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, one 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 U.S. Can you explain? The following is a conversation with Christopher Cappuzola,
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. This is the Lux Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Christopher Cappuzola. Let's start with a big and difficult question. How did World War I
start? On the one hand, World War I started because of a series of events in the summer of 1914,
that brought the major powers of Europe into conflict with one 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, 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 the leaders and within
the populace. They started accepting 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. Yes, yes and. 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, Balkans. Conflict is already underway. And the European
powers haven't faced off against each other. They've usually faced off against, in asymmetrical
conflict, against much less powerful states. But in some ways, that war is already underway.
All right. So do you think it was inevitable? Because World War One is brought up as a case study
where it seems like a few accidental leaders and a few accidental events or one accidental event
led to the war. And if you change that one little thing, it could have avoided the war. Your sense
is the the 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 had it probably had to be a war. So there was the German Empire,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there's France and Great Britain, US, the USP called that empire at
that moment yet. When do you graduate to empire status? Well, certainly after after 1898, with
the acquisition of the former territories of the Spanish Empire, you know, 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, right? 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 Joseph I,
his nephew is Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he was assassinated. 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 what can you describe the dynamics of how that unrolled? Well, U.S., what's the role of U.S.,
what's the role of France, what's the role of Great Britain, Germany, and Austro-Hungarian
Empire? Yeah, over the course of about four weeks, 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 one 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 so it escalates. 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 one to kind of get ready for conflict. So even throughout it, they think
they are getting ready in a defensive maneuver. And if they think if there is conflict, well,
it might be a skirmish. It might be sort of a standoff. It could be solved with diplomacy later
because diplomacy is failing now. That turns out not to be the case. 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 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. And digging trenches
that, at first, are three feet deep to avoid shelling from artillery, then become six feet,
10 feet deep, two 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. So massive numbers of troops, massive efforts,
none of which work. 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? You mentioned trenches. What were the guns used?
What was the size of guns? What are we talking about? What did Germany start accumulating
that led up to this war? One of the things that we see immediately is the industrial revolution
of the previous 30 or 40 years brought to bear on warfare. And so you see sort of machine guns,
you see artillery. These are the kind of the key weapons of war on both sides. The vast majority
of battlefield casualties are from artillery shelling from one side to another, not sort of
rifle or even machine gun kind of attacks. In some ways, the weapons of war are human beings.
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.
And how did Russia, how did Britain, how did France get pulled into the war? I suppose the
France one is the easy one. But what is the order of events here? How it becomes a global war?
Yeah. So Britain, France, and Russia are at this time in their alliance. And so the conflicts in
the summer of 1914 that lead sort of to the declarations of war happened sort of one after
another in late August of 1914. And all three 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 one another. Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the
Ottoman Empire have their own sort of set of secret agreements that also commit them
to defend one 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. So Britain and France, of course, have enormous
sort of global empires that begin mobilizing soldiers as well as raw materials. Germany
has less of an overseas empire. Russia and the Ottoman Empire, of course, have their own sort
of hinterland within the empire. And very soon sort of all of the warring powers are bringing
the entire world into the conflict. Do they have a sense of how deadly the war is?
I mean, this is another scale of death and destruction.
At the beginning, no, but very quickly. The scale of the devastation of these sort of massive over
the top attacks on trenches is apparent to the military officers and it very quickly becomes
apparent even at home. There is, of course, censorship of the battlefield and specific
details don't reach people. But for civilians and 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.
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. They're not backing into the war in the ways that
the European powers did. 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 or the people? Did the death and destruction reach
the minds of the American people by that time?
Yes, absolutely. 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 one kilometer
away. You start to not feel the war. You'll hear an explosion, you'll see an explosion,
you start to like get it 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's 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.
Yeah, that is absolutely the case. 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, you know,
deeply present what they see as the luxury that civilians are living in during the war.
So how did US enter the war? Who was the president? What was the dynamics involved? And
could it have stayed out? 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 everything, 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?
So the US can't ignore the war. But the US makes a choice in 1917 to enter the war by declaring
war, right, on Germany and Austria. And in that sense, this is a war of choice, but it's kicked
off by a series of events, right? 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? That 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 one big chance is to sort of break the blockade,
to push through that the British have imposed on them, to break through against France.
And so they do. 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. And so they say, let's do it, right? They're not going to get any American soldiers there
in time, right? You know, it was a gamble. But I think probably that their best chance,
their best chance, they took that gamble, they lost, right? 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. So the American people were divided? The 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. Lopsided towards entering
the war. Yeah. 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 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 two things. First of all, what are your rights
and obligations? What is 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 what does it mean to belong,
to be part of America, to feel American, to love it or hate it or be willing to die for it.
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, 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 Flags 1916 poster
that reads, I Want You. A lot of people know this poster, I think in its original form or
in its memeified 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 one 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 Flag.
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, memified. 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.
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 one,
you know, whether he's pointing at us. And so, yes, he's asking us to do that, but how do we
respond? And the people responded. So the people are ultimately the machines of history, the
mechanisms of history. It's not that Uncle Sam can only do so much if the people aren't willing
to step up. Absolutely. And the American people responded for sure, but they didn't build what
Uncle Sam asked them to do in that poster. And I think that's kind of a crucial aspect that
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 one of the very first things that Uncle Sam
wants you to do is to register for selective service for the draft. And the laws 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. So it's a requirement to sign up.
It is a legal requirement to register. Of course, not everyone who registers is selected.
But over the course of the war, 24 million men register, almost four million serve in some
fashion. What was the response? What was the feeling amongst the American people to have
to sign up to the Selective Service Act? Well, have to register. 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 one thing to declare war on Germany. 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.
And so ordinary people are participating in the building of this war machine,
but at least a half a million of them don't, and simply never fill out the forms, move from one
town to another. But you said 20 million did? 20 something? Yeah, about 24 million registered,
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 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. There are maybe 100 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. Oh, so there was like a pressure? There's a lot of pressure.
Interesting. So there's 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 was that clash like? What was sacrificed?
What freedoms and rights were sacrificed in this process?
I mean, I think on some of the fundamental right is liberty. That conscription sort of
demands 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, not political objections to this war. And so several
thousand were able to take those provisions. But even then, they faced social sanction,
they faced ridicule, some of them faced intimidation. So those liberty interests,
both individual freedom, religious freedom, those are some of the first things to go.
So what about freedom of speech? Was the silencing of the press, of the voices of the
different people that were objected? Yes, absolutely. And so very soon after the Selective
Service Act is passed, then you get the Espionage Act, which of course is back in the news in 2022.
What's the Espionage Act? 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 one 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? What does that mean? Somebody that
should be willing to sacrifice certain freedoms to fight for their country?
Somebody that's willing to fight the spread freedom elsewhere in the world, spread the American
ideals? Does that begin to tell the story of what it means to be an American?
I think what we see is a change. So citizenship during World War I now includes
the obligation to defend the country, to serve, and to if asked to die for it.
And we certainly see that. And I think we see the close linkage of military service and U.S.
citizenship coming out of this time period. But when you start making lots of demands on people
to fulfill obligations, in turn, they're going to start demanding rights. And we start to see
not necessarily during the war, but after more demands for free speech protections,
more demands for equality, for marginalized groups. And so obligations and rights are
sort of developing in a dynamic relationship. Oh, it's almost like an overreach of power sparked
a sense like, oh, crap, we can't trust centralized power to drag us into a war we need to be able to.
So there's the birth of that tension between the government and the people.
It's a rebirth of it. Of course, that tension is always there. But in its modern form,
I think it comes from this re-intensification of it. So what about, you said that World War
I gave birth to the surveillance state in the U.S.? Can you explain?
Yeah. So the Espionage Act sort of empowers federal organizations to watch other Americans.
They are particularly interested in anyone who is obstructing the draft, anyone who is trying to
kind of organize labor or strikes or radical movements, and anyone who might have sympathy
for Germany, which basically means all German Americans come under surveillance. Initially,
this is a very small scale, but soon every government agency gets involved from the Treasury
Department Secret Service to the Post Office, which is sort of breeding mail, to the Justice
Department, which mobilizes 200,000 volunteers. It's a really significant enterprise,
much of it goes away after the war. But of all the things that go away,
this core of the surveillance state is the thing that persists most fully.
