Chapter 2
Fin de Siècle – Wrapping Up the Nineteenth Century
In This Chapter
Braving the troubled states of Europe
Surveying European empires
Winding down the American West
Considering Central and South America
Encountering radical new ideas
The world didn’t spring out of bed on 1 January 1901 completely different from the world that had gone to bed the night before. (If you’re puzzled why I’m talking about 1901 and not 1900 see the Introduction.) Although the 1890s became known as the fin de siècle (which just means ‘End of Century’ but sounds better in French), the nineteenth-century way of doing things still had a few more years to run. Some historians don’t see the twentieth century really getting going until the First World War broke out in 1914. So this chapter is about how the world wrapped up its unfinished business from the nineteenth century and slowly adapted to the exciting new twentieth century that was just beginning.
Europe: A Dangerously Unstable Continent
For all its wealth, culture, and industry, Europe had big problems and when these came to a head they would tear the world apart.
Britain: Tired of hope and glory?
Britain looked strong and confident at the end of the nineteenth century, but all the flag-waving hid a deep sense of unease. The British were aware of powerful new rivals like Germany and the United States; they also felt that they were losing their old touch. Poverty was worse than ever and the trade unions were more militant. The Irish were demanding self-government and women were demanding the vote. By 1900 many British people were convinced that they were no longer the sort of vigorous, manly people who had built their great empire.
The British could point to two apparently very different events to illustrate what had gone wrong:
The Trial of Oscar Wilde, 1895
The Boer War, 1899–1902
Oscar Wilde was tried and imprisoned for homosexual activity. To shocked British people, that such things should happen at all seemed bad enough, but Wilde’s trial was one of a number of scandals in the 1890s that revealed a network of homosexual brothels and rent boys at the heart of London, some of them visited by high-ranking people. All this seemed to suggest that the British ruling classes had lost their sense of moral decency.
In the Boer War, Britain fought against two small south African states and should have won easily. Instead, the Boers outmanoeuvred the British, trapped them in small townships, and cut their troops to pieces. To add to Britain’s humiliation, thousands of volunteers for the army proved to be medically unfit, and the Boers’ guerrilla campaign forced the British to round up Boer civilians in concentration camps. World opinion supported the Boers and opinion at home divided between those who supported the war and those who thought it showed Britain resorting to barbaric methods. (See the section ‘Britain and the Boers’ later in this chapter for more on the Boer War.) By 1900, therefore, the British had a terrible feeling that their empire was about to go the same way as the Romans’ – into terminal decline.
France: A troubled state
By the beginning of the twentieth century, France was vulnerable and politically divided. The French had lost a disastrous war with the Germans in 1871, in which the Germans had conquered the country and taken over the two border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The French felt deeply humiliated and longed for revenge. The Germans were no fools, though, and kept their army in tip-top condition to stop the French getting ideas. To make things worse, the defeat in 1871 opened up deep divisions within France. A left-wing group called the communards tried to seize power in Paris, and the right-wing government sent in the army to crush them. The French left never forgave the French right for what happened to the communards; the French right thought it showed that the French left were France’s worst enemies.
Rifts opened up elsewhere, too. French people hoping to forget their troubles could sink their savings into the Panama Canal Company, hoping that engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps would follow up the profitable success of his Suez Canal. But that proved a bad move. The company went bust and was riddled with fraud. For extra grief, some of the company directors caught pocketing the cash were Jewish, so everyone just started blaming the Jews.
And if that wasn’t enough to put any country in a funk, the French also had a controversial spy case to deal with. In 1894, a French army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was found guilty of passing military secrets to the Germans and was shipped off to the notorious penal colony on Devil’s Island, French Guyana. Case solved – except that locking up Dreyfus didn’t stop the flow of military secrets to Berlin. It became pretty clear that Dreyfus had been framed and should be released (an apology would have been nice, too), but the French army, the Church, and everyone else on the right said that Dreyfus was just trying to sully the good name of the army until the writer Emile Zola wrote a famous letter in the press headed ‘J’Accuse!’ (‘I accuse!’) saying that Dreyfus was being kept in prison only because he was Jewish. The case dragged on for years, splitting France down the middle. Dreyfus was finally acquitted in 1906, twelve years after his imprisonment.
Germany: Military correctness gone mad!
Germany seemed to be the European State Most Likely To Succeed in 1900. From a collection of small states, it had formed itself into a powerful united nation and rapidly gained an empire overseas. German society and politics were dominated by the army; on one famous occasion a Berlin shopkeeper had great fun dressing up as an army captain and finding that everyone did whatever he told them to do. But even the army couldn’t stop the rise of the German socialist party. The German government tried to win the workers over by introducing social security and national insurance, but doing so made no difference. By 1914, the socialists were the largest party in the German parliament.
