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The PBS American Experience series has produced a 3-part, 6-hour documentary of America's involvement in World War I. It rivals the famed Ken Anderson "Civil War" series, and like that series, it is both entertaining and disturbing, but a much less noble history lesson.
Whereas the Civil War documentary championed the brilliant and clear-headed Abraham Lincoln, "The Great War" also tells the story of the perhaps equally brilliant Woodrow Wilson, but ultimately a self-delusional and self-destructive President who created the seeds of his own destruction, greatly through partisan politics at the end of his Presidency and by alienating his own political base. Most Americans forget that the U.S. never joined the League of Nations, which perhaps could have stopped the rise of Mussolini and Hitler with American support. What is less known, is that Wilson refused a compromise out of partisan hatred that would have allowed for American participation in the League of Nations, the ancestor of the United Nations and largely Wilson's creation.
So "The Great War" is a great cautionary and even frightening history with great bearing on our own time, given that we once again are led by a President who believes in the overwhelming superiority of his own intelligence and wisdom.
Ironically, Wilson's racism and suppression of civil rights, not only of African Americans but also of women, and of freedom of the press, has led to a re-thinking of Wilson's legacy at Princeton University, whose greatness can be traced to Wilson's inspired reign as the university's president (Wilson changed the university's name from College of New Jersey to Princeton and founded its graduate school).
"The Great War" likely will be re-broadcast this weekend, or otherwise in coming weeks and months on most PBS stations.
Not mentioned in the documentary is one theory that the massive loans made to France and Britain by American financial interests motivated their desire for American entry into the war when it appeared, given the eminent collapse of Russia on the eastern front, that German forces might overwhelm Britain and France and result in a default on these loans. See business considerations here:
Ken Burns produced both series. The Civil War was his first, and this was his latest, but he has another on the Viet Nam war coming later this year.
I just finished watching the final episode, and I agree pretty much with your thoughts. Burns always finds some underlying narrative that ties his presentations together; World War I is indeed a much less noble lesson in history, but as history, it's as important to American history as the Civil War.
Our involvement in WWI turned the course of world history toward becoming the American Century. Until then, the United States was largely disengaged in world affairs except for those that had some direct affect on us, and our people wanted it that way. Even though we had become an industrial giant, we were still a debtor nation going into the war, but in the course of only 2 years, we emerged as the most powerful nation on earth, a position that remained for the rest of the 20th century.
Our triumph was not just a military victory. It was even more a moral victory, a righteous triumph, and it flexed our national will in ways that had never happened before, and our muscles as well.
When the war broke out in 1914, the United States had a smaller army than Serbia. By 1917, after declaring war on the Germans, we had over 2 million men in arms, raised from a nation that had never had a large standing army as a national priority.
And Woodrow Wilson made it happen. Despite his mandate to keep us out of the war he didn't want to get us into, the mandate that won him his second term. Once Wilson realized the United States must enter the war, he devised our entry to be under no terms but ours, and he defined those terms with a wisdom that none of the great powers of Europe were ever able to envision.
Your comparison between him and Lincoln were pretty good and quite valid, but I think both were very clear-headed and had equally strong reasons that were carefully though out in their plans, agendas, and the programs they both initiated to ensure their ultimate victories.
I think that you were also generally correct about their personalities, too, but the biggest difference between them to me was that Lincoln changed and changed again during the course of his war, always going toward the principles of mercy, brotherhood, and concern for the humanity he controlled, but Wilson was always abstract and much less able to see things down close to the ground like the common man saw them.
I disagree with one thing; I believe that Lincoln also suffered irreparable physical and physical damage from the stresses he had to endure, just like Wilson. If he had not been killed so soon after Lincoln's war ended, I am very sure he would not have lived long anyway. For sure, Wilson did bring on his own death.
It's definitely worth watching. Burns always does an excellent job showing just how complicated things are in a very clear and lucid way, and he always has the ability to engage a viewer with the people on the ground just as much as the loftier leaders who are more remote and may be harder to understand.
It sure had some comparisons to this very moment 100 years later. World War I changed the world forever, and changed America just as much as any other nation. And those changes were permanent. They all still exist today.
