We've now completed the entire decade that is the primary focus of this blog in sort of real time, although in fairness we didn't really start focusing on things in that fashion until 1916.
It's really been interesting.
In terms of the purpose of the blog, this exercise has achieved what we started out to achieve. The authors now know a lot more about
1910-1919 then they did previously, including everything from details on the
Punitive Expedition and the
Great War, to picayune details of
daily living.
One thing that historians, and we can fancy ourselves that if only from a amateur point of view, tend to do when they look back on an area that they've concentrated on is to to emphasize how that decade changed things, and by saying they emphasize it, they risk overemphasizing it. Or perhaps its that every major event changes the world in ways that are only appreciated, and large, later on. But, having noted that risk, we'll go on to say something that's obvious but under appreciated.
The
1910s changed everything.
Things were changing anyway, and in part because they're always changing. But the pace of change in the
1910s was blistering. Cheap
automobiles had only been introduced in the prior decade, the 1900s, but already by the
1910s they were making major changes in daily life. Commercial
air travel, something completely nonexistent in 1910, as
aircraft only dated to 1903, had actually arrived in its infancy and
aircraft were also starting to carry the mail. Serious long distance travel remained the domain of
steam locomotives, if on land, and would for many years to come, of course. On the sea, modern ships now dominated, although surprisingly enough the age of sail hadn't completely passed and wouldn't for another couple of decades.
That the
equine age hadn't passed yet, but was on the way out, was perhaps best demonstrated by the
1919 Motor Transport Convoy that we just featured this past year, but the events of
The Punitive Expedition, the
Mexican Revolution,
World War One, and the
Russian Civil War did and were demonstrating that horses remained hugely viable in the present at that very time. Very little appreciated now, going through events demonstrated this to a great degree. Motor transport largely failed in the
Punitive Expedition. Horses, and even cavalry, remained employed in the
Great War including in France.
The German 1918 Spring Offensive, in the end, failed in no small part due to a lack of horse transportation combined with the onset of the
1918 Influenza Pandemic.
French war dead, World War One.
On that, we might note that in an era when we constantly hear about how bad things are in our own time, the 1910s say the absolute acclimation to death. The entire Western World engaged in a massive bloodletting on a scale that most would not are endure in our current era. By the end of the war entire cultures were so used to it that they kept on fighting in bloody civil wars without a let up, making the war fatigue claim we so often hear about the Great War seem rather false. In the U.S., acclimation to it was so high that the country
thought nothing about sending airmen on a cross country race that featured constant fatalities. Newspaper headlines constantly discussed death by criminal violence, and the country didn't really get that upset about massive race riots that defined 1919 in certain ways.
War dead of the Mexican Revolution, which started before World War One and continued long after.
The country was about to go into the "Roaring Twenties", but like the violence of the post Civil War American West, a question really has to be asked if the violent Roaring Twenties was hugely impacted by the violent 1910s. Nothing in the 20s or early 30s would replicate the violence of World War One in scale and thousands upon thousands of men were released from wartime service all over the globe with little thought to what they'd been through and how that would impact them.
The 1910s also saw the massive popular onset of
Prohibition, which was a movement that gained momentum in the entire English speaking world in that decade. That would help fuel the violence and lawlessness of the 1920s, but at the time to support prohibition was to be a Progressive and to be on the "right side of history". World War One again caused the movement to accelerate and actually come into being, first as a wartime measure, in the United States.
Christmas Day edition of the Cheyenne State Leader celebrating the permanent passing of John Barleycorn. It wouldn't be so permanent.
By far, however, the biggest event of the decade, and the one that is still with us today, is the smashing of the Old Order, brought about by
World War One, in a fashion which failed to replace it with anything. That lead to immediate, and long lasting, violence, and the reverberations are still very much with us.
The demise of the imperial and monarchical regimes due to
World War One is well known, but the vast impact of it is still poorly understood, particularly because the second great war of the century,
World War Two, came to define the century and the aftermath of it, the
Cold War, dominated over half of it. Given that, what occurred before seemed like a prelude when in fact the events are all closely tied and the sorting out of what occurred has still not been completed. And this is no wonder if we consider that the Old Order was 1,500 years old at the time, in some ways.
By the Old Order, we mean that monarchical system that had dominated in Europe for most of its post Roman Empire period. Indeed, even now, we live in a period in which the passing of that system is really very brief. The system was never uniform and isn't anything like its commonly recalled, but its existence was remarkably long lived.