Is this also a place where the size of government starts to grow in these different
organizations or maybe creates a momentum for growth of government? Oh, it's exponential growth
that over the course of the war, by almost any metric you use, the size of the federal budget,
the number of federal employees, the number of soldiers in the standing army, all of those
things skyrocket during the war. They go down after the war, but they never go down to what
they were before. And probably gave a momentum for growth over time. Yes, absolutely.
Did World War I give birth to the military industrial complex in the United States? So
war profiteering, expanding of the war machine in order to financially benefit a lot of parties
involved. So I guess I would maybe break that into two parts. On the one hand, yes,
there is war profiteering. There are investigations of it. In the years after the war,
there's a widespread concern that the profit motive had played too much of a part in the war.
And that's definitely the case. But I think when you try to think of this term,
military industrial complex, it's best to think of it as at what point does the one side lock in
the other, that military choices are shaped by industry objectives and vice versa. And I don't
think that that was fully locked into place during World War I. I think that's really a cold war
phenomenon when the United States is on this intense footing for two generations in a row.
So industrial is really important there. There is companies. So before then,
weapons of war were created, were funded directly by the government. Who was manufacturing the
weapons of war? They were generally manufactured by private industry. There were, of course,
arsenals, sort of 19th century iterations where the government would produce its own weapons,
partly to make sure that they got what they wanted. But most of the weapons of war for all
of the European powers and the United States are produced by private industry.
So why do you say that in military industrial complex didn't start then? What was the
important thing that happened in the Cold War?
I think one way to think about it is the Cold War is a point at which it switches from being a dial
to a ratchet. So during World War I, the relationship between the military and industry
dials up fast and high and stays that way, and it dials back down. Whereas during the Cold War,
sort of the relationship between the two often looks more like a ratchet. It comes unstoppable.
It goes up again. In the way that you start, I think the way the military industrial complex is
often discussed as a system that is unstoppable, like it expands. I mean, if you take a very cynical
view, it creates war so that it can make money. It doesn't just find places where it can help
through military conflict. It creates tensions that directly or indirectly lead to military
conflict that it can then fuel and make money from.
That is certainly one of the concerns of both people who are critical of the First World War
and then also of Dwight Eisenhower when he's president and sort of in his farewell address,
where he sort of introduces the term military industrial complex. And some of it is about
the profit motive, but some of it is a fear that Eisenhower had that no one had an interest in
stopping this and that no one had a voice in stopping it and that the ordinary American
could really do nothing to dial things down. Is it strange to you that we don't often hear
that kind of speech today with Eisenhower speaking about the military industrial complex?
So, for example, we'll have people criticizing the spending on war efforts, but they're not
discussing the machinery of the military industrial complex, like the basic way that human nature
works, that we get ourselves trapped in this thing. They're saying there's better things to spend
money on versus describing a very seemingly natural process of when you build weapons of war
that's going to lead to more war, like it pulls you in somehow.
Yeah, I would say throughout the Cold War and even after the end of it, there has not been a
sustained conversation in the United States about our defense establishment, what we really need
and what serves our interest and to what extent other things like market forces, profit motives
belong in that conversation. What's interesting is that in the generation after the First World
War, that conversation was on the table through a series of investigations in the U.S., the Nye
Committee, in Britain, a Royal Commission, journalistic exposés. This would have been just
talked about constantly in the years between about 1930 and 1936 as people were starting to worry
that storm clouds were gathering in Europe again. Yeah, but it almost seems like those folks get
pushed to the fringes. You're made an activist versus a thinking leader.
Those discussions are often marginalized, framed as conspiracy theory, etc. I think it's important
to realize that in the generation after World War I, this was a serious civic conversation.
It led to investigations of defense finance. It led to experiments in Britain and France and
public finance of war material. I think those conversations need to be reconvened now in the
21st century. Is there any parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine? The reason
I bring it up is because you mentioned there was a hunger for war, a capacity for war that was
already established, and the different parties were just boiling the tensions. There's a case made
that America had a role to play. NATO had a role to play in the current war in Ukraine.
Is there some truth to that when you think about it in the context of World War I?
Or is it purely about the specific parties involved, which is Russia and Ukraine?
I think it's very easy to draw parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine,
but I don't think they really work. The First World War in some ways is generated by
a fundamental conflict in the European system of empires, in the global system of empires.
In many ways, if there's a parallel, the war in Ukraine is the parallel to some of the conflicts
in the Mediterranean and the Balkans in 1911 to 1913, that then later there was a much greater
conflict. I think if there's any lessons to be learned for how not to let World War III look
like World War I, it would be to make sure that systems aren't locked into place,
that escalate wars out of people's expectations. I suppose what I was implying
that this is the early stages of World War III, that in the same way that
several wolves are licking their chops or whatever the expression is, they're creating
tension, they're creating military conflict with a kind of unstoppable imperative for a global war.
I mean, many people that are looking at this are really worried about that.
The forcing function to stop this war is that there's several nuclear powers involved,
which has at least for now worked to stop full-on global war, but I'm not sure that's going to
be the case. In fact, one of the surprising things to me in Ukraine is that still in the 21st century,
we can go to something that involves nuclear powers, not directly yet, but awfully close to
directly, go to a hot war. Do you worry about that, that there's a kind of descent into a
World War I type of scenario? Yes. That keeps me up at night, and I think it should keep
the citizens of both the United States and Russia up at night. I think, again, it gets back to what
I was saying that in the summer of 1914, even then, things that looked like a march toward war
could have been different. I think it's important for leaders of both countries and of all of the
related country, of Ukraine, of the various NATO powers to really imagine off-ramps and to imagine
alternatives and to make them possible, whether it's through diplomacy, whether it's through other
formats. I think that that's the only way to prevent greater escalation.
What's the difference between World War I and the Civil War? In terms of how they defined what it
means to be an American, but also the American citizen's relationship with the war, what the
leaders were doing, is there interesting differences in similarities? Besides the fact that everybody
seems to have forgotten about World War I in the United States, and everyone still remembers Civil
War. I mean, it's true. The American Civil War defines American identity in some ways, along
with the Revolution and the Second World War, more so than any other conflict. It's a fundamentally
different war. It's one because it is a civil war, because of secession, because of the Confederacy.
This is a conflict happening on the territory of the United States between Americans. The
dynamics are really quite different. The leaders, particularly Lincoln, have a different relationship
to the home front, to civilians than, say, Wilson or Roosevelt have in World War I and II.
Also, the way you would tell the story of the Civil War, perhaps similar to the way we tell
the story of World War II, there's a reason to actually fight the war. The way we tell the stories
we're fighting for this idea that all men are created equal, that the war is over slavery,
in part. Perhaps that's a drastic oversimplification of what the war was actually about in the moment,
like how do you get pulled into an actual war versus a hot discussion. The same with World
War II, people kind of framed the narrative that it was against evil, Hitler being evil.
I think the key part of that is probably the Holocaust. That's how you can formulate Hitler's
being evil. If there's no Holocaust, perhaps there's a case to be made that we wouldn't see
World War II as such, quote unquote, good war. That there's an atrocity that had to happen to
make it really, to be able to tell a clear narrative of why we get into this war. Perhaps
such a narrative doesn't exist for World War I, and so it doesn't stay in the American mind. We
tried to sweep it under the rug, given though overall 16 million people died. To you, the
difference is in the fact that you're fighting for ideas and fighting on the homeland. But in
terms of people's participation, fighting for your country, was there similarities there?
Yeah. I mean, I think the Civil War, in both the north and the south, troops are raised
overwhelmingly through volunteer recruitment. There is a draft in both the north and the south,
but it's not significant. Only 8% of Confederate soldiers came in through
conscription. In fact, the mobilization for volunteers, often organized locally around
individual communities or states, creates multiple identities and levels of loyalty
where people both in the north and the south have loyalty both to their state regiments,
to their community militias, and as well to the country. They are fighting over the country,
over the United States. The Union and the Confederacy have conflicting and ultimately
irreconcilable visions of that. That sort of nationalism that comes out of the Union after
the victory and the war is a crucial force shaping America ever since.