Knowing where we came from and how we got here is always important. It's especially important when such a big event as World War I had such murky beginnings and ended with the seeds that once planted, led to an even bloodier war so soon after.
And it was plenty bloody. One million men died in the course of one very long battle.
I don't believe the Germans would have ever won if we had not entered. By the time we got into the fight, the French had lost 1 million men, the British over 740,000 and the German-Austrians over 800,000. Those numbers don't count their allies' losses or all the civilians who died. The stalemate of the Western Front was simply too strongly entrenched that I think all sides would have become completely exhausted if we had not arrived and tipped the scales in our, and our allies, favor.
I think that staying out simply became impossible for the United States of a century ago. At that time, 1 of every 3 of us was a recent immigrant or a child of one, and none of the groups were really assimilating and unifying very well.
One of the most surprising things I learned was the Army had 42 different languages to take into account when training the troops. That America is not the one that exists today.
Another big surprise was the Army was all essentially National Guard. Guard units were combined and re-combined into battalions at the front.
My grandfather was in it, but he never went overseas. Burns got one minor thing wrong in the narration; the Europeans used millions of horses in the war, but the United States used more mules than horses.
My grandfather was an experienced mule driver, and those guys were a critical shortage. He became a Stablemaster, in charge of a platoon of enlisted men and civilians who selected the mules that went overseas, shoed them, trained them, and put them into good health. In New Orleans, at a facility that was constructed just for the purpose. He never saw a moment of combat.
But his brother-in-law and best friend, my grand uncle, did. He was in the Lost Battalion, one of two message runners who managed to get out of the German surround to tell the high command where they were trapped. 18 other men had died trying, and he was one of the last 2 who volunteered to try again.
Both lived. They both got a Silver Star, but my uncle lost his somewhere before I was born.
My uncle told me about it once, when he was very old, and said he volunteered because he thought his chances were 50/50 anyway, so he figured running like hell for help was as good a way to die as any other. He was shot at so much at close range he was deaf as a post in his right ear for the rest of his life.
He kept his helmet; I counted 41 holes in it. He used it as a target on a stick to see if a German machine gun nest was in front of him or not in the thick woods. A couple of them were.
All he carried was an empty pistol and his trench knife. And a little shoulder packet full of maps and papers. He swore he would die before he gave that up. The show really brought home to me what he was up against.
I saw the last segment that aired this evening, very interesting. There was information shared about the stroke he suffered from in the last year of his presidency. He kept quiet about it to the American people, allowing his wife to basically lead. The historian who spoke about it considered it a great conspiracy.
Wilson invaded Mexico 4 times without permission and invaded half a dozen Latin American countries.
He was a staunch segregationist and allowed suffragists to be pummeled outside his car while he pretended to not notice. He only came around on women's suffrage when the majority of the nation was for it.
He made positive comments (that he denied AFTER it started to cost him politically) about the racist Birth of a Nation movie and is even quoted in support of the KKK within the movie itself.
He created the Federal Reserve. As the OP points out he destroyed his own League of Nation's chances by playing hyper-partisan politics. He created income taxes.
The PBS American Experience series has produced a 3-part, 6-hour documentary of America's involvement in World War I. It rivals the famed Ken Anderson "Civil War" series, and like that series, it is both entertaining and disturbing, but a much less noble history lesson.
Whereas the Civil War documentary championed the brilliant and clear-headed Abraham Lincoln, "The Great War" also tells the story of the perhaps equally brilliant Woodrow Wilson, but ultimately a self-delusional and self-destructive President who created the seeds of his own destruction, greatly through partisan politics at the end of his Presidency and by alienating his own political base. Most Americans forget that the U.S. never joined the League of Nations, which perhaps could have stopped the rise of Mussolini and Hitler with American support. What is less known, is that Wilson refused a compromise out of partisan hatred that would have allowed for American participation in the League of Nations, the ancestor of the United Nations and largely Wilson's creation.
So "The Great War" is a great cautionary and even frightening history with great bearing on our own time, given that we once again are led by a President who believes in the overwhelming superiority of his own intelligence and wisdom.
Ironically, Wilson's racism and suppression of civil rights, not only of African Americans but also of women, and of freedom of the press, has led to a re-thinking of Wilson's legacy at Princeton University, whose greatness can be traced to Wilson's inspired reign as the university's president (Wilson changed the university's name from College of New Jersey to Princeton and founded its graduate school).
