful coda, the war was so badly resolved it led to a second, and even bigger world war. So this is a war that's still very much with us in effects, one hundred years after the armistice was signed............. To Read More......

My Take - I hope this comes to Cleveland as I really would like to see it.  However, this is a good time to say this:  This really was Wilson's war.  America had no dog in that fight, and had no reason for wasting $22,625,253,000 dollars (*$338, 021, 279, 820.00 today) and 116,516 young American lives.  Out of the 4,355,000 Americans to participate in the war, roughly seven percent of them (304,850) were either killed, injured or captured.  

Saving Europe from Europeans in WWI wasn't worth one American dollar and certainly not one American life.  As far as I'm concerned, saving Europeans from non-Europeans is worth even less. 

It's time they stood up on their own hind legs.  But since Europeans no longer believe in anything, it appears they will now tolerate everything, at least at the leadership level.  But Europe, just like France, is fast becoming ungovernable. Let them feed on their own now and leave us out of it.

* One dollar in 1919 was worth 14.94 today. 

 

Remembering Harry Patch

Sam Dickson, American Renaissance, October 2009

Harry Patch (Credit Image: Jim Ross / Wikipedia)

It is appropriate for us to mark the death on July 25th of Harry Patch. Aged 111, Harry Patch was the last surviving British soldier from our race’s First Peloponnesian War of the last century, that is to say, the First World War. These two fratricidal wars — like the original ones among the Greeks of Antiquity — may have accomplished the complete and possibly fatal wreck of our race and civilization.

Patch survived horrific service in the trenches of Flanders as a machine gunner and suffered severe wounds. For most of his life he was reticent about the war and his service in it, but after his 100th birthday Patch began speaking out against the war and the hatreds it engendered.

He said he was a reluctant soldier, noting that when he first came face to face with a German soldier, he could not help thinking of the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” He deliberately shot the German in the shoulder, making him drop his rifle, but the German kept running towards him. He then shot the man twice in the leg. “I had about five seconds to make the decision,” he said. “I brought him down, but I didn’t kill him.”

In July 2007, he was present at the 90th-anniversary commemoration of the beginning of the Battle of Passchendaele, in which he fought. He called the war a “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,” and said that “war isn’t worth one life.”.............To Read More......

My Take - How the author turned this into a racial issue is strange, but I posted it because this former soldier was right "....the war a “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,” and said that “war isn’t worth one life", and because that generation of soldiers who suffered so horribly at the hands of incompetant leaders are gone now.  Soon the WWII vets will be gone, and the insanity that's destroying civilization touched off by WWI is reaching it's climax.  

As an after thought it occured to me in my lifetime the last Civil War veteran, Albert Woolson, that last confirmed veteran of the US Civil War died on August 2, 1956..” The last living veteran of World War I (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918) was Florence Green, a British citizen who served in the Allied armed forces, and who died 4 February 2012, aged 110. [1] The last combat veteran was Claude Choules who served in the British Royal Navy (and later the Royal Australian Navy) and died 5 May 2011, aged 110. [2] The last veteran who served in the trenches was Harry Patch ( British Army ) who died on 25 July 2009, aged 111.  And now the WWII vets are in their 90's. 

Another reason I posted this is because I'm quite emotional about these wars and the terrible suffering these men endured, during the war and after "peace" was attained.....at such a terrible price.

I wish more people read the Guns of August. 

One Century Later

On the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day.

Geoffrey Norman November 11, 2018

The conflict that ended one hundred years ago — on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” – was at first called, “The Great War.”

Winston Churchill had, as usual, the right and necessary words: 

The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought.… Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.

There were so many casualties that the mind could not really apprehend them. They became abstractions, like the distance, measured in light years, to the nearest galaxy. Brought down to the particular, to specific battles, or in the case of the Somme, to a single day, the numbers gain what would today be called “granularity.” On July 1st, 1916, the British lost almost 20,000 killed and another 80,000 wounded. As a people, they never got over it

 

In the months before the “big push” on the Somme, the French had been engaged at Verdun. The general in command of the Germans who were attacking them had made his objective clear. It was to “bleed the French army white.” He almost succeeded.

Almost........... To Read More........

 

November 11, 1918: The End of the Unnecessary War

By Walt Johanson  November 11, 2018

One hundred years ago today, the war to end wars ended.

It was not the end of war, despite the wishful thinking of H.G. Wells, and it was unnecessary, due to an accident of history: the early death of the second Kaiser of Imperial Germany, Frederick III.

The "Second Reich" -- the first being that established by Charlemagne and destroyed by Napoleon a thousand years later -- was established by Bismarck. In its brief existence from January 1871 to November 1918, it had three emperors, all of whom reigned in the Dreikaiserjahr, AD 1888.

The first kaiser, William I, died in March of that year, and the third, William II, assumed the title in June. Between March and June, the reigning monarch was Frederick III.