Russia – behind the times but itching for change
Russia is a huge country with its western part in Europe and vast eastern expanses in Asia. Russia’s business end, however – government, industry, and all the major cities – was in the west. Russians still agonise about whether they belong to Europe or Asia, but in 1900 Russia’s movers and shakers were all looking to the West.
Visiting Russia around the turn of the twentieth century was like going back to the Middle Ages. Russia was still made up of old-fashioned peasant villages and ruled by an all-powerful emperor, the tsar. It had no parliament, no elections, and millions of hungry people. Industry had taken root in only two cities, Moscow and the capital, St Petersburg, where the workers lived in appalling squalor and had to get by on the tiny wages their bosses paid them. If you were rich in Russia, life could be very pleasant, but if you were poor – and most Russians were – life was very harsh indeed. Making life worse, local police chiefs instituted anti-Jewish attacks known as pogroms. Many Russian Jews chose to get out and head for America.
Various people wanted change:
Constitutional Democrats wanted a Western-style democracy
Social Revolutionaries wanted a peasant-run state
Communists, known as Bolsheviks (which means ‘majority party’ – even though they weren’t!) wanted a workers’ revolution and a worker-run state.
But it didn’t look as if any of them would get what they wanted because Tsar Nicholas II had a highly efficient secret police known as the Okhrana, which kept files on potential revolutionaries and regularly locked them up. Most revolutionaries went into exile, though some stayed under cover and set an impressive record for assassinating major figures in Russian public life. Although life in Russia looked outwardly much as it always had been, people in the know realised that it would only take one set back – defeat in a war, for example – to spark off revolution.
And that scenario is exactly what happened. In 1904, Russia went to war with Japan over who should control Manchuria and Korea. The Russians thought the Japanese were an inferior Asiatic people who would be no match for the mighty Russian war machine. The Japanese proved them wrong. They encircled the Russian army and sank the Russian Pacific fleet, and when the Russians sent their Baltic Fleet half way round the world to deal with the Japanese, the Japanese sank that too. US President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an agreement between the two sides, which gave Japan Korea, including the important naval base at Port Arthur, and told the Russians to pay the Japanese a large indemnity as well.
Being beaten by the Japanese brought home to the Russian people just how badly off their country was. The people demanded change, and a crowd of workers walked through the streets to the Tsar’s palace, thinking he’d give it to them. When they arrived, the Tsar’s soldiers opened fire. Before Nicholas knew what was happening (actually, it’s doubtful if he ever knew what was happening), he had a revolution on his hands. The army mutinied and joined in with the protestors, and the workers set up their own parliament called a soviet. At which point, even Tsar Nicholas realised the time had come to do something. So he took a deep breath and agreed to grant Russia an elected parliament, known as a duma. Cheers and smiles all round. Unfortunately, Nicholas had no intention of letting the Duma do anything, so Russia’s problems were only postponed, not solved.
Worldwide web: Europe and its empires
In 1900, the world was still dominated by the continent of Europe. Europe had developed industry ahead of the rest of the world, and the Europeans’ superior technology had enabled them to conquer whole continents. They had long been settled in Asia, ruling India and Indo-China and much of the East Indies. Then, in the space of less than twenty years in the 1880s and 1890s, they took over the whole of Africa. This process was so undignified and unscrupulous that even at the time people called it the ‘Scramble for Africa’.
Britain and the Boers
The British Empire was vast. Something like a third of the surface of the globe, and a quarter of its population, was ruled from London. By the 1890s, British eyes were focused on Africa. Britons dreamed of an unbroken line of British territory from north to south. Only the Boers, Dutch descendents who had settled in South Africa in the seventeenth century, stood in the way.
Scouting for boys, guiding for girls
One Britisher who took the business of national decline seriously was Robert Baden-Powell. ‘BP’, as he insisted on being called, was a rather eccentric army officer who became a national hero when he defended the township of Mafeking against the Boers. Baden-Powell was impressed by the young lads who dodged the Boer shells to run errands and carry messages and decided they were just the right role model for the flabby layabouts lazing about the streets back home. In 1907, he held a camp for a group of working-class city boys, and he followed it up the next year with his famous handbook Scouting for Boys. Baden-Powell believed that with the sort of resilience and resourcefulness army scouts have, young people could rejuvenate the Empire. When the girls said ‘What about us?’ he set up the Girl Guides, named after a famous Indian army regiment, though they didn’t get housework badges the way the girls did. The Scouts and Guides were devoted to developing character and promoting international peace and harmony. Some of the later organisations that sprang up in imitation of the Boy Scouts, such as the Hitler Youth or Mussolini’s Ballila, had a rather different philosophy.
When large diamond mines turned up in the Transvaal, one of the two Boer republics, the Boers feared that the British would try to take over – and they were right. Thousands of Brits flocked to the Transvaal to work in the mines, and in 1895 a young British hothead called Dr Leander Starr Jameson led an armed raid into Boer territory in a failed attempt to launch a coup. When it turned out that the British government had known about the raid in advance – well, talk about scandal!