"The Great War" likely will be re-broadcast this weekend, or otherwise in coming weeks and months on most PBS stations.
Not mentioned in the documentary is one theory that the massive loans made to France and Britain by American financial interests motivated their desire for American entry into the war when it appeared, given the eminent collapse of Russia on the eastern front, that German forces might overwhelm Britain and France and result in a default on these loans. See business considerations here:
Ken Burns produced both series. The Civil War was his first, and this was his latest, but he has another on the Viet Nam war coming later this year.
I just finished watching the final episode, and I agree pretty much with your thoughts. Burns always finds some underlying narrative that ties his presentations together; World War I is indeed a much less noble lesson in history, but as history, it's as important to American history as the Civil War.
Our involvement in WWI turned the course of world history toward becoming the American Century. Until then, the United States was largely disengaged in world affairs except for those that had some direct affect on us, and our people wanted it that way. Even though we had become an industrial giant, we were still a debtor nation going into the war, but in the course of only 2 years, we emerged as the most powerful nation on earth, a position that remained for the rest of the 20th century.
Our triumph was not just a military victory. It was even more a moral victory, a righteous triumph, and it flexed our national will in ways that had never happened before, and our muscles as well.
When the war broke out in 1914, the United States had a smaller army than Serbia. By 1917, after declaring war on the Germans, we had over 2 million men in arms, raised from a nation that had never had a large standing army as a national priority.
And Woodrow Wilson made it happen. Despite his mandate to keep us out of the war he didn't want to get us into, the mandate that won him his second term. Once Wilson realized the United States must enter the war, he devised our entry to be under no terms but ours, and he defined those terms with a wisdom that none of the great powers of Europe were ever able to envision.
Your comparison between him and Lincoln were pretty good and quite valid, but I think both were very clear-headed and had equally strong reasons that were carefully though out in their plans, agendas, and the programs they both initiated to ensure their ultimate victories.
I think that you were also generally correct about their personalities, too, but the biggest difference between them to me was that Lincoln changed and changed again during the course of his war, always going toward the principles of mercy, brotherhood, and concern for the humanity he controlled, but Wilson was always abstract and much less able to see things down close to the ground like the common man saw them.
I disagree with one thing; I believe that Lincoln also suffered irreparable physical and physical damage from the stresses he had to endure, just like Wilson. If he had not been killed so soon after Lincoln's war ended, I am very sure he would not have lived long anyway. For sure, Wilson did bring on his own death.
It's definitely worth watching. Burns always does an excellent job showing just how complicated things are in a very clear and lucid way, and he always has the ability to engage a viewer with the people on the ground just as much as the loftier leaders who are more remote and may be harder to understand.
It sure had some comparisons to this very moment 100 years later. World War I changed the world forever, and changed America just as much as any other nation. And those changes were permanent. They all still exist today.
Knowing where we came from and how we got here is always important. It's especially important when such a big event as World War I had such murky beginnings and ended with the seeds that once planted, led to an even bloodier war so soon after.
And it was plenty bloody. One million men died in the course of one very long battle.
I don't believe the Germans would have ever won if we had not entered. By the time we got into the fight, the French had lost 1 million men, the British over 740,000 and the German-Austrians over 800,000. Those numbers don't count their allies' losses or all the civilians who died. The stalemate of the Western Front was simply too strongly entrenched that I think all sides would have become completely exhausted if we had not arrived and tipped the scales in our, and our allies, favor.
I think that staying out simply became impossible for the United States of a century ago. At that time, 1 of every 3 of us was a recent immigrant or a child of one, and none of the groups were really assimilating and unifying very well.
One of the most surprising things I learned was the Army had 42 different languages to take into account when training the troops. That America is not the one that exists today.
Another big surprise was the Army was all essentially National Guard. Guard units were combined and re-combined into battalions at the front.
My grandfather was in it, but he never went overseas. Burns got one minor thing wrong in the narration; the Europeans used millions of horses in the war, but the United States used more mules than horses.
