1 00:00:00,008 --> 00:00:05,780 Hi. Welcome back. Make yourself comfortable.

We spent a lot of time talking about World War I as an event in world history. It is an event in world history also because the way it changed the lives of communities in all these different countries and the whole ideas of how you'd organize society. Remember in an earlier presentation, I'd talked about one of the great questions of the whole 20th century will be: How are we going to organize these modern industrial societies? The First World War is supplying answers to that question and all the societies that are engaged in it. They're turning into total states. Let's talk a little bit more about what we mean by the creation of total states. In history, war had often been devastating, but armies would pass through, they'd have their pitched battles, now the combination of wars going on year after year, often in the same location, combined with hundreds of thousands, millions of chemical explosives being set off, is creating a different feel of warfare. You pick up a little bit of that feel in a photograph like this one, taken of British soldiers marching through the ruined Belgian city of Ypres. You can also see, here, the way war artists were trying to comprehend this reality. Take a look at this painting. This is by a French artist. Explosions in the background, the earth has been all churned up. Let's take a closer look at the foreground of this painting. Those figures that you might not have made out, these were soldiers. The soldiers are dehumanized; they're made almost indistinguishable from the mud in which they're crawling. Here's one dead body lying in a shell hole here. These are men in a shell hole trying to get out.

You see these are French soldiers, they're wearing their gas masks, one of their comrades is dying over here, another one may be struggling to get out. One of the great horrors of some of the soldiers is that they'd be caught in a shell hole full of water, they couldn't climb out of it because the mud would be too slippery and they'd find themselves drowning in the water polluted by the bodies of their dead comrades. Here's another picture of British soldiers, I think this is in 1917, marching towards the front. You can see what's happened to a piece of land that had once been covered by forest. This painting, by the painter John Singer Sargent, is of soldiers whose eyes have been burned by exposure to poison gas. While they're waiting and hoping that their eyes can heal, they're wearing these blindfolds, and they're helping each other along in the rear areas, find their way to a place of safety. What does it mean by the creation of total states? It means that states are looking at industrial organizations, like the Ford Motor Company or Krupp Steel, and they're thinking that states themselves need to turn into gigantic factories, factories of war in which they can control all the necessary materials. That starts with money. The gold standard, a standardized international form of exchange, goes out the window. Each country needs to print enough money to buy what it needs. It needs to borrow that money mainly from its own businesses, its own banks. And the security for those loans? Well that's the security of their government. So the governments are getting into the business of controlling money, national money, to be sure that they have enough. They also need to control the resources they need. Look around the country.

What might you need? How about wheat? The government will take control of all the farms. It'll take control of the price that's paid for wheat, take control of bread, cotton. In other words, agriculture, production of metals, everything has to be controlled by the government to be sure that the war industries and the soldiers will get what they need. You can't just do this on the free market. Plant. What do I mean by plant? I don't mean a leafy green thing. I mean the building of industrial plant. You need to be sure you have enough factories to build shells. So, for example, gee, I need a shell casing built out of brass. Well, I have this factory over here. It's making tin cans that used to be filled with canned beans. I'm going to take over that factory and turn it from the building of tin cans into the building of artillery shell casings. And if I don't have a plant that can make artillery shell casings, I'm going to use my funds to build one. I'm going to create entirely new factories. So the government has to both convert existing factory capability and make it serve their needs, or they have to create capabilities that don't exist. And manpower. These countries find themselves, by the middle of the war, at a point they don't have enough people both to fill out all the armies and to provide all the necessary workers they're going to need in the factories and all the necessary farmers they're going to need to grow the food. They can't rely on the private sector to be sure that this is allocated right. The government has to really decide how every adult labor-capable man and woman will best serve their country. They'll tell the private sector how many people can work in the factories and which people

have to go into the army. They'll tell them who can stay on the farms and who cannot stay on the farms. The government has to take control of the whole manpower supply of the country as one more industrial resource. Now you begin to see what I mean by a total state. And World War I becomes the great laboratory for the creation of total states. Now, that also has a cultural and social effect, as everything in society is being pulled together into these giant efforts, of course that changes society. It changes popular culture. Take, for example, these sorts of war posters. They're interesting, of course, as propaganda. But they're also interesting at the values that they think will touch the people who are seeing this poster. This is a British war poster from 1915. You see the fellow on the bottom right-hand side. He's obviously the person to whom this question is being posed. You see the women? They're doing their part. You even see the young boy, that member of the boy scouts. He's doing his part, too, collecting some of the materials that the soldier will need at the fighting front. Everybody has their role to play. Or let's switch to Germany. By 1918, the German government can't let private individuals decide who will have valuable metals that the war effort might need, especially since Germany is being blockaded from access to raw materials around the world. So this poster is telling the German population that if they have household items made out of aluminum, copper, nickel, tin, these all need to be turned over to the government. Indeed this notice right here is putting everybody on notice that based on decree issued by the Kriegsrohstoffabteilung, that means the war materials section of the government, as of the 26th of March 1918, all of it has to be in

view at the collection points where the government is going to get these valuable metal items. Here's a poster from the United States after it enters into the war. It's not a very subtle enlistment poster, is it? You can see that the monster who's kidnapped that very vulnerable, attractive young woman, maybe she represents liberty, is being threatened by the monster wearing the helmet of militarism and wielding the German word for culture (Kultur). Mocking Germany's supposed civilized ideals. In this society, the old divisions between the working class and management, now turn into everybody becoming servants of the state. If you think about those old political groupings that we talked about, those five different kinds of political approaches, Democratic Socialism like Revolutionary Socialism prided itself on being internationalist. Solidarity of the working class across borders. Well the war has shattered a lot of that solidarity. The workers are increasingly caught up in workings of the state. Although, it's true by 1917 and 1918 increasingly the workers feel like they're pawns of the states, not partners in them. In some ways, the greatest effects of the war are on the political right wing. Think about that other political faction we talked about, National Tradition. The people who were holding out for oldfashioned values, they're being beaten down by the war. This is a war in which the winners are going to be the modernizers, the industrializers, the managers. Large landowners are finding that their estates and their farmers are being confiscated or deployed for the war effort. What about Liberalism? Remember that one of the basic tenets of classical liberalism is keep the government small. Well, if anything, the total state is the antithesis of liberal ideals. And liberal parties do not fare well in

this war. Just take a look at what's happening in some of the key countries. Russia, ruled by a party that stood for National Tradition. That monarchy cannot survive the war. The war eventually cracks it, brings it down, something else is going to take its place. Britain, ruled by the Liberal party: By 1917, a faction of the Liberal party ready for total war, led by Lloyd George, will rule in combination with the Conservative Party, the National Conservatives, also devoted to a big government effort that will win the war. In Germany, a kind of peculiar empire with its noble elite at the very top, its divided ruling structures, its very polarized politics, is giving way to a total state in which the Kaiser is more and more relinquishing rule to the military; the civilian chancellor is effectively being replaced by what amounts to a military dictatorship to unify the country for total war. And in the United States of America, liberalism had still been very strong. City governments were getting more powerful. State governments were getting more powerful. But the federal government was a relatively weak entity: small army, very little powers in the domestic economy. During the war, the federal government has to take on all sorts of new authorities over farm production, over farm prices, over conscripting manpower and many other things. World War I turns out to be a watershed in America's domestic political life, in the whole shape of the modern United States government. So now that we've talked about the way in which the war is changing the political lives of these countries, let's go back to the war itself and find out, not only what happened, but why. Why the Allies won the war will be the subject for my next talk with you.

See you then.