Part 27 (1/2)

The world's first domestic electric refrigerator is sold in Sweden.

1924.

U.S. Congress enacts legislation that bans all immigration from Asia.

1925.

The Communist Party is formed in China.

1926.

Protesting a lack of influence, Brazil becomes the first country to leave the League of Nations.

Dec. 25, 1926 Hirohito, the twenty-five-year-old crown prince of j.a.pan, becomes the country's 124th emperor.

Sept. 7, 1927 American engineer Philo Farnsworth uses electronics to transmit images on what will become known as a ”television.”

Oct. 24, 1929 The U.S. stock market begins a precipitous slide that will severely affect the world's economy.

The War to End All Wars, Until the Next One The 50-cent Version An archduke got shot; a bunch of countries chose sides and went to war; nasty weapons were used, killing lots of people; disease killed a bunch more; everyone got tired of fighting and agreed to quit; empires fell apart and dictators.h.i.+ps arose.The $9.99 Version The match that lit World War I's fuse was the June 28, 1914, a.s.sa.s.sination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a nineteen-year-old Serbian student/nationalist/terrorist named Gavilo Princip. After Serbia, supported by Russia, refused a demand to extradite Princip and his co-conspirators, Austria declared war. Germany joined sides with Austria and attacked Russian ally France by cutting through neutral Belgium, planning to defeat France in the west, then turn east and lick the Russians.The plan's success hinged on a quick victory in France. But various countries then rushed in to involve themselves. When Britain entered the war on the side of France and Russia, prospects for a short war collapsed. The Austro-Hungarian Empire teamed up with Germany, later joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, to form the Central Powers. They were opposed by the better-named Entente, composed of Britain, France, Russia, and later Italy and Greece. Both sides dug in-literally-and the conflict bogged down in a series of attacks and counterattacks along a three-hundred-plus-mile front of fortified trenches.Modern weaponry, such as tanks and machine guns, and the-psychologically-as-well-as-physically terrifying use of poison gas, proved to be appallingly efficient. The carnage was staggering. During the six-week First Battle of Ypres in 1914, for example, Germany lost 130,000 soldiers, Britain 58,000, and France 50,000.And diseases such as dysentery and the so-called Spanish Flu that circled the world in 1918 felled many of the men who weren't killed by their fellow men.Civilian casualties often rivaled the military's. In the Ottoman Empire, Turkish leaders used the war as an excuse to conduct ethnic cleansing against Armenians. Hundreds of thousands were slaughtered or forcibly relocated to desert areas, where many starved to death.n.o.body could conceive the dimension of a world conflagration, and the misery and trouble it would bring upon the nations. All previous wars would be as child's play.-German chancellor Theobald Von Bethmann-Hollweg, April 7, 1913, on the potential impact of a world war The war's tipping point came when German submarine attacks on American s.h.i.+pping prodded a heretofore reluctant-to-get-involved U.S. government into joining the British and French in April 1917. Eventually realizing it could not match the other side's manpower or materiel, Germany signed an armistice on November 11, 1918, and a formal peace treaty at Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919-five years to the day after Archduke Ferdinand's a.s.sa.s.sination.With the exception of the United States, every major country involved in the conflict had been seriously crippled. More than 8.0 million soldiers had been killed and more than 20.0 million injured. Germany lost 1.8 million men, France 1.3 million. The financial cost was enormous: an estimated total of $186.0 billion, $37.7 billion of that incurred by Germany, $35.3 billion by Great Britain. Even though the United States didn't get involved until April 1917, it still managed to spend $22.6 billion, much of it in loans to its allies.What the world got for its lost lives and money wasn't much. An effort by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson to be magnanimous in victory was rebuffed by the other victors, who, to be fair, had suffered far more. Led by a vengeful France, the winners made Germany acknowledge that the war was its fault, disarm itself and promise to stay disarmed, and make reparations.The Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires were dismantled. More than a half-dozen new countries were carved out of the old empires in Eastern Europe, and German and Turkish territories in the Middle East and Africa were ceded to France and Britain.But the end of the war was by no means the end of conflict. The democratic revolution that began in Russia in 1917 ended in 1922 with the world's first communist state-the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Dictators rose to power in Poland and Italy. j.a.pan was a.s.serting itself as the dominant economic, political, and military force in Asia. And dismal economic conditions threatened the republican form of government that took shape in postwar Germany-and nurtured the ambitions of a dictator wannabe named Hitler.