What was the neutrality period? Why did the US stay out of the war for so long? What was going on
in that interesting... What made Woodrow Wilson change his mind? What was the interesting dynamic
there? I always say that the United States entered the war in April of 1917, but Americans
entered it right away. Some of them actually went and volunteered and fought almost exclusively on
the side of Britain and France. At least 50,000 joined the Canadian army or the British army
and served. Millions volunteer. They sent humanitarian aid. I think in many ways,
modern war creates modern humanitarianism and we can see that in the neutrality period.
Even if they wanted the United States to stay out of the war, a lot of Americans get involved in it
by thinking about it, caring about it, arguing about it. At the same time, they're worried
that British propaganda is shaping their news system. They are worried that German espionage
is undermining them. They're worried that both Britain and Germany are trying to interfere
in American elections and American news cycles. At the same time, a revolution is breaking out in
Mexico. There are concerns about what's happening in the Western Hemisphere as well as what's
happening in Europe. World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and it didn't.
How did World War I pave the way to World War II? Every nation probably has their own story in this
trajectory towards World War II. How did Europe allow World War II to happen? How did the Soviet
Union, Russia allow World War II to happen and how did America allow World War II to happen in Japan?
Yeah, you're right. The answer is different for each country, right? That in some ways,
in Germany, the culture of defeat and the experience of defeat at the end of World War I
leads to a culture of resentment, recrimination, finger-pointing, blame that makes German politics
very ugly, as one person puts it, brutalizes German politics.
You have places of resentment at the core of the populace and its politics.
In some ways, that lays the groundwork for the kind of politics of resentment and hate
that comes from the Nazis. For the United States, in some ways, the failure to win the peace
sets up the possibility for the next war, that the United States, through Wilson,
is crafting a new international order in order that this will be the war to end all wars.
Because the United States failed to join the League of Nations, you see the United States
really on the hook for another generation. In Asia, the story is more complicated. I think
it's worth bearing that in mind that World War II is a two-front war. It starts in Asia for its own
reasons. World War I is transformative for Japan. It is a time of massive economic expansion.
A lot of that economic wealth is poured into greater industrialization and militarization.
When the military wing in Japanese politics takes over in the 1930s,
there are in some ways flexing muscles that come out of the First World War.
Can you talk about the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles?
What's interesting about that dynamic there, of the parties involved,
of how it could have been done differently to avoid the resentment? Or again, is it inevitable?
So the war ends, and very soon, even before the war is over,
the United States in particular is trying to shape the peace. And the United States is the
central actor at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Woodrow Wilson is there. He's presiding,
and he knows that he calls the shots. So he was respected.
He was respected, but resentfully, in some ways, by the European powers,
Britain and France and Italy, to a lesser extent, who felt that they had sacrificed more.
They had two goals. They wanted to shape the imperial system in order to make sure that
their fundamental economic structures wouldn't change. And they also wanted to
weaken Germany as much as possible so that Germany couldn't rise again.
And what this leads to is a peace treaty that maintains some of the fundamental conflicts of
the imperial system and makes bankruptcy Germany, starves Germany, and feeds this politics of
resentment that make it impossible for Germany to participate in a European order.
So people like historian Neil Ferguson, for example, make the case that
if Britain stayed out of World War I, we would have avoided this whole mess,
and we would potentially even avoid World War II. There's kind of counterfactual history.
Do you think it's possible to make the case for that? That there was a moment,
especially in that case, staying out of the war for Britain that the escalation to a global war
could have been avoided, and one that ultimately ends in a deep global resentment. So where Germany
is resentful not just of France or particular nations, but is resentful of the entire,
I don't know how you define it, the West or something like this, the entire global world.
I wish it were that easy. And I think
it's useful to think in counterfactuals, what if? And if you believe, as historians do,
in causation, that one thing causes another, then you also have to believe in counterfactuals,
right, that if something hadn't happened, then maybe that wouldn't, that would have worked
differently. But I think all the things that led to World War I are multi-causal and nuance.
And this is what historians do. We make things more complicated. And so there was no one thing
that could have turned the tide of history. Oh, if only Hitler had gotten into art school,
or if only Fidel Castro had gotten into the major leagues. Those are interesting thought
experiments, but few events in history, I think, are that contingent.
Well, Hitler's an example of somebody who's a charismatic leader that seems to have a really
disproportionate amount of influence on the tide of history. So if you look at Stalin,
you could imagine that many other people could have stepped into that role.
And the same goes for many of the other presidents through, or even Mao. It seems that
there's a singular nature to Hitler, that you could play the counterfactual,
that if there was no Hitler, you may have not had World War II. He, better than many
leaders in history, was able to channel the resentment of the populace into a very aggressive
expansion of the military and I would say skillful deceit of the entire world in terms of his plans
and was able to effectively start the war. So is it possible that, I mean, could Hitler have been
stopped? Could we have avoided if he just got into art school? Right. Or again, do you feel like
there's a current of events that was unstoppable? I mean, part of what you're talking about is
Hitler the individual as a sort of charismatic leader who's able to mobilize the nation.
And part of it is Hitlerism, his own sort of individual ability to play, for example,
play off his subordinates against one another to set up a system of that nature that in some
ways escalates violence, including the violence that leads to the Holocaust. And some of it is also
Hitlerism as a leader cult. And we see this in many other sort of things where a political movement
surrounds one particular individual who may or may not be replaceable. So yes, the World War II we
got would have been completely different if a different sort of faction had risen to power in
Germany. But Europe, you know, Depression era Europe was so unstable. And democracies collapsed
throughout Western Europe over the course of the 1930s, you know, whether they had charismatic
totalitarian leaders or not. Have you actually read one book I just recently
finished? I'd love to get your opinion from a historian perspective. There's a book called
Blitzed Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Oler. It makes a case that drugs played a very large
meth essentially, played a very large role in World War II. There's a lot of criticism of this book
saying that it's kind of to what you're saying. It takes this one little variable and makes it
like this explains everything. So everything about Hitler, everything about the Blitzkrieg,
everything about the military, the way the strategy, the decisions could be explained through drugs,
or at least implies that kind of thing. And the interesting thing about this book because
Hitler and Nazi Germany is one of the most sort of written about periods of human history.
And this was not drugs were almost entirely not written about in this context. So here come along
this semi historian, because I don't think he's even a historian. He's a lot of his work is fiction.
Hopefully I'm saying that correctly. So he tells a really that's one of the criticisms. He tells
a very compelling story that drugs were at the center of this period and also of the man of
Hitler. What are your sort of feelings and thoughts about if you've gotten a chance to
read this book, but I'm sure there's books like it that tell an interesting perspective,
singular perspective on a war. Yeah, I mean, I have read it. And I also had this sort of eye
opening experience that a lot of historians did. And they're like, why didn't why didn't we think
about this? And I think whether he's, the author older is sort of not a trained academic historian,
but the joy of history is like, you don't have to be one to write good history. And I don't think
anyone sort of criticizes him for that. I like the book as a window into the Third Reich. Of
course, drugs don't explain all of it. But it helps us see the people who supported Hitler,
the ways in which it was that mind altering and performance altering drugs were used to kind
of keep soldiers on the battlefield, the ways in which I think that we don't fully understand
the extent to which the Third Reich is held together with duct tape from a pretty early phase
by like 1940 or 41 even. It's all smoke and mirrors. And I think that wartime propaganda,
both Germans trying to say, we're winning everything and America trying to mobilize
and the other allies to mobilize against Germany, described a more formidable enemy than it really
was by 1941 and 42. Yeah. I mean, I could see both cases. One is that duct tape doesn't make the man,
but also as an engineer, I'm a huge fan of duct tape because it does seem to solve a lot of problems.
And I do worry that this perspective that the book presents about drugs is somehow to the mind
really compelling because it's almost like the mind or at least my mind searches for an answer.
How could this have happened? And it's nice to have a clean explanation. And drugs is one
popular one when people talk about steroids and sports. The moment you introduce the topic of
steroids, somehow the mind wants to explain all success in the context was because this person
was on steroids, Lance Armstrong. Well, it's like it's a very sticky idea. Certain ideas,
certain explanations are very sticky. And I think that's really dangerous because then you lose the
full context. And also in the case of drugs, it removes the responsibility from the person,
both for the military genius and the evil. And I think it's a very dangerous thing to do.