Crowned heads of states, many of whom early on never wore a crown, reentered the European scenes in the 400s as the Roman Empire collapsed. Indeed, during that period, with the Roman Empire separated into to two governments, in the East it was itself rapidly returning to monarchy. Following the collapse of the empire in the West, strongmen from Germanic conquering tribes evolved from heads of family groups, the
kin into kings, men who were at first heads of tribes, and then of larger bands, and then in later years, that arrived in different places in Europe at different times, then of nations. By the middle of the Middle Ages the system was unquestionable, even if the legitimacy of an actual monarch may not have been.
Charles the Great receiving the surrender of Widukind at Paderborn, 785
The acceptance of the permanency of a royal family took a much longer period to really arrive. The post Henry VIII of the United Kingdom gives ample proof of that, with the current royal family not occupying that chair until 1714. But that most nations would have a monarch, and that monarchs might claim more than one nation, was well accepted.
Which is not to say that it wasn't challenged and that it didn't evolve. As early as 1215 English noble families, with that status meaning much less than it was to later, were able to force their king, King John, to acknowledge rights that went beyond the crown in the form of the issuance of the Magna Carta. This act also establishes the permanency of the English Parliament which has existed in various forms since that time. Parliament became stronger and stronger, as did the concept of representative rule, over the centuries and by 1642 it had become so strong that the Parliament contested the Crown for the rule of the country, suspending the monarch for a period until it was restored in 1660. That event, however, demonstrated that representatives bodies in Europe were now so strong that in Western Europe crowned heads served at their pleasure.
The Magna Carta.
That pleasure wore out again with Englishmen, this time in the Crown's North American colonies, in 1774 such that by 1776 they declared those colonies independent and, in their following organic documents, they abolished monarch completely in favor of a conservative representative republic. They had an advantage in their revolution, which went surprisingly rapidly from discontent to separation, in that they already had formed representative bodies and were used to acting independently already.
Declaration of Independence.
That conservative and radical concept provided an example, but in a people with no real democratic habits, in 1789 when the French, or more accurately Parisians, rebelled against their king in a revolution that would ultimately fail but which has ironically set the standard for revolutions ever since. A person can debate whether the American Revolution or the French one really indicated that the age of monarchy had completely ended, but in truth it had been ending long before either. The examples, if we include the English example as well, therefore, provide examples of how the end of monarchy could come about, that being either 1) in an orderly developed fashion through a process of natural evolution; or 2) violently and with the institutionalization of disorder as its feature. The latter example, unfortunately, became a disturbingly common one.
French Charter of 1814, a bill of rights imposed upon Louis XVIII by the Congress of Vienna as a condition for his restoration.
From 1789 on various European monarchies struggled with this evolution. The United Kingdom, which had started evolving away from monarchy by 1215, handled it best of all, having an institutionalized process for that evolution. Many other European nations handled it much more poorly. France went through cycles of revolution, monarchy, and republicanism, before it finally came around to permanent republicanism in 1870. 1848 saw republican revolutions all over Europe. Other nations saw the old order retrench in their traditional governmental institutions suppressing democratic developments as much as they could, with Germany (which had only been a state since 1870) and Imperial Russia providing prime examples.
Uprising in Berlin in 1848, one of a series of republican revolutions that year which came close to creating a republican German constitutional monarchy only to see it fail due to disorganization.
Where the Old Order hung on with the least amount of surrender to a growing literate class, no matter how marginal that literacy may be, the struggle became malignant. The difference in developments between societies that had democratic institutions that functioned and those that did not, with the latter often existing only as a bare marginal concession to the inevitable, was stark. Everywhere, by the late 19th Century, radical challenges to the Old Order existed, even spilling into fully democratic nations that had made the transition well prior, but nowhere were these movements stronger and more active than in those nations that had monarchs who actually functioned as monarchs. Imperial Russia, where the Czar remained as absolute of monarch as any in the Western World, provides a prime example, although Imperial Germany wasn't really far behind it.
Nicholas Romanov after his abdication.
In spite of the growing strengths of those movements, the nations of the Old Order went into war in 1914 seemingly unified and strong, and indeed the advent of the war in some ways boosted the strength of the monarchs as their populations and what functioning democratic institutions there were, rallied to their nations. The Imperial German and Austro Hungarian crowns did not suffer from going to war in 1914, and the Imperial Russian one did not for the same.
A dapper Wilhelm Hohenzollern after his abdication, 1933.
The division of nations in terms of their development during that war was not a pure one by any means, but there was one that was notable nonetheless. Republican France and Parliamentary Britain lined up against Imperial Germany and Austria rapidly in the contest. Various monarchies did join the Allied cause, but all of them were democracies in various degrees except for Imperial Russia, which provided an embarrassing exception until it collapsed in 1917. On the other side, the Central Powers all featured governments that strongly endorsed central authority and a central authority that was autocratic and invested with the Old Order. The Central Powers, for that reason, didn't find the Ottoman Empire to be an embarrassing ally the same way the Allied found Russia, as even though its underlying nature was different in every sense, the principal one that identified them, autocracy, was the same.