SPINNING THE GLOBE.

j.a.pan: Entering the World Stage with a Vengeance [image]

After staying below the Western radar for centuries, j.a.pan quickly learned to adapt the West's technology, industrial methods, and even its politics. It also embraced the West's imperialist tendencies.In 1895, after a brief war with China, j.a.pan secured control of the island of Taiwan. In 1905, after crus.h.i.+ng Russia in a war, the j.a.panese secured more territory and concessions, which paved the way for a takeover of Korea in 1910. In 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, j.a.pan grabbed German colonies in the Pacific, and by 1918, it controlled portions of Siberia and Manchuria. j.a.pan was now the major power in East Asia.In 1919, j.a.pan was made a permanent member of the League of Nations, and in 1922 it strengthened its ties with Western nations by signing an agreement with France, Britain, and the United States to reduce naval forces, denounce the use of poison gas in warfare, and ban submarine attacks on merchant vessels.But the j.a.panese did not go along with the West on everything. In 1928, when Western countries acquiesced to Chinese demands for new treaties among the nations, j.a.pan refused. This set the stage for increasing friction between not only j.a.pan and China, but also j.a.pan and the West.When hard economic times. .h.i.t the country in 1929, radical nationalists and sympathetic military leaders began to a.s.sert themselves and gradually take over the government. In 1930, the j.a.panese began a new round of incursions into Manchuria and parts of Northern China, foreshadowing much larger conquests to come.China: A Series of Ineffective Revolutions As the twentieth century began, the world's oldest empire was staggering. The Q'ing (Manchu) Dynasty had been in power since the mid-seventeenth century. Starting in 1861, it was ruled, mostly behind the scenes, by the empress dowager Cixi. But it had lost a brief war to j.a.pan in the mid-1890s, and was torn between a conservative ruling cla.s.s bent on preserving the status quo and a growing number of people calling for reforms.'

NO QUALIFICATIONS NECESSARY.

In 1905, the Q'ing Dynasty abolished the country's two-thousand-year-old civil service system because it interfered with the regime's corrupt political patronage system.

There was also growing resentment to foreign, mostly European, incursions into Chinese culture and commerce. In 1900, a group of Chinese, angered by Christian missionary work, went on a rampage, marching on Beijing and laying siege to foreign legations there. The rebels were dubbed ”Boxers,” a Westernized shorthand for their Chinese name ”Righteous Harmonious Fists.”Troops from the United States, j.a.pan, and six European countries ended the sieges, and in 1901 forced China to accept the presence of foreign troops on its soil and pay huge reparations to the ”Eight-Nation Alliance.”Following the death of Cixi in 1908, the last emperor in China's four-thousand-year history ascended to the throne. P'u Yi was not quite three years old when he became emperor, and his reign lasted only a little longer than that. In 1911, a revolution began, led by a forty-six-year-old doctor named Sun Yat-sen. In February 1912, the rebels overthrew the monarchy, the Republic of China was declared, and Sun became China's first president.