Transvaal President Paul Kruger decided to strike back. In 1899, the Boers invaded British territory, ran rings round the British forces, cut them to pieces in the Battle of Spion Kop, and cooped them up in three small townships, Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking. In the end, however, Britain’s superior numbers told: The Brits raised the sieges, defeated the Boer armies, and took their towns. Mission accomplished? Er, no. The Boers switched to guerrilla tactics. The British commander, General Kitchener, tried to deal with the insurgency by fencing the land off and forcing the population to move into hastily set-up concentration camps. We’re not talking gas chambers here, but so little thought had been given to basic hygiene and survival that the inmates started dying like flies, especially the children. The leader of the Liberal Opposition in Parliament denounced Kitchener’s ‘methods of barbarism’.
Icy wastes
Towards the end of the nineteenth century polar exploration became a sort of obsession, an international race to get to the Pole – any Pole – before anyone else. In 1895 the Norwegian scientist Fridtjof Nansen got closer to the North Pole than anyone else had managed, until the Americans Robert Peary and Matthew Henson finally got there in 1909 using Inuit-style sledges and dogs. Or at least Peary said he got there, though some historians doubt it. Norwegian Roald Amundsen and Briton Robert Falcon Scott raced each other to the South Pole, with Amundsen ploughing ahead with his huskies and Scott bogged down with ponies trying to drag his supplies through the snow. Amundsen got to the South Pole first while, tragically, having reached the Pole second, Scott and all his team died on the way back. In 1914, British explorer Ernest Shackleton and his men were stranded trying to cross Antarctica, and Shackleton pulled off an amazing coup by getting them all back alive.
At one level polar exploration was about extending our knowledge of the world, just as space exploration was meant to be about science. But at another level it was about getting your flag there before anyone else’s – much like the race to the moon, in fact.
Asia boxes back
China was a vast empire, but it was weak and corrupt and had been torn apart in the nineteenth century by rebellions and civil war. In the nineteenth century, Britain and France had forced China at gunpoint to open up to outside trade, mostly so that they could carry on pumping opium into the country. At the time, the Chinese government was led by the Dowager Empress Tzu-hsi, who loathed foreigners, especially missionaries. In 1900, she encouraged a young radical group, the Society of Harmonious Fists, known – inevitably – as the Boxers, to rise up and kill as many westerners as they could find. The westerners – British, French, German, Russian, as well as American and Japanese – retaliated by sending an extraordinary international force into China to crush the Boxers and force China to hand over more of its ports and open others up to Western trade; in 1905, the British even invaded Tibet. These events gave the Chinese a deep sense of grievance that lasted throughout the century.
Japan was one Asian nation that made sure it wasn’t carved up by the Europeans or the Americans. When US Commodore Perry sailed into Nagasaki harbour in 1853, the Japanese quickly realised it was a case of westernise or die. In 1869, the Meiji Emperor overthrew the last of Japan’s medieval warlords, and Japan set about modernising itself in double-quick time, importing Western experts and techniques and turning Japan – especially its army and navy – into a modern, industrial power. By 1902, Japan was powerful enough for Britain, the leading naval power in the world, to choose Japan as its only ally. Two years later Japan went to war with Russia – and easily won.
More fun times in Europe
The opening decades of the century saw the powerful states of Europe itching to go to war with each other, like over-excited children needing to let off steam.
Love me, love my ally
At the end of the nineteenth century the European great powers squared up to each other in a set of rival alliances. In 1900, the two main alliances were:
The Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy.
The Dual Alliance: France and Russia.
But the situation wasn’t quite as simple as that. Russia had a separate understanding with Serbia, whose people shared a similar language and culture. Britain had stayed aloof from these European alliances (well, okay, no one had actually wanted her), but she signed an alliance with Japan in 1902, and signed ententes (agreements) in 1904 with France and in 1907 with Russia. In effect, Britain, France, and Russia were allies.
The spectre of nationalism and the looming fight for the Balkans
As the new century dawned, the big nationalist trouble spot was south- eastern Europe, the area known as the Balkans. In 1900, most of this area was ruled by the tottering Turkish Ottoman Empire. Although everyone confidently expected the Empire to collapse in the near future, in 1908 a group of nationalist officers called the Young Turks seized power and put some backbone into the Turkish government. If the Balkan nationalists wanted to declare independence from Turkey, they were going to have to fight for it.
Making matters worse, in 1908 the government of Austria-Hungary, another hybrid empire with lots of different nationalities within it, decided to move in and take over the Balkan province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbs, who wanted Bosnia-Herzegovina for themselves, were furious and looked for ways of kicking the Austrians out. It was one such attempt that led eventually to the First World War.
