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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:12 - How World War I started
15:49 - US and World War I
32:46 - US Military
39:05 - War in Ukraine
43:15 - American Civil War
48:53 - World War II
1:08:00 - Nationalism
1:18:49 - US elections
1:44:56 - Donald Trump
1:59:01 - Philippine–American War
2:05:24 - Greatest US president
2:09:58 - Advice for young people
2:12:15 - Meaning of life

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The lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War is that human life is not cheap.

That all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force.

And at the end of the day in 1918, 1 side did win that, but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems.

You said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US.

The following is a conversation with Christopher Capozzola, a historian at MIT specializing in the history of politics and war in modern American history, especially about the role of World War I in defining the trajectory of the United States and our human civilization in the 20th and 21st centuries.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Christopher Cappuzzola.

Let's start with a big and difficult question.

On the 1 hand, World War I started because of a series of events in the summer of 1914 that brought sort of the major powers of Europe into conflict with 1 another.

But I actually think it's more useful to say that World War I started at least a generation earlier when rising powers, particularly Germany, started devoting more and more of their resources toward military affairs and naval affairs.

This sets off an arms race in Europe, it sets off a rivalry over the colonial world and who will control the resources in Africa and Asia.

And so by the time you get to the summer of 1914, and in a lot of ways I say the war has already begun, and this is just the match that lights the flame.

So the capacity for war was brewing within like the leaders and within the populace.

They started accepting sort of slowly through the culture propagated this idea that we can go to war, it's a good idea to go to war, it's a good idea to expand and dominate others, that kind of thing.

Maybe not put in those clear terms, but just the sense that military action is the way that nations operate at the global scale?

So yes, there's a sense that the military can be the solution to political conflict in Europe itself.

And the and is that war and military conflict are already happening, right?

That there's war, particularly in Africa, in North Africa, in the Middle East, in the Balkans, conflict is already underway.

And the European powers haven't faced off against each other.

They've usually faced off against an asymmetrical conflict against much less powerful states.

But in some ways that war is already underway.

Because World War I is brought up as a case study where it seems like a few accidental leaders and a few accidental events, or 1 accidental event led to the war.

And if you change that 1 little thing, it could have avoided the war.

Your sense is the drums of war have been beating for quite a while and it would have happened almost no matter what or very likely to have happened.

Yes, historians never like to say things are inevitable and certainly, you know, there were people who could have chosen a different path both in the short term and the long term.

But fundamentally, there were irreconcilable conflicts in the system of empires in the world in 1914.

I can't see, you know, it didn't have to be this war, but it probably had to be a war.

So there was the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there's France and Great Britain, could the USP call that empire at that moment yet?

Well, certainly after 1898 with the acquisition of the former territories of the Spanish Empire, the United States has formal colonial possessions and it has sort of mindsets of rule and military acquisition that would define empire in a kind of more informal sense.

So you would say you would put the blame or the responsibility of starting World War I into the hands of the German empire and Kaiser Wilhelm II.

You know, that's a really tough call to make.

And, you know, that deciding that is going to keep historians in business for the next 200 years.

I think there are people who would lay all of the blame on the Germans, right, and you know, who would point toward a generation of arms buildup, you know, alliances that Germany made and promises that they made to their allies in the Balkans, to the Austro-Hungarians.

And so yes, there's an awful lot of responsibility there.

There has been a trend lately to say, no, it's no one's fault, right, that, you know, that all of the various powers literally were sleepwalking into the war, right, They backed into it inadvertently.

I think that lets everyone a little too much off the hook.

And so I think in between is, you know, I would put the blame on the system of empires itself, on the system.

But in that system, the actor that sort of carries the most responsibility is definitely Imperial Germany.

So the leader of Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Josef I, his nephew is Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

And so that didn't have to lead to a war.

And then the leader of the German Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm II, pressured, sort of started talking trash, and boiling the water that ultimately resulted in the explosion, plus all the other players.

So can you describe the dynamics of how that unrolled?

What US, what's the role of US, what's the role of France, what's the role of Great Britain, Germany and also Hungarian Empire?

Yeah, over the course of about 4 weeks, right, following the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo.

It sort of triggers a series of political conflicts and ultimately ultimatums sort of demanding sort of that 1 or other power sort of stand down in response to the demands of either Britain, France, or in turn, Germany or Russia, at the same time that those alliances kind of trigger automatic responses from the other side.

And once that escalation is combined with the call up of military troops, then none of those powers wants to be sort of the last 1 to kind of get ready for conflict.