VOTE? I DON'T NEED NO STINKING VOTE When your nickname is the ”Dragon Lady,” you don't worry much about whether you can vote or not. Which is why Cixi, or T'zu-His, the de facto ruler of China for nearly half a century, didn't. ”I have often thought that I am the most clever woman who ever lived,” she once said. ”I have four hundred million people dependent on my judgment.”Born to a middle-ranking Manchu family, Cixi became a member of the emperor Xianfeng's harem at the age of seventeen, and gave birth to the emperor's only son. That elevated her status from concubine to consort. When Xianfeng died in 1861, Cixi's six-year-old son, Tongzhi, took the throne. Cixi became empress dowager, and de facto ruler. When Tongzhi died in 1875, Cixi gave his crown to her three-year-old nephew Guangxu. But Guangxu began implementing radical reforms that alarmed China's ruling cla.s.ses. So in 1898, Cixi put her nephew under arrest, quite possibly had him killed, and replaced him with her three-year-old grandnephew P'u Yi. Cixi herself died in 1908, and her tomb is now a pretty big tourist attraction.

In 1916, however, China's second president, Yuan s.h.i.+kai, decided he'd like to name himself emperor. He died before he could pull it off, and the country fragmented into a chaotic caldron of feuding warlords and nascent political parties that included the Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalists, and the Chinese Communist Party. By 1923, full-scale civil war had broken out.In 1926, Chiang Kai-shek, a military man who had once served in the j.a.panese army, became head of the Kuomintang. Chiang led an alliance, which included the Communists, in a successful fight against warlords in Northern China in 1927. But the following year, he turned on his Communist allies and purged them from his government.This, in turn, set off a civil war that would not end for another twenty-three years. Thus in 1930, China was in many ways just where it had been in 1900: under autocratic rule, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with civil unrest, economically impoverished, and dreaming of better days.Russia (and Eventually the Soviet Union): Seeing Red Like China, Russia went through a bewildering blizzard of brutal changes between 1900 and 1930, including a civil war, two regular wars, two revolutions, and a famine.Also like China, Russia found itself torn between an Old Guard aristocracy and an increasingly restless peasantry. Hoping to distract his subjects from their other troubles, the largely ineffectual czar Nicholas II went to war in 1904 with j.a.pan, nominally over territorial disputes in Manchuria and Korea.Bad idea. Russia was severely thrashed by the j.a.panese, which only added fuel to the fire at home. On January 22, 1905, a very large but generally peaceful group of workers tried to present the czar with a pet.i.tion calling for political and economic reforms. They were greeted with a volley of gunfire from Nicholas's guards, and more than a hundred workers were killed.What became known as ”b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday” resulted in a revolution that failed to overthrow Nicholas but forced him to agree to make Russia a const.i.tutional monarchy, with people guaranteed certain basic rights.But you can't eat basic rights. In 1907, a famine struck the country, killing millions. Although Russia had become one of the world's biggest industrial nations, workers' wages remained microscopic. World War I turned out to be another disaster, with Russia suffering defeat after defeat, mostly at the hands of Germany. By the end of 1915, one million Russian soldiers had been killed and another one million captured.

LENIN, TROTSKY, AND STALIN WALK INTO A BAR...

A trio of widely disparate men chiefly led Russia's transformation from czarism to communism: Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin.Lenin was a lawyer and intellectual who had been heavily influenced in his teens by the writings of Marx and Engels. In 1903, Lenin led a split from the dominant radical left party in Russia. His faction, called the Bolsheviks (from the Russian word for ”majority”), advocated immediate and violent revolution.The son of a wealthy Jewish farmer, Trotsky was at first affiliated with the more moderate Menshevik (”minority”) Party, but eventually became Lenin's chief lieutenant. The son of an alcoholic cobbler, Stalin spent parts of his youth as a seminary student and a bank robber. Lenin regarded Stalin as something of a useful thug.In late 1922, Lenin suggested Trotsky as his successor, noting that ”Stalin is too rude.” But Stalin was also politically cunning, and brutal. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin elbowed Trotsky aside and a.s.sumed control. In 1929, Stalin exiled Trotsky, who was a.s.sa.s.sinated in Mexico in 1940 by a Soviet agent.Stalin was more interested in eliminating rivals, consolidating power, and pus.h.i.+ng his ”Five-Year Plan” (which called for putting millions of peasants into factories or onto ma.s.sive state-run farms) than in expanding the ”People's Revolution.”Except for Mongolia, the Soviet Union would remain the only Communist state until after World War II.