The woeful history of the twentieth century would have turned out far, far differently if Frederick had lived as long as his father, William I (91 years), and his son, William II (82). Instead, at age 57, Frederick was a dying man when he assumed the throne, a victim of throat cancer, probably on account of his love of cigars, and to the fact that his illness was not properly diagnosed and treated.

His reign was so brief that few know that he had ever occupied the throne..................Read more

The Tragedy of America's Entry into World War I

John L. Chapman

This week some 80 world dignitaries including Presidents Putin, Trump, and Chancellor Merkel are gathering in France to mark the culmination of year-long remembrances of the centenary of the end of “the Great War” on November 11, 1918 – later labeled and known to every American high school history student as World War I. While at least 17 million people, including more than 116,000 Americans, died in this war — and millions more were wounded, gassed, or maimed — it’s a conflict widely misunderstood today. Indeed, because of World War II’s size and scope, cultural influence, and greater media coverage and capture, the First World War is often called “the forgotten war.”

Yet it was a cataclysmic event in its own right that both foreshadowed more intense and violent warfare in the 20^th century, and fueled the growth of gargantuan central government in the United States. Most crucially, however, it was a war that should never have been fought — its causal origins and assignment of guilt for same are still a hot topic of debate a century later, a fact that alone attests to its superfluity — and one that, in any case, the United States should never have entered. These are disturbing theses about the war that will not be remembered by any of the global elites in Paris this weekend, but given the lessons for today, Americans should learn about them so as to demand of their Beltway solons wiser policy choices in the future. What follows is a short summary of America’s involvement in the war and lessons for today.

Origins of the Conflict in 1914 ............... Read More

World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals

Murray N. Rothbard

I. Introduction

In contrast to older historians who regarded World War I as the destruction of progressive reform, I am convinced that the war came to the United States as the "fulfillment," the culmination, the veritable apotheosis of progressivism in American life.[1] I regard progressivism as basically a movement on behalf of Big Government in all walks of the economy and society, in a fusion or coalition between various groups of big businessmen, led by the House of Morgan, and rising groups of technocratic and statist intellectuals. In this fusion, the values and interests of both groups would be pursued through government.

Big business would be able to use the government to cartelize the economy, restrict competition, and regulate production and prices, and also to be able to wield a militaristic and imperialist foreign policy to force open markets abroad and apply the sword of the State to protect foreign investments. Intellectuals would be able to use the government to restrict entry into their professions and to assume jobs in Big Government to apologize for, and to help plan and staff, government operations. Both groups also believed that, in this fusion, the Big State could be used to harmonize and interpret the "national interest" and thereby provide a "middle way" between the extremes of "dog-eat-dog" laissez faire and the bitter conflicts of proletarian Marxism.

Also animating both groups of progressives was a postmillennial pietist Protestantism that had conquered "Yankee" areas of northern Protestantism by the 1830s and had impelled the pietists to use local, state, and finally federal governments to stamp out "sin," to make America and eventually the world holy, and thereby to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. The victory of the Bryanite forces at the Democratic national convention of 1896 destroyed the Democratic Party as the vehicle of "liturgical" Roman Catholics and German Lutherans devoted to personal liberty and laissez faire and created the roughly homogenized and relatively non-ideological party system we have today. After the turn of the century, this development created an ideological and power vacuum for the expanding number of progressive technocrats and administrators to fill. In that way, the locus of government shifted from the legislature, at least partially subject to democratic check, to the oligarchic and technocratic executive branch...........To Read More.....

America’s Biggest Battle, 100 Years On

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive of 1918 was the largest battle ever fought by Americans.

By Dan McLaughlin

One hundred years ago this morning, at 5:30 a.m. Central European Time, the 1.2 million–man American Expeditionary Force launched all of its available combat strength into the largest and arguably the bloodiest battle in American history: the six-week Meuse-Argonne offensive that continued through the armistice at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The horrific and protracted battle brought a decisive end to the first war in which Americans fought on European soil. Though it was filled with then-famous incidents and notable Americans, the ordeal of the Meuse-Argonne is far less remembered today than Gettysburg, Normandy, Yorktown, Okinawa, or New Orleans. We should keep that memory alive, as it tells us a lot about the America of 1918 and the century that followed................

With the Americans added to the defensive lines from the late spring on, and the arrival of the “Spanish flu” epidemic, the Germans simply ran out of men to press the attack. Like the British and the French, they no longer had any reserves of men left to draw on except teenagers waiting to be old enough to fight. Yet ship after ship, Americans kept arriving...............

The resulting casualties, while dwarfed by those endured by the European armies and spread over the 1.2 million men ultimately engaged in the fight, were nonetheless shocking: Over 26,000 killed and 95,000 wounded, about triple the number of Americans killed at Gettysburg even though Americans made up both sides of that battle. And yet, in the end, it was the very fact that the Americans were so willing to spend their young men so cheaply in 1918 that demoralized the Germans the most; nobody else had enough young men left to spend to act that way in 1918, and the Europeans knew it. More than any advances of territory, more than any skill in fighting, the mere fact of the Americans on the field with no end of their arrivals in sight decided the war............To Read More....