Halife Abdulmecid Efendi, the last Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, during his exile. He came into the position post war and occupied it for the last two years of its existence, which came to an end in 1924.
As soon as the war's stresses became strongly manifest, a struggle which had from the very onset been touched off as a violent protest against Austrian autocracy and empire by a common man, saw working class radicalism develop everywhere in the old imperial regimes except for the Ottoman Empire, where instead nationalist and republican forces began to emerge. Nowhere in the states most invested in the Old Order was there a long lasting society wide support of its continued existence.
Blessed Charles of Austro-Hungaria, who became the last Emperor of the Austro Hungarian Empire in 1916 with the war in progress. A devout man, he attempted to secure a separate peace with France upon ascending to the thrown.
The collapse started to come suddenly, first in 1917 in Russia where a decades long smoldering collection of underground forces and a small republican one toppled the Romanov's and then went into a fratricidal civil war against each other. That followed rapidly into Germany where the forces of the radical extreme left made the continuation of the war by Germany and the continuation of the Hohenzollern monarchy untenable. Indeed, as Kaiser Wilhelm went into exile in the Netherlands, the other more local German royal families rapidly collapsed as well, leaving the German Social Democratic Party to deal with the collapse, the rise of the radical left, and a war that had to be immediately concluded. Germany descended into a brief period of civil war followed by a long period of instability until the forces of the extreme left and the forces of the extreme right, in the new form of fascism, destroyed the country's democracy in 1932 with the Nazi Party claiming the thrown of the country.
Benito Mussolini, who became the Italian head of state in 1922.
That same story, but in a much less protracted form, had already played out in Italy, which had a parliament going into World War One but which had never been politically stable. The Fascists toppled the elected government in the 1920s and brought in a new radical right wing order, although it allowed the King to remain on his thrown. In Spain, which had not fought in the war, the monarch and the republican government collapsed giving rise to a bloody civil war which saw the forces of the right emerge victorious. Portugal, another Allied power that was a republic but a weak one likewise slid into a dictatorship in the post war period. Radicalism in Japan, which only had a semi functioning parliamentary body, caused a struggle in the Imperial army, which was divided not only politically but in terms of age, with older, right wing, officers prevailing over young, left wing ones, taking Japan into a finally highly autocratic era under its Old Order, the only one to really survive the period.
The drama also played out in newly liberated lands. Many new countries oddly opted for constitutional monarchies, trying to somewhat recreate what they'd lately experiences, but some of those did not last long. Poland briefly had a title to its ancient thrown, backed by Germany, but rapidly became a parliamentary democracy before becoming a practical dictatorship prior to World War Two. Finland likewise briefly had a German monarch before he resigned in the face of the obvious and the country fought out its own civil war before emerging as a democracy.
Porfirio Diaz in 1910.
Even in North America this drama played out to a degree, and oddly somewhat before that in Europe. Mexico had struggled since its independence with its own imperial legacy, never finding a way to transform into a functioning democracy. In 1884 Porfirio Diaz had come to power and, while theoretically an elected head of state, he ruled as a practical imperial monarch, even appearing in his portraits as one. In 1910, as a result of a stolen election, democratic forces rose up against him and deposed him before they descended into periods or counter revolution and revolution that would last nearly twenty years and which saw initially democratic forces slowly slide into more and more dictatorial ones until Mexico emerged in the 1920s as highly left wing single party state.
Plutarco Elias Calles, who would be the Mexican head of state from 1924 to 1928 and whose extreme left wing policies would lead to the Cristero Rebellion, the last phase of the Mexican Revolution.
All of this is highly significant as it makes the 1910s one of the most pivotal, and perhaps the most pivotal, decades of the 20th Century and modern history. Vast portions of what was destroyed in terms of intellectual and societal deposit has never been recovered, restored or replaced and the struggles of the subsequent decades have failed to fill the vacuum. It's common to note that the results of World War One brought about World War Two, and then to note, often in other works, that the conclusion of World War Two brought about the Cold War. But in fact the cause and effect of the 1914-1918 disaster were far greater than that, and vast as those stated implications are.
In May through October 1917 three Portuguese children claimed to receive visitations by the Virgin Mary, the authenticity of which is widely accepted by Catholics as well as some Orthodox. As a feature of those visitations, they claimed to have received three messages.* Among the content that they included in the messages they received was:
If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be
peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing
wars and persecutions of the Church.
That the war raging in 1917 was to end is obvious to us know, as it ended in about one year following the visitations. That a worse one greater than the first occurred is of course obvious to all. And that Russia, the flagship of Communism spread errors around the globe is easy to see as well. But many have debated what the full extent of those errors were and the degree to which the errors coming out of the cataclysmic of 1914-1918 continue to manifest themselves to this day.