In February 1917, another revolution broke out, and the following month, Nicholas abdicated, and he and his family were later executed. By November, the Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, had taken over. The Bolsheviks quickly sued for peace and withdrew from the world war.But their ascension touched off a civil war between the ”Reds” (Bolsheviks and other communist groups) and the ”Whites,” a collection of nationalists and aristocrats. Several foreign countries, including the United States, sent troops to aid the Whites. The foreign interests hoped that kicking out the Bolsheviks would get Russia back into the war against Germany.But the Whites were badly fragmented, and by 1921, Lenin's forces had won. In 1922, the world's first major Communist-controlled country was formally declared: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And like other European countries by 1930, the former Russia began to rearm.Germany: Sore-and Poor-Losers In 1900, Germany was as bellicose and avaricious as most of its Western European neighbors. In addition to running colonies in Africa and the Pacific, it was clamping down on the former French and Russian territory it had wrested away in the nineteenth century.Its policies were often harsh in the areas it dominated. Poles, for example, were forbidden to speak their own language at public meetings or in cla.s.srooms. Yet at home, the German government was at times fairly progressive. In 1903, sick-leave benefits were extended to many workers, and in 1909 women were admitted to state universities.

WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS.

Times were tough in postwar Germany, but that didn't mean there wasn't a bright spot now and then. In 1921, for instance, a factory in Westphalia manufactured thirty-six tea-kettles that whistled when the water was boiling. They were offered for sale in a Berlin department store-and sold out in three hours.

World War I eviscerated the country economically as well as psychologically. Some 90 percent of the country's merchant fleet was lost as a result of the war, along with 75 percent of its iron ore production. France occupied Germany's chief manufacturing region and refused to leave.In 1919, Germans elected a national a.s.sembly in the city of Weimar (hence the term ”Weimar Republic”) and crafted a new const.i.tution that guaranteed ”basic personal liberties” and universal suffrage.But the huge reparations bill presented by the victorious countries helped drive the country deeper into the economic Dumpster. The government began to print money like crazy, and the resulting inflation was stratospheric. By 1923, it took one trillion trillion marks to buy what one mark bought in 1914. It literally took a wheelbarrow full of bills to buy a loaf of bread. Unemployment rose from one million people out of work in 1923 to five million by 1930. marks to buy what one mark bought in 1914. It literally took a wheelbarrow full of bills to buy a loaf of bread. Unemployment rose from one million people out of work in 1923 to five million by 1930.The economic crisis went hand in hand with political unrest. Communists stirred up trouble on the left; archconservative nationalists on the right. Among the right-wing groups was the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party, or n.a.z.is, founded by a former corporal and failed artist named Adolf Hitler. In 1923, Hitler brashly proclaimed a new government, and was arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to five years, although he served only a little more than a year.In 1925, Germans elected a seventy-seven-year-old war hero named Paul von Hindenburg as president. He was unable to do much to address the country's deep economic woes, or stem the lingering resentment many Germans felt for being held responsible for World War I.Hitler's n.a.z.i Party, meanwhile, was steadily making political headway. In the 1928 elections, the n.a.z.is held 12 seats in the Reichstag, or German parliament. In 1930, that number rose to 107, or about 20 percent. By 1932, the percentage had increased to almost one third.Germany also began to rearm itself, in defiance of the agreements it had made with the victorious countries after the war.United States of America: Getting Nosy Although perhaps not yet as greedy or grasping as other Western powers, the United States entered the twentieth century with its own yen to run other countries' affairs-and benefit from their resources-whether those countries were keen on it or not.The first president of the century, William McKinley, lasted only until September 1901, when a self-proclaimed anarchist a.s.sa.s.sinated him during a visit to an international fair in Buffalo, New York.McKinley's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, was positively bully on the idea of increasing America's clout in the rest of the world. In 1903, he encouraged Panama to revolt against Colombia, and then grant the United States rights to build a ca.n.a.l across the Panamanian Isthmus, thus linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.In 1905, he brokered a peace treaty between Russia and j.a.pan that earned him the n.o.bel Peace Prize. And he sent the U.S. Navy fleet around the world on a mission of ”goodwill”-which also served to give other countries a glimpse of what they would be messing with if they messed with the United States.