Because something about the mind, maybe it's just mine, it's sticky to this. Well,
drugs explain it. If the drugs didn't happen, then it will be very different. It worries me
how compelling it is of an explanation. So that's why it's maybe better to think of it as a window
into the third rank than an explanation of it. But it's also a nice exploration of Hitler the
man. For some reason, discussing his habits, especially later in the war, his practices with
drugs gives you a window into the person. It reminds you that this is a human being,
like a human being that gets emotional in the morning, gets thoughtful in the morning, hopeful,
sad, depressed, angry, like a story of emotions of the human being. Somehow we construct a,
which is a pretty dangerous thing to do, we construct an evil monster out of Hitler when in
reality, he's a human being like all of us. I think the lesson there is the soldier instant
lesson, which is all of us to some degree are capable of evil. Or maybe if you want to make
a less powerful statement, many of our leaders are capable of evil, that this Hitler is not
truly singular in history. That yeah, when the resentment of the populace matches the right
charismatic leader, it's easy to make the kind of not easy, but it's possible to frequently make
the kind of initiation of military conflict that happened in World War II. By the way,
because you said not a trained historian, one of the most compelling and, I don't know, entertaining
and fascinating exploration of World War I comes from Dan Collins. I don't know if you've
gotten a chance to listen to his sort of podcast form telling of the blueprint for Armageddon,
which is the telling of World War I. What do you think about Dan Collins? You yourself,
as a historian who has studied, who has written about World War I, do you enjoy that kind of
telling of history? Absolutely. And I think, again, you know, you don't need a PhD in history to be
a historian, right? Does every historian agree with that? He gets quite a bit of criticism from
historians. You know, I mean, you know, we like to argue with each other and stick with each other,
but the one thing I have no patience for is when we like pull rank on each other. You know, I think
we depend on, you know, if you're, you know, a historian in a university with degrees and
research materials, you know, you depend on the work of people in some local community,
like recording oral history, saving documents. And history is a social science, but it's also a
storytelling art. And, you know, history books are the ones you find on the shelves and bookstores
that people read for fun. And you can appreciate both the knowledge production as well as the
storytelling. And when you get a good oral storyteller, like Dan Carlin, there's a reason
that thousands and hundreds of thousands of people tune in. Yeah, but he definitely suffers
from anxiety about getting things corrected. It's very, it's very difficult. Well, our first job
is to get the facts, the facts corrected and then to tell the story off of those.
But the facts are so fuzzy. So it's, I mean, you have the probably my favorite telling World War
II is William Shire's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and, or at least not telling the
Nazi Germany. And that goes to primary sources a lot, which is like, I suppose that's the honest
way to do it. But it's tough. It's really tough to write that way, to really go to primary sources
as always. And I think the one of the things that Dan tries to do, which is also really tough
to do, perhaps easier in oral history, is try to make you feel what it was like to be there.
Which I think he does by trying to tell the story of like individual soldiers and
do you find that telling like individual citizens, do you find that kind of telling of
history compelling? Yeah, I mean, I think we need historical imagination. And I think historical
imagination teaches something very valuable, which is humility to realize that there are
other people who've lived on this planet and they organized their lives differently. And
you know, they made it through just fine too. And, you know, I think that that kind of
meeting other people from the past can be actually a very useful skill for meeting
people unlike you in the present. Unlike you, but also like you. I think both are
humbling. One realizing that they lived in a different space and time, but two realizing that
if you were placed in that space and time, you might have done all the same things, whether it's
the brave, good thing or the evil thing. Yeah, absolutely. And you get also a sense of
possibility. You know, there's this famous line, right, that, you know, those who do not learn
history are condemned to repeat it. But I think the other half is true as well, which is those who
do not learn history don't get the chance to repeat it, right? You know, that we're not the
first people on this planet to face, you know, any certain kinds of problems. You know, other
people have lived through worlds like this one before. It's like when you fall in love as a
teenager for the first time, and then there's a breakup, you think it's the greatest tragedy
tragedy that has ever happened in the world. You're the first person, even though like Romeo
and Juliet and so on had had this issue, you're the first person that truly feels the catastrophic
heartbreak of that experience. It's good to be reminded that no, the human condition is what it
is. We've lived through it at the individual and the societal scale. Let me ask you about nationalism,
which I think is at the core of I want you poster. Is nationalism destructive or empowering to a
nation? And we can use different words like patriotism, which is in many ways synonymous
to nationalism, but in recent history, perhaps because of the Nazis, has slowly parted ways
that somehow nationalism is when patriotism, patriotism gone bad or something like this.
Yeah, they're different. Patriotism is in some ways best thought of as an emotion and a feeling
of love of country, literally. And in some ways, that's a necessary condition to participate in
nationalism. To me, I think nationalism is crucial in a world organized around
nation states. And you have to believe that you are engaged in a common project together.
In the contemporary United States, in some ways, that question is actually on the table
in ways that it hasn't been in the past. But you have to believe that you're engaged in a
common project, that you have something in common with the person with whom you share this nation
and that you would sacrifice for them, whether it's by paying taxes for them or
going to war to defend them. That's a vision of what we might call civic nationalism.
That's the good version. The question is whether you can have that without having
exclusionary nationalism, hating the other, fearing the other, saying, yeah, you're part
of this nation against all others. And I think there's a long tradition in America of a very
inclusive nationalism that is open, inclusive, welcoming, and new people to this shared project.
That's something to be defended. Exclusionary nationalism is based on ethnic hatreds and
others that we see throughout the world. Those are things to be afraid of.
But there is a kind of narrative in the United States that a nationalism that includes the
big umbrella of democratic nations, nations that strive for freedom. And everybody else is against
is against freedom and against human nature. And it just so happens that it's a half and half
split across the world. So that's imperialism. That feels like it beats the drum of war.
Yeah. And I mean, I don't want to paint too rosy a picture. And certainly,
you know, the United States as a nation has often found it easier to define ourselves against
something than to clarify exactly what we're for. Yeah. Yeah. The Cold War, China today. That's not
only United States, I suppose that's human nature. It's we need a competitor. It's almost like maybe
the success of human civilization requires figuring out how to construct competitors
that don't result in global war. Yes. Or figuring out how to turn enemies into rivals and competitors.
There's a real difference. You can compete with competitors. You fight with enemies.
Yeah. With competitors as a respect, maybe even a love underlying the competition.
What lessons, what are the biggest lessons you take away from World War One?
Maybe we talked about several, but you know, you look back at the 20th century, what
as a historian, what do you learn about human nature, about human civilization,
about history from looking at this war? I think 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. At the end of the day, in 1918, one side did win that,
but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems.
In the end, the regular people paid the price of their lives.
They did, and people who had been told that their lives were cheap remembered that.
And it reshapes mass politics for the rest of the 20th century, both in Europe and around the
world. Yeah, the cost of a death of a single soldier is not just, or a single civilian,
is not just the cost of that single life. It's the resentment, that the anger, the hate that
reverberates throughout. One of the things I saw in Ukraine is the birth of a scale of
generational hate, not towards administrations or leaders, but towards entire peoples.
I mean, overnight that hate is created, and it takes perhaps decades for that hate to dissipate.
It takes decades, and it takes collective effort to build institutions that divert
that hate into other places. One of the biggest things I thought was not part of the calculus,
and when the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, is the creation of hate. When you drop a bomb,
even if it hits military targets, even if it kills soldiers, which in that case,
it didn't. There's a very large amount of civilians. What does that do to the,
how many years, minutes, hours, months, and years of hate do you create with a single bomb you
drop? And they calculate that. Literally, in the Pentagon, have a chart, how many people will hate
us, how many people does it take, do some science here, how many people does it take. When you have
a million people that hate you, how many of them will become terrorists? How many of them
will do something to the nation you love and care about, which is the United States,
will do something that will be very costly? I feel like there was not a plot and a chart.
It was more about short-term effects. Yes. Again, it's the idea of using military force
to solve political problems. And I think there's a squandering of goodwill that people have around
the world toward the United States. That's a respect for its economy, for its consumer products,
and so forth. And I think that's been lost a lot of that. Do you think leaders can stop war?