So even throughout it, They think they are getting ready in a defensive maneuver.

And they think if there is conflict, well, it might be a skirmish.

It could be solved with diplomacy later, because diplomacy is failing now.

Diplomacy fails, it's not a skirmish, it becomes a massive war.

And the Americans are watching all of this from the sidelines.

They have very little influence over what happens that summer.

How does it go from a skirmish between a few nations to a global war?

Is there a place where there's a phase transition?

Yeah, I think the phase transition is over the course of the fall of 1914, when The Germans make an initial sort of bold move into France.

In many ways, they're fighting the last war, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

And they really do sort of, you know, kind of want to have a quick sort of lightning strike in some ways against France to kind of bring the war to a speedy conclusion.

France turns out to be able to fight back more effectively than the Germans expected and then the battle lines sort of harden.

And then behind that, the French and the Germans, as well as the British on the side of the French, start digging in, literally, right?

And digging trenches, trenches that at first are, you know, 3 feet deep to, you know, to avoid shelling from artillery, then become 6 feet, 10 feet deep, 2 miles wide, that include telegraph wires, that include whole hospitals in the back.

And then at that point, the front is locked in place and the only way to break that is sort of basically dialing the war up to 11, right?

So massive numbers of troops, massive efforts, none of which work, right?

And so the war is stuck in this, but that's the phase transition right there.

What were the machines of war in that case?

What did Germany start accumulating that led up to this war?

1 of the things that we see immediately is the industrial revolution of the previous 30 or 40 years brought to bear on warfare, right?

And so you see sort of machine guns, you see artillery, you know, these are the kind of the key weapons of war on both sides, right?

The vast majority of battlefield casualties are from artillery shelling from 1 side to another, not rifle or even machine gun attacks.

In some ways, the weapons of war are human beings, right?

Tens of thousands of them poured over the top in these sort of waves to kind of try to break through the enemy lines.

And it would work for a little while, but holding the territory that had been gained often proved to be even more demanding than gaining it.

And so often, each side would retreat back into the trenches and wait for another day.

how did Britain, how did France get pulled into the war?

Yeah, so Britain, France, and Russia are at this time, and they're in alliance.

And so the conflicts in the summer of 1914 that lead to the declarations of war happen 1 after another in late August of 1914.

And all 3 powers essentially come in at the same time because they have promised to do so through a series of alliances conducted secretly in the years before 1914 that committed them to defend 1 another.

Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire have their own set of secret agreements that also commit them to defend 1 another.

And what this does is it sort of brings them all into conflict at the exact same moment.

They're also, for many of these countries, bringing not just their national armies, but also their empires into the conflict, right?

So Britain and France, of course, have enormous sort of global empires that begin mobilizing soldiers as well as raw materials.

Russia and the Ottoman Empire, of course, have their own sort of hinterland within the empire.

And very soon, all of the warring powers are bringing the entire world into the conflict.

Did they have a sense of how deadly the war is?

I mean, this is another scale of death and destruction.

The scale of the devastation of these sort of massive over-the-top attacks on the trenches is apparent to the military officers, and it very quickly becomes apparent even at home.

There is of course censorship of the battlefields and specific details don't reach people, but for civilians in any of the warring powers, they know fairly soon how destructive the war is.

And to me, that's always been a real sort of puzzle, right?

So that by the time the United States comes to decide whether to join the war in 1917, they know exactly what they're getting into, right?

They're not backing into the war in the ways that the European powers did.

You know, they've seen the devastation, they've seen photographs, they've seen injured soldiers, and they make that choice anyway.

When you say they, do you mean the leaders of the people?

Did the death and destruction reach the minds of the American people by that time?

You know, we don't in 1917 have the mass media that we have now, but there are images in newspapers, there are newsreels that play at the movie theaters, and of course, some of it is sanitized, but that combined with press accounts, often really quite descriptive press accounts, gory accounts, reached anyone who cared to read them.

Certainly plenty of people didn't follow the news, felt it was far away, but most Americans who cared about the news knew how devastating this war was.

Yeah, there's something that happens that I recently visited Ukraine for a few weeks.

There's something that happens with the human mind as you get away from the actual front where the bullets are flying, like literally 1 kilometer away, you start to not feel the war.

You'll hear an explosion, you'll see an explosion, you start to like get assimilated to it or you start to get used to it.