ONE RARE BEAR.

Theodore Roosevelt is the only man to be awarded both the n.o.bel Prize for brokering peace, and the Congressional Medal of Honor for waging war.Born in 1858 into a prosperous New York merchant family, Roosevelt was a sickly child. To buck up his health, his father pushed him into a lifestyle built around strenuous exercise and constant activity. After a brief career as a cattle rancher and part-time lawman in the Dakota Badlands, Roosevelt returned to New York and entered politics, eventually being named a.s.sistant secretary of the Navy by President William McKinley.When the U.S. war with Spain began in 1898, Roosevelt organized a cavalry unit known as the Rough Riders. His daring exploits in Cuba brought him national fame, helped him get elected governor of New York, and earned him the Medal of Honor (posthumously, in 2001).It also secured Roosevelt the 1900 vice presidential nomination under McKinley on the successful GOP ticket. In 1901, after McKinley was a.s.sa.s.sinated, Roosevelt became, at forty-three, the youngest U.S. president.As chief executive from 1901 to 1909, Roosevelt greatly expanded the role of the office, created most of the federal government's important environmental programs, and pushed major consumer protection and monopoly-fighting acts through Congress. He often quoted an old African adage: ”Speak softly and carry a big stick.”And he found time to write books, hunt big game, explore the Amazon, design a simplified spelling system (that failed to catch on), and lend his name to one of the world's most popular children's toys, the Teddy Bear.Roosevelt died of a coronary embolism at the age of sixty. ”Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping,” Vice President Thomas Marshall said, ”for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight.”

The presidents who followed Roosevelt-William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge-had their own versions of ”gunboat diplomacy.” U.S. troops were dispatched on several occasions to various Latin American nations to ”protect American interests,” which was generally understood to mean ”protect American business interests.”But Americans were by no means united in support of imperialism. An Anti-Imperialist League was formed, led by such disparate and celebrated figures as author Mark Twain and industrialist Andrew Carnegie. And when World War I broke out, most of the country was solidly for the United States minding its own business. In 1916, in fact, Wilson won reelection with the slogan ”He kept us out of war.”This changed, however, due mainly to German submarine threats against U.S. s.h.i.+pping and clever Allied anti-German propaganda that galvanized American sentiment in favor of England, France, and to a lesser extent, Russia.In April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany, and by the end of the war had dispatched 1.4 million troops to European battlefields. Although it spent a large amount of money, U.S. casualties-about 48,000 killed in battle and 56,000 lost to disease-were trifling when compared with the stupendous carnage suffered by other nations.Moreover, no battles were fought on U.S. soil. As a result, the country was uniquely poised to help the world heal after the war. For the most part, however, America said ”no thanks.”It wasn't from lack of trying on the part of Woodrow Wilson. Even before the war ended, Wilson proposed a plan of ”14 points” that outlined what he thought would be a lasting peace. Other nations' leaders, however, found the plan naive: ”Moses brought down Ten Commandments,” sniffed French premier Georges Clemenceau. ”Wilson needed fourteen.”Wilson also failed to persuade the U.S. Senate to approve America's members.h.i.+p in the League of Nations, crippling the fledgling organization's chances of success.And fearful of being flooded with a ma.s.sive human wave of refugees from the rest of the war-torn world, Congress turned down the heat under America's ”melting pot” by approving measures in 1921, 1924, and 1929 that severely limited immigration.One thing America continued to do after the war for much of the world was lend it money. But many of the borrowers couldn't pay it back.Coupled with a combination of farm failures, bad loans, and an over-inflated stock market in the United States, the rest of the world's economic troubles finally caught up with Uncle Sam.In late October 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed. Investors lost $15 billion in one week, and the country was plunged into the deepest and longest economic mora.s.s in its history.Latin America: It's Not That We Don't Appreciate Your Shameless Interference, but...