Africa’s Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, set in the Belgian Congo, tells of an expedition deep in the African jungle to find a European trader called Kurtz who has lost touch with reality. The story was based on the very real tales of cruelty that emerged from British reports about conditions in the Congo basin after the Belgians and the French had taken it over.
The French rubber and ivory trading companies and the representatives of King Leopold II of Belgium treated the Congolese as slaves in their own lands; the Belgians made a speciality of terrorising the local population by cutting off the hands of anyone who protested against the way they were being treated. As news of the atrocities began to leak out, despite the best efforts of the French and Belgians to hush it up, international opinion was outraged. In 1907 the French government imposed some control over the French companies; in 1908 the Belgian government took the Belgian Congo away from King Leopold. No one can doubt that conditions in the Congo were appalling, but some historians say that other Europeans thought that pointing the finger at the Belgians would help to divert attention from the way they treated their own African colonies.
America: A Waking Giant
Europe’s days of dominating the world were numbered. The twentieth century would see new states arising to enormous power and leaving the Europeans far behind. The first of these new powers was the United States. By 1900, the United States had only recently completed its westward expansion and American ports were filling with immigrants from Europe and Asia. But America’s business leaders were wealthy and ambitious, and the United States was already conquering an empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean. American power would grow even more in the new century.
Sunset in the West
The wagon trains and railroads of the American West were just a few years away from the cars and highways of the twentieth century. The American government only declared the famous ‘Frontier’ in the West officially closed in 1890, the year the Sioux tribes in South Dakota launched their ‘Ghost Dance’ wearing special shirts they believed would turn the white soldiers’ bullets to water. Sadly, when the soldiers moved in for the kill at Wounded Knee Creek their bullets proved all too solid as they massacred some 200 Sioux, including women and children. America’s native peoples were going to have to enter the new century living in small, barren reservations. Some of them were able to make a living playing Indians in the early Hollywood movies, only a few years after they’d been attacking wagon trains for real!
The American West was entering the twentieth century, settling down into an orderly group of states within the Union, with state capitals, governors, and highways – and some romantic memories.
Huddled masses: America’s immigrants
While the heyday of the West was coming to a close, a new America was getting going in the East. Thousands of immigrants arrived each week from Europe. They came from Italy, Hungary, Scandinavia, Poland, Russia – wherever there was poverty or repression or both. Russian Jews, for example, came to America to escape violent police raids on their communities.
These immigrants, first greeted in New York harbour by the sight of the Statue of Liberty and her famous poem welcoming ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’, found themselves in the hands – and at the mercy – of tough, businesslike immigration officers in the infamous reception centre on Ellis Island. Those immigrants found to be diseased were held in quarantine or packed off on the next boat back; those who made it through wandered out into New York’s poor tenements to start to build their new life.
Not all of these immigrants came from Europe. Large numbers of Chinese and Japanese arrived in San Francisco and other Californian ports, where their reception was much the same as on Ellis Island.
These immigrants had to start at the very bottom. They had little money and could often only get low-paid menial work. They had to live in crowded tenements where they were at the mercy of ruthless ‘robber barons’, industrialists who needed lots of cheap labour to fill their own pockets. Whole areas of American cities were colonised by the immigrants and you could walk the streets of New York’s Lower East Side and hear almost every European language – except English.
Not all Americans were happy with their new neighbours, especially if they thought the immigrants were doing them out of a job (they weren’t, but many Americans thought they were). Congress tried to halt Chinese immigration, essentially on racial grounds, and stopped the practice of contracting foreigners to work for very low pay on major construction projects without giving them the chance to look for other work. In 1903, Congress brought in new rules to control ‘undesirable’ immigrants. ‘Undesirable’ meant anyone of vaguely liberal opinions.
Black tie at the White House
Americans who disliked immigrants from Europe still kept their bitterest hatred for America’s oldest and most involuntary immigrant community, its black people. When President Theodore Roosevelt invited the black educational reformer Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901, angry rioting broke out and 34 people were killed. The rioters couldn’t abide the idea that the President of the United States should sit down to dinner on equal terms with a black man. In fact, Washington was a very moderate reformer: He thought America’s black people should get themselves educated so they could fit in with the white way of doing things. But if you can’t stomach a black man in the White House, I guess you’re hardly going to care about his opinions. America was to see a lot more of this sort of bigotry as the new century got going.
If you’ve got it, flaunt it! The age of the robber barons
In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, real power lay in big business, not in the White House (so don’t worry if you’re a bit hazy on American presidents after Abraham Lincoln). There was money to be made in oil, steel, and coal, and a handful of plutocrats made a lot of it, partly by canny investments but mainly by working together in ‘trusts’ to keep prices high and wages low. John D. Rockefeller made his fortune in oil, J. Pierpoint Morgan in banking, and Andrew Carnegie, who’d started out as a penniless Scottish immigrant, in steel.
