The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

In the spring of 1917 one option considered in London was to bring Australian and Canadian pressure to bear as advertisements for the benefits of autonomous self-government within the empire. But the Ulster Protestant influence was too strong in Canada and the Irish Catholic element too powerful in Australia.

Sinn Fein and its allies boycotted the Convention, demanding that the Irish question be put to the post-war peace conference, ‘an unpacked jury of the nations of the world’ that ‘England could not coerce or cajole’.

Unless the full force of both London and Washington was put behind a compromise, Ireland faced permanent partition between a ‘majority and a minority each relying upon the doctrine of self-determination . . .’64

As Germany’s spring offensive crashed into the Allied lines in March 1918, manpower was the imperative of the moment. Sinn Fein refused any war service on behalf of the British state. But the British Labour movement made clear that it would not accept a last levy of men from London and Manchester, if Dublin and Cork remained exempt. The only way to give even a shred of legitimacy to conscription in Ireland was to move immediately to Home Rule.

By washing their dirty linen in front of the Americans, the British cabinet had stooped to asking Wilson and House ‘to make up their minds for them’. But injurious though it may have been to national pride, neutralizing the possibility of a disavowal from the White House was essential.

‘The settlement of the Irish question’ would thus emerge ‘as a great world factor of capital importance . . .’.67 Washington’s grudging response to the Home Rule compromise of April 1918 fell far short of that grandiose vision, and with good reason. Ireland’s political future was in no way resolved. Sinn Fein was preparing to resist conscription with force. The path to partition and a bloody civil war was clearly marked. But London’s painstaking elaboration of the Home Rule formula had done enough to prevent any serious breach with Washington.

From the mid-nineteenth century British policy in the region had been torn between the desire to protect the Suez canal, by shielding the ailing Ottoman Empire against Tsarist expansion, and liberal indignation over ‘Turkish atrocities’ in the Balkans.

In 1917 Russia’s collapse, France’s enfeeblement and the recovery of Britain’s military position in Mesopotamia came together with the new imperial focus of Lloyd George’s cabinet, to produce a far more aggressive strategy. In the eyes of Curzon and Viscount Alfred Milner the outcome of the war should be the total suppression of imperialist competition by the assertion of British control over the eastern Mediterranean and East Africa, establishing a British Monroe Doctrine in the Indian Ocean and its approaches. It was to be an all-empire project.

Conceived at first at a moment of triumph, at the height of the crisis that followed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and Ludendorff’s Western offensive in the spring of 1918, this encompassing vision of empire became instead the vision of a defensive redoubt to which Britain would retreat if France collapsed and control of the continent fell to a rampant Germany.73 This made it all the more pressing to decide how such expansionism might be squared with the dominant power of the future, the United States. As Milner put it, ‘the remaining free peoples of the world, America, this country and the Dominions’ must be ‘knit together in the closest conceivable alliance’.

If, as one Middle East hand put it in the summer of 1918, ‘open annexation is no longer practical and out of kilter with declaration of allies’, Britain must make itself into the vanguard of self-determination.

In 1917 it was to address the specific challenges posed by the Russian revolution and the rise of American power that British imperial strategists took up the cause of Zionism.

In 1915 Zionists both in Europe and America had been unable to hide their enthusiasm when the Kaiser’s armies drove the Tsar’s army out of western Poland.

Preoccupied as he was with his momentous declaration on Indian policy, Montagu could not but regard with horror the casual manner in which Britain, the ruler in India of the largest Muslim population on earth, was proposing to affront the Ottoman Empire.

First and foremost, the British cabinet was considering patronage of the Zionist cause because they credited ‘world Jewry’ with power to influence affairs both in the United States and in revolutionary Russia.

Oooof

The assumed influence of the New York Jewish lobby, echoing similar anxieties about the power of the Irish-American machine, reflected a by no means flattering conception of the working of American democracy.

The news that the huge Zionist organizations in revolutionary Russia had, in fact, voted overwhelmingly to disown any aggressive demands on the Ottoman Empire was suppressed.

Montagu was outvoted and the cabinet approved Balfour’s short declaration announcing Britain’s sponsorship of Jewish aspirations to a National Home in Palestine. It was despatched to Lord Rothschild as the presumptive leader of Anglo-Jewry, on 2 November 1917.

Despite the challenge laid down by the Bolsheviks and Germans at Brest-Litovsk, the French and Italians in their weakened state refused to allow any discussion of broader war aims. Lloyd George’s response to this impasse was telling.

His first reaction was to despatch the charismatic South African General Jan Smuts to Switzerland for secret discussions with the Austrians, who were clearly desperate and might perhaps be lured out of their dependence on Germany. The message that Smuts conveyed to the Austrians was indicative of the British self-conception at the time.

The Entente, Lloyd George proclaimed, was an alliance of democracies fighting for a democratic peace. ‘The days of the Treaty of Vienna,’ the Prime Minister announced, are ‘long past’.81 It would be a peace, he openly declared, of self-determination, ensuring that governments ruled by the consent of the governed.

And the willingness of world opinion not only to give far greater attention to Wilson’s 14 Points, but to read into his text phrases that Lloyd George rather than Wilson had actually uttered, was a harbinger of things to come.

France, Britain and Italy contained the crisis of political legitimacy that felled Russia and would soon tear the Central Powers apart. But what kept the populations of the Entente off the streets and drove their armies across the line was a remarkable economic effort.