I have perhaps a romantic notion, perhaps, because I do these podcasts in person and so on,
that leaders that get in a room together and can talk, they can stop war. I mean,
that's the power of a leader, especially one in an authoritarian regime,
that they can, through camaraderie, alleviate some of the emotions associated with the ego.
Yes. Leaders can stop war if they get into the room when they understand
from the masses in their countries that war is something that they want stopped.
So the people ultimately have a really big say.
They do. It was mass movements by people in the United States for the nuclear freeze
in Russia pushing for openness that brought, for example, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
to Reykjavik to debate and eventually put caps on nuclear weapons.
Those two people made choices in the room that made that possible,
but they were both being pushed and knew they were being pushed by their people.
Boy, that's a tough one. It puts a lot of responsibility on the German people, for example.
In both wars, we fans of history tend to conceive of history as a meeting of leaders.
We think of Chamberlain. We think of Churchill and the importance of them in the Second World War.
We think about Hitler and Stalin and think that if certain conversations happened,
the war could have been avoided. You tell the story of how many times Hitler
and Nazi Germany's military might was not sufficient. They could have been easily stopped.
The pacifists, the people who believed Hitler or foolish enough to believe Hitler,
didn't act properly. If the leaders just woke up to that idea.
In fact, Churchill is a kind of representation of that, but in your conception here,
it's possible that Churchill was also a representation of the British people,
even though seemingly unpopular. That force was, they gave birth to somebody like Churchill,
who said, we'll never surrender. She'll fight in the beaches.
I think World War II Britain is a good example of that. It is clearly a dynamic leader who has
his pulse on what the people want and demand and are willing to do. It's a dynamic art of
leading that and shaping those wants at the same time as knowing that you're bound by them.
Well, then if we conceive of history in this way, let me ask you about our presidents.
You are taking on the impossibly difficult task of teaching a course in a couple of years here,
or in one year, called the history of American presidential elections.
So if the people are in part responsible for leaders,
how can we explain what is going on in America that we have the leaders that we do today?
So if we think about the elections of the past several cycles,
I guess let me ask, are we a divided nation? Are we more of a divided nation that were in the past?
What do you understand about the American citizen in the beginning of this century
from the leaders we have elected?
Yes, obviously, we are a divided country in our rhetoric, in our day-to-day politics.
But we are nowhere near as divided as we have been in other periods in our history,
right? The most obvious, of course, being in the American Civil War, right, 150 years ago.
And the distinction is not just that we haven't come to blows, but that we are fundamentally
one society, one economy, and deeply integrated as a nation, both domestically and on the world stage
in ways that look nothing like the United States in 1861. Will political rhetoric continue to be
extreme? Of course, but we're not as divided as people think we are.
Well, then if you actually look throughout human history, does it always get so outside
of the people that do the elections get as contentious as they've recently been?
So there's a kind of perception that has been very close, and there's a lot of accusations,
a lot of tensions. It's very heated. It's almost fueling the machine of division. Has that often
been the case? It has. It hasn't. I mean, I do think right now is different. And there,
it's worth distinguishing, are there deep social or economic divisions, which I don't
actually think that there are, versus partisanship in particular, sort of the rivalry between the
two parties. And it's very clear that we are in an era of what political scientists call
hyperpartisanship, right? And that the two parties have taken fundamentally different
positions and moved further apart from one another. And that is what I think people talk
about when they say our country is divided. So the country may not be divided even if our
politics are highly partisan. That is a divergence from other time periods in our history.
So I wonder if this kind of political partisanship is actually an illusion of division. I sometimes
feel like we mostly all agree on some basic fundamentals. And the things that people
allegedly disagree on are really blown out of proportion. And there's like a media machine
and the politicians really want you to pick a blue side and a red side. And because of that,
somehow, I mean, families break up over Thanksgiving dinner about who they voted for.
There's a really strong pressure to be the red or blue. And I wonder if that's a feature or a bug.
Whether this is just part of the mechanism of democracy that we want to,
even if there's not a real thing to be divided over, we need to construct it such that you can
always have a tension of ideas in order to make progress to figure out how to progress as a nation.
I think we're figuring that out in real time, right? On the one hand, it's easy to say that
it's a feature of a political system that has two parties, right? And the United States is,
in some ways, unique in not being a parliamentary democracy. And so in some ways,
you would think that would be the feature that is causing partisanship and to reach these heights.
That said, we can even see in parliamentary systems all around the world that the same kinds of
rhetorics of irreconcilable division, a kind of politics of emotion are proliferating around the
world. Some of that, as you say, I think is not as real as it appears on television, on social
media, and other formats. So I don't know that other countries that are experiencing sort of
political conflict, I'm not sure that they're deeply divided either. So I've had the fortune
of being intellectually active through the George Bush versus Al Gore election,
then the Obama and just every election since. And it seems like a large percentage of those
elections. There's been a claim that the elections were rigged, that there is some conspiracy,
corruption, malevolence on the other side. I distinctly remember when Donald Trump won in 2016,
a lot of people I know said that election was rigged. And there's different explanations,
including Russian influence. And then in 2020, I was just running in Austin along the river.
And somebody said, like, oh, huge fan of the podcast. And they said, like, what do you think
of it? This is just not right. What's happening in this country that the 2020 election was obviously
rigged from their perspective in electing Joe Biden versus Donald Trump? Do you think there's
a case to be made for and against each claim in the full context of history of our elections being
rigged? I think the American election system is fundamentally sound and reliable. And I think
that the evidence is clear for that regardless of which election you're looking at. In some ways,
whether you look at a presidential election or even a local county election for dog catcher or
something, that the amount of time and resources and precision that go into voter registration,
vote counting, certification processes are crucial to democratic institutions.
I think when someone says rigged, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they're
coming from, they're looking for an answer. They're looking for that one answer for what is in fact a
complex system. So on the left, when they say rigged, they may be pointing to a wide range of
ways in which they think that the system is tilted through gerrymandering,
sort of misrepresentation through the electoral college. On the right, when people say rigged,
they may be concerned about voter security, about ways in which the mainstream media may
control messages and in which, in both cases, the feeling is it's articulated as my vote
didn't get counted right. But the deeper concern is my vote doesn't count. My voice
isn't being heard. So no, I don't think the elections are rigged.
So let me push back. There's a comfort to the story that they're not rigged.
And a lot of us like to live in comfort. So people who articulate conspiracy theories say,
sure, it's nice to be comfortable. But here's the reality. And the thing they articulate is
there's incentives in close elections, which we seem to have not stop close elections.
There's so many financial interests. There's so many powerful people.
Surely, you can construct not just with the media and all the ways you describe both on the left
and the right, the elections could be rigged. But literally, actually, in a fully illegal way,
manipulate the results of votes. Surely, there's incentive to do that.
And I don't think that's that's a totally ridiculous argument. Because it's like, all right,
well, I mean, it actually lands to the question, which is a hard question for me to ask,
because ultimately, as an optimist of how many malevolent people out there and how many malevolent
people are required to rig an election. So how many what is the face transition for system to
become from like corruption light to corruption, to a high level of corruption, such that you
could do things like rig elections, which is what happens quite a lot in many nations in the world
even today. So yes, there is interference in elections. And there has been in American history,
right? And we can go all the way back into the 18th century. You don't have to go back to Texas in
the 1960s, LBJ, to find examples of direct interference in the outcome of elections. And
there are incentives to do that. Those incentives will only feel more existential as hyperpartisanship
makes people think that the outcome of the elections are a matter of black and white,
or life and death. And you will see people organizing every way they can to shape elections.
We saw this in the 1850s when settlers, pro and anti-slavery, flooded into Kansas
to try to sort of determine the outcome of an election. And we see this in the reconstruction
period, right? When the Ku Klux Klan shows up to kind of, you know, to block the doors for black
voters in the south, you know, that this history is not new. It's there. I think what the reason
why I think that the system is sound is not, or the reason, when I say I believe that the election
system is fundamentally sound, it's not, I'm not trying to be reassuring or encourage complacency,
right? I'm saying like, you know, this is something that we need to do and to work on.