These robber barons, so called because they acquired their wealth by ravag-ing natural resources, exploiting workers, and cozying up to like-minded politicians, built massive palaces, collected priceless antiques or historic manuscripts, and held lavish parties for their super-rich friends. They founded museums or charitable institutions – Carnegie virtually sold up completely to devote his time and money to charity work – but they made dam’ sure their names were attached to any building or institution they founded. Yet while the bosses of corporate America were living in luxury, the people who actually did the work that made them so rich were living in overcrowded tenements on tiny wages.
A new breed of politicians and journalists known as progressives started to attack the discrepancy between rich and poor and to expose the corporate corruption and sleaze behind those gleaming palace doors. The journalists got called ‘muckrakers’ for their pains – people who’d stop at nothing to dig the dirt – but in fact they were exposing serious flaws in the American Dream. Some politicians began to take up the causes the muckrakers were exposing.
Building an American empire
Strictly speaking, the Americans didn’t approve of empire-building and never referred to their overseas possessions as ‘colonies’ but that’s what they were. By 1903, the US had six colonies. If you’re thinking that’s a lot of colonies for a country that doesn’t believe in them, you’re right. A ‘splendid little war’ – the Spanish–American War – broke out in 1898 between the United States and the original European empire in America – Spain – and that event got the American-empire-building ball rolling.
By the 1890s, the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific was a far cry from its glory days in the sixteenth century (to find out about that period, see European History For Dummies (Wiley)). The Spanish government was weak and corrupt. Cuba had tried once to throw off Spanish rule and failed; then they had another go in 1898. American business, with an eye to the profits after the war, backed them.
On 15 February 1898, the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbour in a massive explosion that killed 260 of her crew. To this day, no one knows how it happened, but Hearst said the Spanish did it, and the American public agreed with him. ‘Remember the Maine!’ they cried, forcing a reluctant President McKinley to declare war on Spain. The war lasted from April to August 1898.
The US army proved awesomely incompetent – except for the ‘Rough Riders’ led by one Colonel Theodore Roosevelt – but luckily for them, the Spanish were even worse. When the Americans sank the Spanish fleet, Spain gave in and handed over to the USA nearly all her remaining colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific: Puerto Rico, the Philippines (Filipinos tried to resist but were defeated when Americans captured their general, Emilio Aguinaldo, in 1901), and Guam. The Americans would’ve taken Cuba as well until they remembered they’d been fighting for Cuban independence. Oops.
Following are some of the other colonies America added to its belt and the circumstances under which they were acquired:
Wake Island, 1898: America annexed this uninhabited Pacific island just in case it came in useful.
Hawaii, 1898: American businessmen had invested so heavily in Hawaii that they virtually ran the islands’ economy. When Queen Liliuokalani tried to remind them who was in charge, they arranged for her overthrow and in 1898, at the third time of asking, persuaded the US Senate to declare Hawaii a US territory.
Panama Canal Zone, 1903: The French were making such a hash of building it that US President Theodore Roosevelt simply bought them out.
The Americans’ success in taking over the Spanish Empire inspired another man who knew something about empires to appeal to the United States to ‘take up the white man’s burden’ and take over from Britain as the leading imperial power of the new century. He was the British writer Rudyard Kipling, author of Kim and later of The Jungle Book. Kipling recognised that the great empire of the new century would be America. He was right.
Central and South America
Nationalism (see preceding section) had also taken root in Central and South America. Central America and the whole South American continent had once been ruled by Spain and Portugal, but by 1900 the Spanish and Portuguese had been sent packing and the continent was made up of independent states. ‘Independent’ didn’t mean stable or secure, though. Nineteenth-century South America was notorious for its endless wars, revolts, and revolutions, for example:
Chile had fought Peru and Bolivia between 1879–83 and taken land off both of them.
In 1889, the Brazilians overthrew their monarchy and set up a republic.
The Peruvians had a coup in 1895.
In 1899, civil war broke out in Colombia and lasted until 1902.
If wars amongst themselves weren’t bad enough, other countries – notably Britain and America – were also involved in the region. The British had invested heavily in South America but by 1900 the Americans were moving in fast, taking over the region’s flourishing trade in fruit. American money supported right-wing rebels in Nicaragua and in 1909 US troops invaded and overthrew the government.
But nothing compared to nineteenth-century Mexico. This poor country saw it all: Revolution, rebellion, war with the United States, invasion by France, and an Austrian Archduke who declared himself emperor before being overthrown and shot. In 1876, General Porfirio Diaz led a military coup and for the next 35 years ruled Mexico as a dictator. Diaz restored a bit of stability (military dictators do tend to do that) but at a price: No democracy, no opposition, and no concessions to the workers.