Even the richest combatants in World War I were not affluent by modern standards. Pre-war France and Germany had per capita incomes roughly comparable to those of Egypt or Algeria today, but had access to far less sophisticated technologies of transport, communications and public health.

the major combatants were by 1918 committing 40 per cent or more of total output to the destr...

Back in 1914 conventional liberal wisdom had insisted that the globalization of the world economy would make prolonged war impossible. The collapse of trade and finance would bring the fighting to a halt within months. That crisis had indeed arrived in the autumn of 1914, when financial markets seized up and the st...

Far from limiting the combat, industrial mobilization and technological innovation acted as a flywheel on the war.2 This enormous effort spawned three new visions of modern economic power, two of which have remained as part of the commonplace iconography of the war; the third, significantly, was largely erased from memory.

The first economic model spawned by the war was that of the self-sufficient, state-planned national economy.

Walther Rathenau, the CEO of the international electrical engineering group AEG, became renowned as the exponent of a new mode of organized capitalism, in which corporate organization would be merged seamlessly with the power of the state.

By 1918 the productive capacities of the Entente and the Americans, the cooperation they managed to sustain and their willingness to take considerable risks, all combined to give the Allies a crushing superiority.6 In every dimension it was the Allied armies that pushed the battlefield into a new technological era.

The German squadrons, led amongst others by the youthful Hermann Goering, were outnumbered five to one. On the ground the imbalance was even more severe. By 1917 every major attack by French or British infantry could count on the support of hundreds of tanks. The Germans never fielded more than a handful.

In November 1918 Germany’s planned economy surrendered in the face of a second even more powerful economic vision – a triumphant model of ‘democratic capitalism’.

World War I marked the point at which America’s wealth stamped itself dramatically on European history. The globetrotting engineer and philanthropist Herbert Hoover was the first great ambassador of American abundance.

Ford introduced his legendary $5 per-day wage on his Model T production lines in January 1914.8 Following Wilson’s declaration of war, Ford outdid himself in his extraordinary promises: 1,000 two-man tanks per day, 1,000 midget submarines, 3,000 aero engines per day, 150,000 complete aircraft. None of these ever materialized.

American ‘productivism’ soon established itself as one of the guiding ideologies of the early twentieth century. Greater productivity per hour promised an escape from hard political choices, opening the door to a new era of domestic and international harmony.

as a self-declared ideology we should treat ‘productivism’ and the associated fable of American abundance with the caution it deserves. The celebration of American productive power was exaggerated.

As an ideology it obscures the interests that it served and, with its emphasis on tangible, material goods it deflects attention from the true locus of American power, which in 1918 was founded above all on money not on things.

If we look more closely at the way in which America’s resources were actually funnelled into Europe, what we see is both the purposefulness with which that shadow was cast and the as yet fragile facade from which it was projected.

From the summer of 1917 Entente military planning was based on the assumption that 1 million American soldiers would arrive in Europe by the end of 1918.

In the United States droves of would-be Doughboys had signed up. But they were training with wooden rifles and obsolete machine guns. They had none of the heavy weaponry that ruled the European battlefield. Nor, in early 1918, was America in any position to supply its new army with advanced armaments from its own factories.

Though the US had made huge deliveries of war supplies, the Entente’s orders had been concentrated on raw materials, semi-finished products, explosives, gunpowder and ammunition.12 The actual weapons of war continued to be designed and finished by the Europeans.

Ford’s main contribution, rather than the thousands of tanks he promised, was to devise a low-cost process for mass-producing the cylinders required by the Liberty aero-engine that American engineers had scrambled together from French, British, Italian and German designs. Despite the already legendary prowess of Detroit, there was too little time ...

In 1918 it was the American Army that fought with French weapons, not the other way around. Three-quarters of the aircraft flown by the US Air Service were of French origin.

there was one rate-limiting factor that constrained any American contribution – shipping. When the commitment of 1 million American soldiers was made, it was understood that they would be shipped to Europe predominantly in American vessels. But due to infighting in Washington, little was done in 1917 to actually build cargo ships.

The effective monopoly over the world’s shipping fleet established by Britain and its allies after 1914 was a direct challenge to Wilson’s vision of an American-led world order. The Shipping Act passed in September 1916 was intended to sponsor the construction of an American merchant navy to rival that of Britain.

Once the U-boat war forced America’s hand in April 1917, it was the Federal government that took emergency powers to build and operate a publicly owned merchant fleet. But by then the British had pre-emptively cornered every free slipway and dry dock in the United States.

On this basis, the Emergency Fleet Corporation launched an epic ship-construction programme. With their familiar combination of showmanship, entrepreneurial energy and technical vision, America’s industrial barons competed in meeting ever more excessive targets. Some $2.6 billion later, the results were impressive. In the last six months of 1918 American shipyards delivered as much as the entire world had launched in 1913 – 100 ships on 4 July 1918 alone (Independence Day).17 But by the third quarter of 1918 the military crisis had already passed.

Not only that, even at the height of the crisis, the Wilson administration did not give clear priority to the needs of the European war. Of the ships requisitioned by the Federal government, only a fraction were actually allocated to troop transport.

Already in January the British had imposed a stomach-churning shift in priorities. To free enough capacity to transport 150,000 American soldiers per month, food imports were slashed.

Turning the tables on Wilson, it was now Lloyd George who, over the head of the laggardly President, appealed directly to the American public. Wilson was so incensed that he even considered having the British ambassador recalled. ‘I fear,’ he expostulated on one occasion, ‘I will come out of the war hating [the] English.’

The bottleneck of shipping reduced the transatlantic war economy to the most primitive economic trade-off: men against things.