My grandfather was an experienced mule driver, and those guys were a critical shortage. He became a Stablemaster, in charge of a platoon of enlisted men and civilians who selected the mules that went overseas, shoed them, trained them, and put them into good health. In New Orleans, at a facility that was constructed just for the purpose. He never saw a moment of combat.
But his brother-in-law and best friend, my grand uncle, did. He was in the Lost Battalion, one of two message runners who managed to get out of the German surround to tell the high command where they were trapped. 18 other men had died trying, and he was one of the last 2 who volunteered to try again.
Both lived. They both got a Silver Star, but my uncle lost his somewhere before I was born.
My uncle told me about it once, when he was very old, and said he volunteered because he thought his chances were 50/50 anyway, so he figured running like hell for help was as good a way to die as any other. He was shot at so much at close range he was deaf as a post in his right ear for the rest of his life.
He kept his helmet; I counted 41 holes in it. He used it as a target on a stick to see if a German machine gun nest was in front of him or not in the thick woods. A couple of them were.
All he carried was an empty pistol and his trench knife. And a little shoulder packet full of maps and papers. He swore he would die before he gave that up. The show really brought home to me what he was up against.
" that's Ken Burns," Burns is VERY liberal and it is reflected in his "stories".
Woodrow Wilson was the worst President in the history of the USA. He was the original neocon.
Wilson was so giddy and intellectual, that Stalin had some of the best ideas in governing the little people.
Wilson set out to destroy the individual liberties of the little people, so government could rule and make choices for the people directly, or face the noose.
Wilson was a big fan of Fascism and like Obama's cabinet when he came into office, thought communism was the perfect ruling ideology.
So the Constitution has been severely altered, from Wilsons, precedence law, over constitutional law, so politically appointed judges could authorize the government to take liberties directly from the people.
The 16th Amendment, put every American(the little people) into slavery to the government, they now had the ability to put a boot on your throat and take it, or kill you if you resisted...
The PBS American Experience series has produced a 3-part, 6-hour documentary of America's involvement in World War I. It rivals the famed Ken Anderson "Civil War" series, and like that series, it is both entertaining and disturbing, but a much less noble history lesson.
Whereas the Civil War documentary championed the brilliant and clear-headed Abraham Lincoln, "The Great War" also tells the story of the perhaps equally brilliant Woodrow Wilson, but ultimately a self-delusional and self-destructive President who created the seeds of his own destruction, greatly through partisan politics at the end of his Presidency and by alienating his own political base. Most Americans forget that the U.S. never joined the League of Nations, which perhaps could have stopped the rise of Mussolini and Hitler with American support. What is less known, is that Wilson refused a compromise out of partisan hatred that would have allowed for American participation in the League of Nations, the ancestor of the United Nations and largely Wilson's creation.
So "The Great War" is a great cautionary and even frightening history with great bearing on our own time, given that we once again are led by a President who believes in the overwhelming superiority of his own intelligence and wisdom.
Ironically, Wilson's racism and suppression of civil rights, not only of African Americans but also of women, and of freedom of the press, has led to a re-thinking of Wilson's legacy at Princeton University, whose greatness can be traced to Wilson's inspired reign as the university's president (Wilson changed the university's name from College of New Jersey to Princeton and founded its graduate school).
"The Great War" likely will be re-broadcast this weekend, or otherwise in coming weeks and months on most PBS stations.
Not mentioned in the documentary is one theory that the massive loans made to France and Britain by American financial interests motivated their desire for American entry into the war when it appeared, given the eminent collapse of Russia on the eastern front, that German forces might overwhelm Britain and France and result in a default on these loans. See business considerations here:
I was excited to see this, yet very disappointed. It was the same feeling I had when visiting the American History museum at the Smithsonian several years ago to find only a booth size are on WW1, yet a wing to MLK and the entire WW2 area revolving around the Tuskegee Airmen!
This series was ruined by over emphasizing (to the point of becoming nauseating) the impact of "race" on WW1, the sentinental event of the 20th century. Racism was endemic at that time, but very, very little impact on the factors leading to WW1 and the events that followed.
This three part series was complete garbage. I have LOVED the Ken Burns "Civl War", "WW2", "baseball", and "jazz' series.
Woodrow Wilson was the worst President in the history of the USA. He was the original neocon.
And who ran on a plattform of non-intervention. Sounds familiar.
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