And then when you get as far away from like currently what is Kiev, you start to, you know the war's going on, everybody around you is fighting in that war, but it's still somehow distant, and I think with the United States, with the ocean between, even if you have the stories everywhere, it still is somehow distant, like the way a movie is.

Maybe, yeah, like a movie or a video game, it's somewhere else, even if your loved ones are going, or you are going to fight.

And in some ways that's true even for the home fronts in Europe, except for the areas where, in Belgium and France, where the war is right there in your backyard.

For other people, yeah, there's a distance.

Soldiers, of course, feel this very strongly.

When they, European soldiers, when they're able to go home on leave, often deeply resent what they see as the luxury that civilians are living in during the war.

To answer your last question first, yes, right?

That the United States could have stayed out of the First World War as a military power.

The United States could not have ignored the war completely, right?

It shaped trade, it shaped goods and services, agriculture, you know, whether there was a crop coming, whether there were immigrants coming across the Atlantic to work in American factories, right?

Makes a choice in 1917 to enter the war by declaring war on Germany and Austria.

And in that sense, this is a war of choice, but it's kicked off by a series of events.

So President Woodrow Wilson has been president through this entire period of time.

He has just run in the 1916 presidential election on a campaign to keep the United States out of war.

But then in early 1917, the Germans in some ways sort of twist the Americans' arms, right?

The Germans' sort of high command comes to understand that, you know, that they're stuck, right?

That they, you know, they're stuck in this trench warfare, they need a big breakthrough.

Their 1 big chance is to break the blockade, to push through that the British have imposed on them, to break through against France.

And along with this, they start sinking ships on the Atlantic, including American ships.

The Germans know full well this will draw the United States into war.

But the Germans look at the United States at this moment, a relatively small army, a relatively small Navy, a country that at least on paper is deeply divided about whether to join the war.

They're not gonna get any American soldiers there in time.

Right, You know, it was a gamble, but I think probably their best chance.

In part because French resistance was strong, in part because Americans mobilized much faster and in much greater numbers than the Germans thought they would.

American people were absolutely divided about whether to enter this war, right?

From 1914 to 1917, there is a searing debate across the political spectrum.

It doesn't break down easily on party lines about whether it was in the US interest to do this, whether American troops should be sent abroad, whether Americans would end up just being cannon fodder for the European empires.

Eventually, as American ships are sunk, first in the Lusitania in 1915, then in much greater numbers in 1917, the tide starts to turn and Americans feel that our response is necessary.

And the actual declaration of war in Congress is pretty lopsided, but it's not unanimous by any means.

Well, that's really interesting because there's echoes of that in later wars where Congress seems to, nobody wants to be the guy that says no to war for some reason.

Once you sense that, in terms of, sorry, in terms of politicians, because then you appear weak, but I wonder if that was always the case.

So you make the case that World War I is largely responsible for defining what it means to be an American citizen.

So in which way does it define the American citizen?

When you think about citizenship, what it means is 2 things.

First of all, what are your rights and obligations?

What is sort of the legal citizenship that you have as a citizen of the United States or any other state.

And the second is a more amorphous definition of like, what does it mean to belong, right?

To feel American, to, you know, to love it or hate it or be willing to die for it, right?

And both of those things really are crystal clear in terms of their importance during the war, right?

So both of those things are on the table, being a citizen who is a citizen, who isn't matters.

So people who had never carried passports or anything before suddenly have to, but also what it means to be an American, right?

To feel like it, to be part of this project is also kind of being defined and enforced during World War I.

So Project, you know, is a funny way to put a global war, right?

So can you tell the story, perhaps that's a good example of it, of the James Montgomery Flagg's 1916 poster that reads, I want you.

A lot of people know this poster, I think in its original form, in its meme-ified form, I don't know, but we know this poster and we don't know where it came from, or most Americans, I think, me included, didn't know where it came from, and it actually comes from 1916.

Does this poster represent the birth of something new in America, which is a commodification or, I don't know, that propaganda machine that says what it means to be an American is somebody that fights for their country.

Yeah, so the image, it's in fact, I think 1 of the most recognizable images, not only in the United States, but in the entire world, right?

And you could, you can bring it almost anywhere on earth in 2022, and people will know what it refers to, right?

And so this is an image that circulated first as a magazine cover, later as a recruitment poster, where the figure is Uncle Sam, sort of pointing at the viewer with his finger, sort of pointing and saying, I want you.

Right, and the I want you is a recruitment tool to join the US Army.