So the current electoral mechanisms are sufficiently robust, even if there is corruption,
even if there is rigging, they're like the force that corrects itself, corrects and ensures that
nobody gets out of line is much stronger than the other incentives, which are like the corrupting
incentives. And that's the thing I talked about corrupt, you know, visiting Ukraine talking
about corruption, what a lot of people talk about corruption as being a symptom, not if the system
allows, creates the incentives for there to be corruption, humans will always go for corruption.
That's just, you have to assume that the power of the United States is that it constructs systems that
prevent you from being corrupted scale, at least I mean, depends what you believe, but most of us,
if you believe in this country, you have to, you believe in the in the self-correcting
mechanisms of corruption, that even if that desire is in the human heart, the system resists it,
prevents it. That's your current belief. Yes, as of today. But I do think that those,
that will require oversight by institutions, ideally ones that are insulated as much as
possible from partisan politics, which is very difficult right now. And it will require the
demands of the American people that they want these elections to be fair and secure. And that
means being willing to lose them, regardless of which party you're in favor of.
So what do you think about the power of the media to create partisanship? I'm really worried
that there's a huge incentive, speaking of incentives, to divide the country in the media and
the politicians, I'm not sure where it originates, but it feels like it's the media. Maybe it's a
very cynical perspective on journalism, but it seems like if we're angry and divided as evenly
as possible, you're going to maximize the number of clicks. So it's almost like the media wants to
elect people that are going to be the most divisive maximizing. And the worry I have is they are not
beyond either feeding, or if you want to be very cynical, manufacturing narratives that
lead that division, like the narrative of an election being rigged. Because if you convinced
half the populace that the election was completely rigged, that's a really good way to get a lot
of clicks. And the very cynical view is I don't know if the media machine
will stop the destruction of our democracy in service of getting more clicks.
It may destroy our entire democracy just to get more clicks, just because the fire,
as the thing burns down, will get clicks. Am I putting too much blame on the media here?
The machine of it. You're diagnosing the incentive structure.
You're depicting that with 100% accuracy. But I think history teaches that you might be giving
the media too much causal power. That the American people are smarter than the media
that they consume. And even today, we know that. People who consume just Fox or just MSNBC
know what they're consuming. So I don't think that media will be the solution.
And I certainly don't think that returning to a media structure of the mid-20th century with
three news channels that all tell us one story, that's no golden age that we're trying to get back
to, for sure. Well, there is a novel thing in human history, which is Twitter and social media
and so on. So we're trying to find our footing as a nation to figure out how to think about
politics, how to maintain our basic freedoms, our sense of democracy, of our interaction
with government, and so on, on this new media or medium of social media. How do you think
Twitter changed things? Do you think Twitter is good for democracy? Do you think it has changed
what it means to be an American citizen? Or is it just the same old media mechanism?
It has not changed what it means to be an American citizen. It may have changed the
day-to-day sound of being and the experience of it. It got noisier, it got louder, and it
got more de-centered. I think Twitter is paradoxical. On the one hand, it is a fundamentally
democratic platform. In some ways, it democratizes institutions that had gatekeepers and authority
figures for a very long time. But on the other hand, it's not a democratic institution at all.
It's a for-profit corporation, and it operates under those principles. That said, it's an
institution of American and global life that the people of the United States have the authority
to regulate or reshape as they see fit, both that and other major media players.
It's one of the most dramatic decisions that illustrate both sides of what you're saying is
when Twitter decided to ban, I think permanently, the president of the United States, Donald Trump,
off of Twitter. Can you make the case that that was a good idea and make the case that that was
a bad idea? Can you see both perspective on this? Yes. I think the simple fact of the matter is
Twitter is a platform. It has rules of service. Twitter concluded that President Trump had
violated the terms of service and blocked them. If you have rules, you have to enforce them.
Did it have consequences? It had direct and predictable consequences
of creating a sense among millions of Americans that Twitter had taken aside in politics,
or confirming their belief that it had done so. Will it have unintended consequences?
This is where the historian can come in and say, yes, there's always unintended consequences,
and we don't know what it would mean for political figures to be excluded from
various media platforms under these notions that they had violated terms of service, etc.
To me, I'm generally against censorship, but to take Twitter's perspective,
it's unclear to me, in terms of unintended consequences, whether censoring a human being
from being part of your platform is going to decrease or increase the amount of hate in the
world. As a strong case to be made that banning somebody like Donald Trump increases the amount
of resentment among people, and that's a very large number of people that support him,
or even love him, or even see him as a great president, one of the greatest this country has
had. If you completely suppress his voice, you're going to intensify the support that he has
from just the regular support for another human being who ran for president,
to somebody that becomes an almost heroic figure for that set of people. Now, the flip side is
removing a person from a platform like Donald Trump might lessen the megaphone of that particular
person, might actually level the democratic notion that everybody has a voice. So basically,
removing the loud extremes is helpful for giving the center the calm, the thoughtful voices more
power. And so, in that sense, that teaches a lesson that don't be crazy in any one direction.
Don't go full, don't go Lenin, don't go Hitler, don't like you have to stay in the middle,
there's divisions in the middle, there's discussions in the middle, but stay in the middle.
That's sort of the steelman in the case for censoring. But I, boy, is censorship a slippery
slope. And also, boy, is Twitter becoming a thing that's more than just a company. It seems like
it's a medium of communication that we use for information, for knowledge, for wisdom even.
And during the period of COVID, we used it to gain an understanding of what the hell is going on,
what should we do? What's the state of the art science? Science fundamentally transformed during
the time of COVID because you have no time for the full review cycle that science usually goes
through. And some of the best sources of information for me, from the conspiracy theory to the best
doctors was Twitter, the data, the stats, all that kind of stuff. And that feels like more than a
company. And then Twitter and YouTube in different places took a really strong stance on COVID,
which is the laziest stance in my opinion, which is we're going to listen to whatever CDC or the
institutions have said. But the reality is, you're an institution of your own now, you're kind of
depressed. It's a really difficult position to take. But I wish they have stepped up and
take on the full responsibility and the pain of fighting for the freedom of speech.
Yes, they need to do that. But I'm struck by some of the things that you said,
ways in which Twitter has the power to shape the conversation. And I don't think in a democratic
society, democratic polities should cede that power to for-profit companies.
Do you agree that it's possible that Twitter has that power currently? Do you sense that it has the
power? Is that my sense is Twitter has the power to start wars, like tweets have the power to start
wars to change the direction of elections? Maybe in the sense in the ways in which a wave has the
power to wash away sand. It's still the medium. It's not in itself an actor. It's how actors use
the platform, which requires us to scrutinize the structure of the platform and access to it.
Unfortunately, it's not maybe a similarity to the wave. It's not just a medium. It's a medium
plus. It's a medium that enables virality, that benefits from virality of engagement. And that
means singular voices can have a disproportionate impact. Not even voices, singular ideas,
dramatic ideas can have a disproportionate impact. And so that actually threatens,
it's almost like, I don't know what the equivalent is in nature, but it's a wave that can grow
exponentially because of the initial intensity of the wave. I don't know how to describe this,
a dynamical system, but it feels like there is a responsibility there not to accelerate voices
just because they get a lot of engagement. You have to have a proportional representation of
that voice. But you're saying that a strong democracy should be robust to that.
A strong democracy can and should and will be. I think the other thing historian will tell you
about Twitter is that this too shall pass. But I do think the structures of the platform,
of the algorithm, of this and other major players are eligible for scrutiny by democratic institutions.
So in preparing to teach the course, the history of American presidential elections leading up to
the 2024 elections. So one of the lessons of history is this too shall pass. So don't make
everything about this is going to either save or destroy our nation. That seems to be like the
message of every single election as I'm doing Trump hands. Do you think Donald Trump, what do
you think about the 2024 election? Do you think Donald Trump runs? Do you think the tension will
grow? Or was that a singular moment? Do you think you'll be like AOC versus Trump or whoever,
whatever the most drama maximizing thing, or will things stabilize?