King Alfonso XIII of Spain, whose monarchy was abolished in 1931, only to fall into civil war in 1936. The Nationalist had no desire to restore him to his thrown.
What is clear is that the strong resistance to the end of the cycle that imperial regimes exhibited from the 1770s onward built up like steam in a sealed vessel before it exploded in 1917. By that time, that sealed political steam was not only explosive, it was corrupted and infected in that same atmosphere by a radicalism that countries that had developed no democratic habit could contain. Even in those countries that were democracies, but which were weak ones, such as post 1918 Germany, Italy, and Spain, they proved impossible to contest and contain. The festering of the far left would bring evolution across the globe from 1917 forward until the Soviet came to an end on December 26, 1991. The festering of the far right would bring the world into a Second World War in 1939, assuming that earlier imperial far right wing malignancy in the Far East isn't included, in which case the world descended in 1932. It would take that Second World War and millions of additional deaths to put to an end of the rise of a global far right fascist movement which, while extremely distinct in many ways, shared some of its most malignant traits, including a fascination and advocacy of the application of death, with the far left of Communism.
While that struggle is seemingly now concluded, what was never fully restored was a concept of humanity and natural order that existed earlier on. The change came too rapidly to be coherent in that fashion and the forces that claimed an organic reason for their positions had not had them exposed in the full light of day before they were let out to spread like viruses.
Indeed, in some remarkable ways, no matter how different, and indeed they were radically different in a plethora of ways, most of the political and societal theory was that governed the globe's societies prior to 1910 may have been, they did have some central principals. Most of these principals remain, but because of the radicalism of the 1917 explosion, nearly all of them have been challenged, most wish very little thought given to what that challenge meant, and nearly all without the influence of any scientific thought into them. Indeed, on the latter, social theories that were bootstrapped into political ones of the late 19th Century and early 20th were often justified in the name of "science" when they were quite contrary to it, with horrific examples of the same playing out in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.**
It's always tempting, of course, when looking at an era that you're studying to conclude that that era was the conclusive one to history. There are so many "pivotal decades" and the like claimed that they can't all be true. Indeed, perhaps no one claim is really true as history is a stream, not a canal with a series of locks. Having said that, the 1910s saw a lot of history vastly accelerated, diverted, and broken. The world has been different since then, and in many ways that are not good ones. The forces unleashed in the 1910s were akin to opening Pandora's box, and we've never been able to put the disorder that the decade saw released back into any state of order. Many of the ills and confusion that we experience today have their origins in that fateful ten years.
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*Sister Lucia, the only one of the three children to live into adulthood, recounted the messages as follows:
Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze,
floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the
flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of
smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire,
without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and
despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons
could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to
frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision
lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind
heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first
Apparition, to take us to heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died
of fear and terror.
You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God
wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If
what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be
peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending
God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pope Pius XI.
When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is
the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for
its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and
of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays.
If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be
peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing
wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy
Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.
In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will
consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of
peace will be granted to the world.
The third part of the secret revealed at the Cova da Iria-Fátima, on 13 July 1917 was as follows.
I write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his
Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and
mine.
After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our
Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his
left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would
set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour
that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the
earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice:
'Penance, Penance, Penance!'. And we saw in an immense light that is
God: 'something similar to how people appear in a mirror
when they pass in front of it' a Bishop dressed in White 'we had the
impression that it was the Holy Father'. Other Bishops, Priests, men and
women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there
was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark;
before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in
ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and
sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having
reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big
Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows
at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other
Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of
different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there
were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium
in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and
with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.
It was later noted that:
The purpose of the vision is not to show a film of an irrevocably fixed
future. Its meaning is exactly the opposite: it is meant to mobilize the
forces of change in the right direction. Therefore we must totally
discount fatalistic explanations of the “secret”, such as, for example,
the claim that the would-be assassin of 13 May 1981 was merely an
instrument of the divine plan guided by Providence
and could not therefore have acted freely, or other similar ideas in
circulation. Rather, the vision speaks of dangers and how we might be
saved from them.
The Fatima apparitions are widely accepted by Catholics and are also accepted by some Orthodox, as noted.
**The primary example of this would be how the science of genetics morphed into the social and pseudo science of eugenics, which in turn provided a pseudo scientific basis for Nazi racial policies and, ultimately, mass murder.
A lessor, but still disastrous, example would be the "scientific" nature of the Communist economic model which purported that history itself was subject to inviolate economic laws, all of which coincidentally justified the Communist economic model.
Many other such examples, we'd note, in all 20th Century societies, exist.