In 1910, Diaz, who was getting on a bit, decided to hold an election, just to show he could move with the times. He took the sensible precaution of having the main opposition leader, Francisco Madero, thrown into jail and, to be on the safe side, rigged the ballot as well. According to the official results, the whole country had voted for Diaz except for the immediate friends and family of Francisco Madero. Diaz started to draw up his big Thank-You-Really-You-Shouldn’t-Have speech, when Madero from his prison cell denounced the election as a fraud and called on Mexicans to rise up in revolt. They did.
Diaz found himself under attack by a string of colourful revolutionaries, including Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. In 1911, the rebels defeated the government troops, forced President Diaz into exile, and let Francisco Madero out of jail. Mexicans went back to the polls and this time Madero won. And they all lived happily ever after? Not a bit of it! See Chapter 3 to find out how Mexico’s revolution got even bloodier.
Radical New Ideas
In some ways the world in 1900 seemed very stable. Class structures were in place over most of the globe, the rich seemed richer than ever, and in every half-way modernised country, a prosperous middle class was rapidly establishing itself, taking tea, going for walks on Sundays, and making sure the workers knew their place. That place was right down at the bottom of the social heap, whether it was peasants and rural labourers in the countryside or industrial workers in the cities.
All major cities had their slum areas where the poor lived in filthy, squalid, and unsanitary conditions. In 1902, the British philanthropist Charles Booth published his study on Life and Labour of the People of London, though many of his findings would also apply to other industrial cities around the world. Looking at workers in each trade in turn, Booth examined their living conditions and the patterns of migration that had brought them to the city in the first place. He argued that it was perfectly possible for poor people to live with dignity if they were provided with decent housing, access to health care, and security in their old age. Booth’s ideas were taken up by the British socialist movement and had a major influence on socialist thinking around the world.
Smash the system!
Not everyone was prepared to wait around for governments to build workers’ flats and introduce old age pensions. Many socialists thought that the answer to the poor conditions in which workers lived was to rise in revolution. They got their ideas from the writings of Karl Marx, a nineteenth-century German writer who had studied British industrial society in great detail and worked out how capitalist systems evolve – and collapse.
Marx thought that trying to introduce small-scale changes to make life a bit better for the workers was a waste of time: Doing so was just a way of keeping the workers quiet while the bosses enjoyed their wealth. He also believed that, because capitalism is so driven by the need to expand, economic and political power would eventually lie with an ever-smaller group of super-rich. The unfairness of this system would be so obvious that the poor exploited workers, who had produced the wealth in the first place, would rise up and take over. Not ‘might’ rise up or ‘probably’ will rise up, mind you: Marx believed that a revolution to overturn the capitalist system was inevitable. See Chapter 4 to see how Marx’s ideas worked in practice.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin led the revolutionary wing of the Russian Social Democratic (that is, socialist) Party (SDP). The SDP met in London in 1902 (they were all in exile to escape the tsar’s secret police) and the party split in two, between Lenin’s revolutionaries, who wanted immediate change, and those who wanted to wait for revolution, as Marx had said you should. Lenin called his followers Bolsheviks, which means majority party in Russian, which meant his opponents were now called Mensheviks, or minority party. Even though they were actually in the majority!
The Bolsheviks didn’t just want revolution in Russia: They wanted it to spread around the world. An international communist association was created called the Second International (the First International had collapsed shortly after Marx had founded it back in 1864 because no one could agree on anything), and communists from different countries kept in regular touch with each other. Communists existed in industrialised countries all around the world, but most communist parties were only founded officially at the end of the First World War, after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia. Chapter 4 tells you what they did with the power they’d seized.
A good head of state is a dead head of state
One alarming trend in political life at the end of the nineteenth century was an increasing tendency for heads of state to get assassinated. After Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865, radicals and oddballs the world over seemed to think a day wasted that wasn’t spent using some high-up person as target practice. US President James A. Garfield was shot in 1881 by a man with a grudge, the same year that Russian revolutionaries blew up Tsar Alexander II. In 1894, President Sadi Carnot of France was stabbed by an anarchist, and the same thing happened four years later to Empress Elizabeth of Austria. In 1900, anarchist assassins tried to shoot the Prince of Wales, killed King Umberto of Italy, and the following year killed US President William McKinley. In 1903, a group of very disgruntled army officers burst into the royal bedroom in Belgrade and shot dead the King and Queen of Serbia; three years later an anarchist group tried to blow up the King and Queen of Spain (on their wedding day, if you please), and in 1908 the King of Portugal and his son were assassinated in Lisbon. The following year Prince Ito of Japan was shot.
But it was the Russians who really had political assassination down to a fine art. In 1902, Russian revolutionaries shot the Minister of the Interior and two years later they shot his successor as well. In 1905, they blew up the Grand Duke Sergei, the tsar’s uncle, and one of his closest advisers. Prime Minister Peter Stolypin cracked down so hard on dissident groups that ‘Stolypin’s necktie’ became the grim nickname for the hangman’s noose. So in 1911, the revolutionaries shot Stolypin as well. When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo by Serb nationalists in 1914, it just seemed like yet another high-profile assassination. No one could guess that this assassination would have much more serious consequences than any of the others. Go to Chapter 3 for more on the First World War.