And this image, you know, really kind of starts as a kind of, like I said, a magazine cover in 1916 by the artist James Montgomery Flagg.

It initially appears under the heading, What are you doing for preparedness?

Meaning to prepare in case war comes to the United States.

And at that point in 1916, we're still neutral.

In 1917, it's turned into a US Army recruiting poster.

And then it reappears in World War II, reappears generations after, you know, like you said, it's now, gets remixed, meme-ified, it's all over the place.

I think, for me, it's a turning point, it's a sort of window into American culture at a crucial moment in our history, where the federal government is now embarking on a war overseas that's going to make enormous demands on its citizens.

And at the same time, where sort of technologies of mass production and mass media, and what we would probably call propaganda are being sort of mobilized for the first time in this new kind of way.

Well, in some sense, is it fair to say that the empire is born, the expanding empire is born from the Noam Chomsky perspective kind of empire that seeks to have military influence elsewhere in the world.

Yes, but I think as historians, we need to be at least as interested in what happens to the people who are getting pointed to by Uncle Sam, right, rather than just the 1, whether he's pointing at us.

And so, yes, he's asking us to do that, but how do we respond?

So the people are ultimately the machines of history, the mechanisms of history.

Sam can only do so much if the people aren't willing to step up.

And the American people responded for sure, but they didn't build what Uncle Sam asked them to do in that poster, right?

And I think that's, you know, kind of a crucial aspect that, you know, there never would have been sort of global US power without the response that begins in World War I.

What was the Selective Service Act of 1917?

So 1 of the very first things that Uncle Sam wants you to do, right, is to register for selective service, for the draft, right?

And the law is passed very soon after the US enters the war.

It's sort of demanding that all men, first between 21 and 30, then between 18 and 45, register for the draft, and they'll be selected by a government agency, by a volunteer organization.

Of course, not everyone who registers is selected, but over the course of the war, 24 million men register, almost 4 million serve in some fashion.

What was the feeling amongst the American people to have to sign up to the Selective Service Act?

This is a bigger turning point than we might think.

In some ways, this is a tougher demand of the American public than entering the war.

It's 1 thing to declare war on Germany, right?

It's another thing to go down to your local post office and fill out the forms that allow your own government to send you there to fight.

And this is especially important at a time when the federal government doesn't really have any other way to find you, unless you actually go and register yourself, right?

And so, ordinary people are participating in the building of this war machine, but at least a half a million of them don't, right?

And simply never fill out the forms, move from 1 town to another.

Yeah, about 24 million register, at least 500,000.

Is it surprising to you that that many registered since the country was divided?

It is, and that's what I sort of tried to dig in to figure out how did you get 24 million people to register for the draft, and it's certainly not coming from the top down, right?

You know, there may be 100 sort of agents in what's now called the FBI.

It's certainly not being enforced from Washington.

It's being enforced through the eyes of everyday neighbors, through community surveillance, all kinds of ways.

So there was not a significant like anti-war movement as you would see maybe later with Vietnam and things like this.

There was a significant movement before 1917, but it becomes very hard to keep up an organized anti-war movement after that, particularly when the government starts shutting down protests.

So as the Selective Service Act of 1917 runs up against some of the freedoms, some of the rights that are defined in our founding documents.

What freedoms and rights were sacrificed in this process?

I mean, I think on some level, the fundamental right is liberty, right?

That conscription sort of demands, you know, sacrifice on the behalf of some, for notionally, for the protection of all.

So even if you're against the war, you're forced to fight.

Yes, and there were small provisions for conscientious objectors, solely those who had religious objections to all war, right?

And so, you know, several thousand were able to take those provisions, but even then, they faced social sanction, they faced ridicule, some of them faced intimidation.

You know, So those liberty interests, both individual freedom, religious freedom, those are some of the first things to go.

Was there silencing of the press, of the voices, of the different people that were object.

Right, and so very soon after the Selective Service Act is passed, then you get the Espionage Act, which of course is back in

The Espionage Act is a sort of omnibus bill.

It contains about 10 or different provisions, very few of which have to do with espionage.

But 1 key provision basically makes it illegal to say or do anything that would interfere with military recruitment.

And that provision is used to shut down radical publications to shut down German language publications.

And this really has a chilling impact on speech during the war.

Could you put into words what it means to be an American citizen that is in part sparked by World War I.

Somebody that should be willing to sacrifice certain freedoms to fight for their country.

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Christopher Capozzola: World War I, Ideology, Propaganda, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #320