How World War I Shaped America

Reuters
November 10, 2018 Topic: History Region: Americas Blog Brand: The Skeptics Tags: World War IMilitaryHistoryArmistice DayAmerica

How World War I Shaped America

There is a long history behind America's decision to start and end one of the country's greatest wars.

As it turned out, the twentieth century didn’t die in its eighteenth year. It lived a full life, spawning the Great Depression, Hitler, Stalin, FDR, Japanese Imperialism, the Second War, the Cold War, the West’s Cold War triumph, and America’s post–Cold War triumphalism. But looking at its first two decades and the seminal events of World War I, many questions agitate the mind. Did those European countries stumble into war as sleepwalkers, or was that conflagration ordained by big events eating away at the foundations of a crumbling old order? Could Woodrow Wilson’s gauzy notions of compassionate peace and national self-determination have fostered a more tranquil world, forestalling the rise of German Nazism and the entrenchment of Russian Bolshevism? Did the Allies’ harsh treatment of Germany at Versailles, shadowing Marshal Foch’s brutal treatment at Compiegne, help render inevitable World War II? Or does history just go its own way irrespective of the puny actions of small men in large chairs?

All such questions are worthy of inquiry and discourse. But on this particular hundredth-year observance, the central questions are best focused on those events outside Compiegne. And there’s merit in pondering the idea that the actions of pitiless victors often beget pitiless reactions from the vanquished when the tables are turned. When Hitler conquered France just twenty-two years after the Armistice of Compiegne, he imposed on the vanquished the humiliation of having to sign the peace document in that same railcar on that same siding in that same forest. By then Matthias Erzberger was dead, murdered by two right-wing nationalists who considered the dutiful public servant, as he had feared, a traitor to his people.

Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the author of books on American history, most recently President McKinley: Architect of the American Century.

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