Out of the dolls’ house
The nineteenth century had seen a great stirring among women agitating for the same opportunities that were open to men, and it soon became clear that this movement would grow even stronger in the new century. Women were active in all the nationalist and revolutionary groups, and in Western countries they were actively campaigning for the right to vote. New Zealand had already granted female suffrage and Finland followed suit in 1907, but most countries still held back. The famous British Suffragette movement was launched in 1904, and it linked with a similar campaign in the United States. Meanwhile, women were making huge advances in medicine and education: Universities and colleges were opening their doors to women, and Western women played a leading role in spreading the message of education and emancipation in Africa and Asia. Much remained to do, though: Not until 1902 did China formally ban the practice of binding girls’ feet.
Changes in art, music, and literature
As if feminists, assassins, and socialists weren’t enough to have to cope with (see previous section), as the new century got underway artists, writers, and musicians seemed to have lost the plot as well. Gone were the traditional forms, storylines, and images.
My four year old could do better than that! Modern art
In 1907, the art world was taken aback by a painting called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (the Ladies of Avignon) by the young Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. What was so shocking wasn’t the bold colours or the fact the women were nude, but the way two of the ladies were painted as if they’d been broken down into geometrical shapes. This new style was known as Cubism. Cubist painters like Picasso and Georges Braque were trying to make people look at the world around them in a new way, looking underneath the surface at its underlying shapes. Some painters went even further, painting shapes and lines without even trying to portray people or things as they really were. Vassily Kandinsky, who pioneered this abstract art, said that he got the idea from seeing a painting lying on its side and thinking it looked more interesting that way. Of course, most people just thought these modern artists’ paintings looked wrong.
The golden age of children’s lit
If all this challenging literature was too much for you, you could take comfort in children’s writing, which was entering a veritable golden age. In Britain alone, the new century brought Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906), Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908); while across the Atlantic in Canada, Miss L. M. Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables in 1909. The Western world was creating something of a cult of childhood, with separate nurseries, professional nannies, and a whole literature of magazines and novels written specially for children. Sadly, many of the children who read it were just at the right age for the First World War when it broke out in 1914.
Music to my ears – not!
Things were changing in music, too. The Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi died in 1901, but Giacomo Puccini was still composing operas in the style opera-lovers were used to: Madame Butterfly was the big hit of 1900 and in 1904 he had another success with his opera-thriller Tosca. But in the dance world, some of the old rules were being challenged. The French composer Claude Debussy had composed an impressionist ballet in 1894, L’Après Midi d’un Faun, which painted a sort of sound picture by breaking all the usual rules of harmony. It was still hauntingly beautiful, though, which was more than could be said for the dissonant sounds being produced by Arnold Schoenberg and his musical chums in Vienna.
Schoenberg and others of his ilk completely turned their backs on the established rules of structure and harmony to explore new ways of conveying emotion and ideas through music. But the real outrage came in 1913 when the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky had his ballet The Rite of Spring produced in Paris. Set in pagan times, the ballet featured a wild dance set to clashing chords which assaulted the ears with sheer animal power. Stravinsky was trying to put across something of the raw energy and emotion of ancient Mother Russia, but the audience hated it. Not only did the ballet challenge every rule of decency and order, but it didn’t produce one hummable tune either.
Both Picasso and Stravinsky and their followers caused controversy not just by breaking the rules but by turning to non-Western art and music for their inspiration. To educated people in the West, Western civilisation represented the highest level of technological advancement and moral precepts that humankind was capable of, so to turn to the art of the non-Christian peoples of Africa or Asia seemed to be a shocking renunciation of all the modern world stood for. Artists and musicians often said they were trying to express the feelings of the people, but the people by and large wanted nothing to do with modern art or music: They preferred old-time waltzes, or light opera, or – if they were really daring – the catchy ragtime tunes coming out of America’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’.
A good read – if you like racy stories!
The new century seemed to be bad news for literature. Oscar Wilde died in 1900 followed by Anton Chekhov (1904) and Henrik Ibsen (1906). Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, came back from the dead. His creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had got so tired of the great detective that he’d killed him off, but such an outcry rose up around the world that in 1902 Conan Doyle brought out The Hound of the Baskervilles followed by a new set of adventures. Meanwhile, a mysterious French writer caused scandal with an account of a young woman’s initiation into the arts of love; the scandal was even greater when it turned out the writer was a woman hiding behind a man’s name and henceforth known as Colette. H. G. Wells, who had already made a name for himself with his disturbing vision of the future in The Time Machine in 1895, raised more eyebrows with his 1909 novel Ann Veronica about the need to loosen up public attitudes to love and sex. And the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was having fun with his successful plays attacking middle-class attitudes.