Historians don't like to predict the future, but I can predict this one that it will not be
calm and stabilized election. I think as of the time that we're talking in 2022, there are too
many open questions, particularly about whether Joe Biden will run for reelection. He says he will,
but the jury I think is out on that. I can't predict whether Donald Trump will run for election
or not. We do know that President Trump doesn't like to start things he can't win,
and if the polling data suggests that he's not a credible candidate, he might be reluctant to
enter the race and might find more appealing the sideline kingmaker role that he's been
crafting since he left the White House. I think there are plenty of people who are
dreaming that there's some sort of centrist candidate, whether it's a conservative Democrat
or a liberal Republican who will save us from all of this, either within the party or in a
third party run. I don't think that's likely. Why are we getting them? Why don't you think
it's likely? What's the explanation? This seems to be a general hunger for a person like this.
You would, but the system sorts it out that the primary systems and the party candidate
selection systems will favor more partisan views, more conservative Republicans, more
liberal Democrats, as the kind of center candidates. It seems like the system prefers
mediocre leaders, mediocre partisan leaders to take a cynical look, but maybe I'm
romanticizing the leaders of the past, and maybe I'm just remembering the great leaders of the past.
Yeah, I can assure you there's plenty of mediocre partisans in the 19th century.
Okay. And the 20th. Well, let me ask you about platforming. Do you think
Donald, it's the Torta question, but I was torn about whether to talk to Donald Trump on this
podcast as a historian. What would you advise? I think, I mean, this is a difficult question
for historians who want to make sure that they know what Americans are thinking and talking about
four centuries later. So one of the things that at least my understanding is that when
President Trump was banned from Twitter, his account was also deleted. And that is one of
the most valuable sources that historians will use to understand that the era and parts of it were
archived and reconstructed. But in that sense, I think that that is also a real
loss to the historical record. I mean, I think that your podcast shows, you'll talk to anyone.
So I'm here, right? So I'm not in the business of saying, don't talk.
That's one of the difficult things when I think about Hitler. I think Hitler, Stalin,
I don't know if World War I quite has the same intensity of controversial leaders,
but one of the sad things from a historian perspective is how few interviews Hitler has
given or Stalin has given. And that's such a difficult thing because it's obvious that
talking to Donald Trump, that talking to Xi Jinping, talking to Putin is really valuable
from a historical perspective to understand. But then you think about the momentary impact
of such a conversation and you think, well, depending on how the conversation goes, you could
steer or flame, what is it, feed the flame of war or conflict or abuses of power and
things like this. And that's, I think, the tension between the journalist and the historian.
Because when journalists interview dictators, for example, one of the things that strikes me
is they're often very critical of the dictator. They're like, they're basically attacking them
in front of their face as opposed to trying to understand. Because what I perceive they're
doing is they're signaling to the other journalists that they're on the right side of history kind
of thing. But that's not very productive. And it's also why the dictators and leaders often
don't do those interviews. It's not productive to understanding who the human being is. To
understand, you have to empathize. Because few people, I think, few leaders do something
from a place of malevolence. I think they really do think they're doing good. And not even for
themselves, not even for selfish reasons, I think they're doing great for the, they're doing the
right thing for their country or for whoever the group they're leading. And to understand that,
you have to, and by the way, a large percent of the country often supports them. I bet if you pull,
legitimately pull people North Korea, they will believe that their leader is doing the right
thing for their country. And so to understand that, you have to empathize. So that's the tension
of the journalist, I think, and the historian, because obviously the historian doesn't care.
They really want to, but they care obviously deeply. But they know that history requires
deep understanding of the human being in the full context. Yeah, it's a tough decision to make.
Yeah. Well, I think it's both for journalists and historians, the challenge is not to be too close
to your subject and not to be overly influenced and used by them. When you're talking to a
living subject, which historians do, it's a matter of making sure that you triangulate
their story with the rest of the record. And that may paint a different picture of the person
and will prevent you as a journalist or a historian from just telling someone else's story.
And historians also have the benefit of going back 30, 40 years and finding all the other stories
and figuring out, playing two truths and a lie, which parts are accurate, which are not. And
journalists do that work in a day-to-day basis. But historians, we get a little more time to
think about what we're doing. Well, I personally also think it's deeply
disrespectful to the populace, to people to censor and ignore a person that's supported
by a very large number of people. I personally feel like you owe the citizens of this country
a deep empathy and understanding of the leaders they support,
even if you disagree with what they say. To me, I'm much more worried about the resentment
of the censorship, that having a good conversation with Donald Trump is ultimately valuable.
Because I think, especially in this case, I agree with you that Donald Trump is not a singular
person. He represents a set of feelings that a large number of people have,
and whatever those feelings are, you can try to figure out by talking to people,
but also talking to the man and then seeing the interplay there. What does this really represent?
In this period in history, in this slice of the world, ultimately, understanding, I think, leads to
compassion and love and unity, which is how this whole thing progresses. The tension between
the different sides is useful to have a good conversation, but ultimately coming up with
the right answer and progressing towards that answer is how you make progress.
Do you think a pure democracy can work? We have this representative of democracy,
with these contentious elections and so on. When we start a civilization on Mars,
which becomes more and more realistic technologically, we can have a more direct access to be able to vote
on issues and vote for ideas. Do you think it can work?
I don't think we have to go to Mars to do it. I think the answer is not to flip a switch and turn
on something called pure democracy. When people are not ready for it, when they're
incentive structures are not structured for it, but you can experiment with more democratic forms
of governance one after another, whether it's experimenting with technology to find new ways
of getting greater rates of participation in democracy. I think that we see some experiments
in more complicated systems of voting that, in fact, might actually be more reflective
of people's choices than simply picking one candidate, rank choice voting, or runoffs,
other kinds of things. I think that we can think more creatively about something like
participatory budgeting, in which we put all this money into the government, and then we
should, as a people, there are more democratic ways of how we spend it.
I think the most urgent in some level is a more democratic form of foreign policymaking,
that foreign policymaking, decision making about the military, about foreign policy
is very ways insulated from popular participation in modern American history.
Technology is not going to solve this. It's a combination of technology and human creativity,
but I think we can start heading that direction. Whether we get there before we get to Mars,
I don't know. What interesting lessons and thoughts, if you look at the fundamentals
of the history of American elections, do you hope to reveal when you try to solve this?
Do you hope to reveal when you try to teach the class? How will those fundamentals be met
by the students that receive that wisdom? What do you think about this dance, especially
such an interesting idea, and I hope you do go through with this kind of idea,
is look at the history while the next one is happening. Yes. I think it's worth remembering
that the students who are typical American student who's in college right now has lived
their entire life after the election of 2000 and Bush v. Gore. And after 9-11 probably.
And after all of these things. And so on the one hand, they take partisanship and
contentious elections for granted. They don't, I think, share some vision that things used to
be different. They don't remember a world that had lots of moderate Democrats and liberal
Republicans sort of running around in it. But so in some ways, it's a way of looking back
into the past to find other ways of organizing our politics. It's also a way of reassuring
students that we have been through contentious and even violent elections before in our history.
And that people have defended the right to vote. People have risked their lives to vote.
I think they will understand that as well. And maybe
knowledge of history here can help deescalate the emotions you might feel about one candidate
or another. And from a place of calmness, you can more easily arrive at wisdom.
That's my hope.
Just as a brief aside, you, but nevertheless, you wrote the book Bound by War that describes
a century of war in the Pacific. So looking at this slice of geography and power. So most
crucially through the partnership between the United States and the Philippines.
Can you tell some aspect of the story that is often perhaps not considered when you start to look
more at the geopolitics of Europe and the Soviet Union and the United States?
How did the war in the Pacific define the 20th century?
Yeah, I came to this book Bound by War from a sense that our stories were too lopsided
towards Europe. That American history, when viewed from the Pacific, specifically in the 20th
century, helps us understand American power in some new ways. Not only American projection of
power into Asia, but also the ways in which American power affected people in Asia. Either
as in places like the Philippines, where the United States had a colony for almost 50 years,
or Asian Americans, people who had migrated over their descendants in the United States.
And those linkages between the United States and Asia, particularly the US-Philippine connection,
I think, were something that needed to be traced across the 20th century because it's a way,
kind of a new way of seeing American power from a different angle. You see it in that way.
What are some aspects that define America from when you take the perspective of the Pacific?
What military conflict and the asymmetry of power there?
So I start in 1898 with the US invasion of the Philippines. It's a conquest and annexation.