By the beginning of the twentieth century, almost all of Central and South America had already shrugged off the yoke of European empires. But the omnipresent shadow of the United States was still, well, omnipresent.U.S. interference was often designed to head off political instability that might threaten American business investments in the region.If autocratic in its methods, the United States was democratic in its targets. U.S. troops went into Colombia in 1902 to help put down a revolt, and then backed rebels in Panama against Colombia the following year, when the rebels seized control of the Panamanian Isthmus. Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti also played unwilling hosts to U.S. soldiers and Marines.

COME, MR. TALLY MAN, TALLY ME BANANA.

Sometimes American businesses eliminated the middleman. In 1911, for example, Samuel Zemurray, the owner of the Cuyamel Fruit Company, didn't like the U.S.-backed government of Nicaragua. So he sponsored a revolution that put in charge someone who was more to his company's liking. In the mid-1920s, Zemurray tried unsuccessfully to get Honduras to invade Guatemala so he could gain control of a prime banana-growing area. In fact, Latin American countries run by dictators, often in cahoots with Yankee businessmen, became widely known as ”banana republics,” a phrase first coined by the American writer O. Henry in 1904. (And you thought it was just the name of a store!)

America's closest Latin American neighbor, Mexico, went through some big changes all by itself. In 1911, an odd coalition of intellectuals, peasants, Indians, and urban radicals coalesced to overthrow the dictators.h.i.+p of Porfirio Diaz.But the revolutionaries soon splintered, and the country was plunged into chaos. One of the revolution's leaders, Francisco Madero, was elected president in 1911, then overthrown and killed in 1913. He was followed by Victoriano Huerta, who resigned in 1914 and was replaced by Venustiano Carranza, who was killed in 1920 and replaced by alvaro Obregon. Obregon made it through most of the 1920s as president, and actually accomplished a few things before he was killed in 1928.As if the domestic side of being president of Mexico during this time weren't rough enough, there were also troubles on the foreign front. In 1915, U.S. troops entered Mexico, chasing the revolutionary leader Francisco ”Pancho” Villa, who had raided into U.S. territory. The following year, it was revealed that German emissaries had tried to entice Mexico into an alliance against the United States. Although Mexico had rejected the overture, the incident wasn't exactly a relations booster between the two countries.

BANDITO TO HERO.

The son of a horse trainer, Emiliano Zapata was born in 1879 in southern Mexico. After a brief-and involuntary-military stint, Zapata organized an army of five thousand peasants in 1910 and backed the revolutionary efforts of Francisco Madero against the dictator Porifirio Diaz. After Madero won, however, Zapata and Madero had a falling-out.For most of the next decade, and under the motto ”Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty), Zapata battled for sweeping land reforms that would end the country's semi-feudal system. He also established commissions that were charged with distributing land equitably, and set up a bank to make loans to small farmers.During most of the decade, Zapata's forces in the south were allied with the rebel forces of Francisco ”Pancho” Villa in the north. In 1917, however, federal troops defeated Villa and increased the pressure on Zapata.In April 1919, a federal officer ingratiated himself into Zapata's confidence and lured him into an ambush, where he was gunned down. He was buried in Morelos, in southern Mexico.A snappy dresser with a trademark drooping moustache, Zapata was often vilified during his life as a ”common bandit” by Mexico's upper crust and in the American press. It didn't faze him.”It is better to die on your feet,” he once remarked, ”than to live on your knees.”