And I think, in many ways, this is a defining conflict of the 20th century that's often completely
overlooked. We're described, I think incorrectly, as merely a war with Spain, that the war in the
Philippines is our first extended overseas conflict, our first conflict in what would come to be called
the developing world or third world. It's a form of counterinsurgency. This is the US army
sort of learning lessons that are then repeated again in the Second World War in Korea, Vietnam,
and even after 9-11. Is the Philippines our friends or enemies in this history?
Well, that's the interesting part. The book focuses in particular on Filipinos who fight
with the Americans who fought in the US army and navy over the course of the 20th century.
And they are in a fundamentally ironic position. They are from the Philippines,
and they're fighting for the United States, which is the colonial power occupying their country.
And I think that irony persists. So if you look at sort of polling data where they ask people
all around the world, do you think positively or negatively about the United States? That the
highest responses are from the Philippines. Filipinos view the United States more favorably than
people from any other country in the world, including America. They think more favorably
of Americans than Americans do. And so sort of unpacking that irony is part of what I'm
trying to get at in the book. What was the people power revolution and what lessons can
we learn from it? You kind of assign an important, a large value to it in terms of what we can learn
for the American project. Yeah. So in 1986, the president of the Philippines,
Ferdinand Marcos is overthrown by a popular revolution known as people power in the wake
of a contested and probably almost certainly rigged election that sort of confirms his rule.
When that is overturned through sort of mass movements in the Philippines, it's also sort of
confirmed in many ways by the reluctance of the United States to intervene to prop up a Cold War
ally. Ferdinand Marcos had supported American policy throughout his administration. The Reagan
administration, Ronald Reagan's president at the time, basically chooses not to support him.
That's a personally wrenching decision for Reagan himself. But he's being shaped in many ways by
the emerging voices of neoconservative political foreign policy voices, in particular Paul
Wolfowitz and the State Department and others who see sort of movements for democracy and
democratization that then kind of take fire in the late 20th century in Latin America,
in South Korea, in Eastern Europe, and all around the world until it hits the wall in
Tiananmen Square in June 1989. What's that wall? What do you mean by it hits the wall?
So there are global movements for democratization, for opening up throughout the world, starting
in the 1980s. And obviously they continue in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall
in 1989. I say it hits the wall in China with the protests in Tiananmen Square that are blocked
and that are crushed and I think represent a real sort of turning point in the history of
democratic institutions on a global scale in the late 20th century.
So there's some places where the fight for freedom will work and some places not. And that's the kind
of lesson from the 20th to take forward to the 21st century.
No, I think the lesson is maybe one that we talked about earlier, that there's this dynamic
dance between leaders, whether totalitarian leaders or leaders of democratic movements
and the people that they're leading. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Let me ask a big ridiculous question because we talked about sort of presidential elections.
Now, this is objectively, definitively, you have to answer one person, who's the greatest
president in American history? Oh, that's easy. Yeah. Abraham Lincoln.
Is that easy, not George Washington? Washington had the statesman qualities he understood,
his power as the first president. Also relinquished power. He was willing to relinquish power.
But Lincoln has the combination of personal leadership, a fundamental moral character,
and just the ability to fight the fight of politics, to play the game of it,
to get where he's going, to play the short game and the long game, to work with his enemies,
to block them when he had to. And he gets the United States through the Civil War,
so you got to give him some credit for that. And it's pretty good at making speeches.
Obviously, it helps that he's a remarkable speaker and able to convey those kinds of visions.
But he is first and foremost a politician and probably the best one we have.
Both of getting elected and at ruling. In some ways, better at the doing than at
the getting elected. The election of 1860 is just a hot mess that could have worked out
many different ways. And even the election of 1864, when we have a presidential election in
the middle of a civil war, it was not a foregone conclusion that Lincoln would be reelected.
So, you know, both times, he's sort of, you know, he's not a master campaigner by any means,
but he was a master politician as a governor.
Do we have leaders like that today? So one perspective is like leaders aren't
ain't what they used to be. And another perspective is, well, we always romanticize
stuff that happens in the past. We forget the flaws and remember the great moments.
Yeah, both of those things are true, right? On the one hand,
you know, we are not surrounded by people of Lincoln's caliber right now.
That feels like the case.
And I think we can say that with some certainty. But, you know, I always like to point to
President Harry Truman, who left office with, you know, some truly abysmal presidential ratings,
was dismissed throughout his presidency as unqualified, as not knowing what he was doing,
et cetera. And then, you know, turns out with hindsight, we know that he was better at the
job than anyone understood. Better at getting elected, right? You remember that sign, do he
defeats Truman, right? He showed them, right? And better at holding power and better at sort of,
you know, kind of building the kind of institutions that long after he was gone
demonstrated that he won the long game.
And some of that is the victors do write the story. And I ask myself very much,
how will history remember Volodymyr Zelensky? It's not obvious. And how will history remember
Putin? That, too, is not obvious. Because it depends on how the role, the geopolitics,
the, how the nations, how the history of these nations unravel, unfold, rather.
So, it's very interesting to think about. And the same is true for Donald Trump, Joe Biden,
Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and so on. I think it's probably an unanswerable question
of which of the presidents will be remembered as a great president from this time.
You can make all kinds of cases for all kinds of people, and they do, but it's unclear.
It's fascinating to think about when the robots finally take over what,
which of the humans they will appreciate the most. Let me ask for advice. Do you have advice for
young folks as they, because you mentioned the folks you're teaching, they don't even,
they don't know what it's like to have waited on the internet for the thing to load up for every
single webpage is suffering. They don't know what it's like to not have the internet and have a
dial phone that goes shh shh. And then the joy of getting angry at somebody and hanging up with a
physical phone. They don't, they don't know any of that. So, for those young folks that look at the
contention election, contentious elections, they look at our contentious world, our divided world.
What advice would you give them of how to have a career they can be proud of? Let's say they're
in college or in high school and how to have a life they can be proud of.
Oh man, that's a big question. Yeah, I've never given a graduation speech.
This is like warm up. Let's look for like raw materials before you write it.
If I did, I think, I think I would advise students that history teaches that you should be
be more optimistic than your current surroundings suggest, right? And I think
it would be very easy as a young person today to think there's, there's nothing I can do about
this politics. There's nothing I can say to this person on the other side of the aisle.
There's nothing I can do about the planet, et cetera, and just sort of give up. And I think
history teaches that we don't know who the winners and losers are in the long run,
but we know that the people who give up are always the losers, right?
So don't give into cynicism or apathy. Yeah. Optimism paves the way.
Yeah, because human beings are deeply resilient and creative, even under far more difficult
circumstances than, you know, than we face right now. Let me ask a question that you don't even
need to, that you wouldn't even dare cover in your graduation commencement speech.
What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? This whole project that history studies and
analyzes as if, as if there's a point to the whole thing. What is the point?
All the wars, all the presidents, all the struggles to discover what it means to be human
or reach for a higher ideal. Why? Why do you think we're here?
I think this is where there is often a handoff from the historian to the clergy,
you know, who, but in the end, there's less distance between the two than you think,
right? That, you know, if you think about some of the kind of answers to that question,
what is the meaning of life that are given from religious traditions?
Often they have a fundamentally historical core, right? It's about, you know, unifying the past
and the present in some other, you know, non-earthly sort of dimension. And, you know, so I think
there is that. I think even for people who don't have religious belief, there's a way in which
history is about the shared, the shared human condition. And I think historians aspire to
telling all of that story, right? You know, we drill down on the miseries of war and depressions
and so forth. But, you know, the story is not complete without, you know, blueberries and
butterflies and all the rest that go with it. So, both the humbling and the inspiring
aspect that you get by looking back at human history, that we're in this together.
Christopher, this is a huge honor. It's an amazing conversation. Thank you for taking us back to a war
that not often discussed, but in many ways defined the 20th century and the century we are in today,
which is the First World War. The war that was supposed to end all wars, but instead defined the
future wars and defines our struggle to try to avoid World War III. So, it's a huge honor to
talk with me today. This is amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this
conversation with Christopher Capuzola. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in
the description. And now, let me leave you some words from Woodrow Wilson in 1917 about World War
I, that haunted the rest of the 20th century. This is a war to end all wars. George Santana,
a Spanish-American philosopher, responded to this quote in 1922 by saying,
only the dead have seen the end of war. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.