But even writers seemed to have caught the modernism bug. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses about one day in the life of an ordinary Dubliner abandoned ordinary language and seemed to be written in gobbledegook. The ‘Dada’ poets did away with the normal rules of rhyme and rhythm and just picked words at random out of a hat. Many people, of all classes, felt that the arts had completely lost touch with ordinary people.
The Brave New World of Science and Technology
The 1900s witnessed some major breakthroughs in science and technology that would set the tone for the century that followed.
Visions of the future
The happening science at the start of the new century was physics. All the best brains seemed to be working on exactly what this matter is that makes up the world around us. A group of scientists got the century off to a good start with a remarkable series of discoveries that were to have enormous impact in the future:
Max Planck (1858–1947) was a German physicist who looked into why the radiation hot bodies give off doesn’t flow steadily but seems to come out in spurts. Planck concluded that energy is released in small packets that he called quanta. His ‘Quantum Theory’ (from which we get the term ‘quantum leap’) had a big influence on the work of Albert Einstein.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) sought to use quantum theory in his work on the nature of matter. Taking the tram to his work in Zürich each day, the German-born Einstein noticed that the buildings he passed appeared tall and thin when the tram was moving but settled into their old shape when the tram stopped. Were his eyes deceiving him, or perhaps did those houses actually change shape? And why didn’t they change shape for the people inside them? The answer was that, unlike the people in the houses, Einstein was moving past at speed, so to him the houses didn’t just look thin: They actually were thin. Because of the speed and direction of the tram, Einstein was looking at the houses in a different combination of space and time from people outside the tram; or, to put it another way, the nature of space and time depend on where you are. Einstein put his ideas into his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, followed in 1907 by his General Theory of Relativity, arguing that space and time change and as they do so, they affect matter – hence the thin houses. The only thing that doesn’t change, Einstein said, is the speed of light.
Einstein’s theory had a number of important implications. Firstly, it showed that Newton’s laws of motion, including his famous law of gravity, did not apply everywhere, most obviously in space (if you’re a bit hazy on Newton’s Laws of Motion, see British History For Dummies (Wiley)). Secondly, Einstein suggested that matter itself is not fixed: It is made up of enormous concentrations of energy, even in the tiniest particles of matter. That meant that matter could be changed into energy – possibly a vast explosion of energy. And all sorts of ways of using vast explosions of energy exist, some of them peaceful, some not.
Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) worked out the structure of an atom – hence ‘atomic’ physics – in 1911.
Niels Bohr (1885–1962), a Danish physicist, used quantum theory to draw up a model of the hydrogen atom.
Pierre and Marie Curie (1859–1906; 1867–1934) identified the radioactive element within uranium and named it radium in 1902. But what can you do with it? Marie, a brilliant mathematician and physicist, set herself to working out the medical application of radium. She found it could be used to combat tumours; she also pioneered its use in x-rays.
At home with the Curies
If you ever got invited to tea with the Curies and couldn’t cope with small talk about atomic particles, Polish nationalism was a very acceptable substitute. It was Marie Curie’s main interest outside her scientific work. The Curies were a formidably intelligent pair – not many married couples share the Nobel Prize for Physics, as Pierre and Marie did in 1903. Working on humanitarian applications for radium meant Marie had to master a lot of chemistry, which she did so well that in 1911, five years after the death of her beloved Pierre in a road accident, she won another Nobel Prize, this one for Chemistry. That wasn’t the end of the Curie family’s involvement with Nobel Prizes: Their daughter Irene Joliot-Curie and her husband Frédéric won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935 for their work on artificial radioactivity. Sadly, Marie had died the year before. Still, all those prize certificates on the walls must have made a change from the usual family photos.
In your dreams: Exploring the human mind
While some scientists were exploring the nature of matter (see preceding section) others were delving deep into the human mind:
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) lived in Vienna and virtually invented the science of psychoanalysis. In his famous book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), based on hundreds of interviews in which his subjects talked about their childhood and recounted their dreams, Freud theorised that dreams are messages from our subconscious revealing fears and thoughts that are usually kept hidden. He said that human consciousness can be divided into three parts, the Id (instinct), the Ego (sense of self), and the Superego (conscience and morality). Above all, Freud thought that sex was a powerful factor in determining behaviour, even if people were not aware of it and even in young children.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) thought that Freud had simplified things too much and had allowed the sex to go to his head. Jung argued that male and female minds work in different ways (and who would disagree with that?) and that people are also influenced by the Collective Unconscious – a sort of mindset that is shared within a whole society – a bit like urban myths or believing the Da Vinci Code.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936) showed in 1902 that you could condition behaviour by controlling reflexes. He kept some dogs in his lab and rang a bell at feeding time. They got all excited and started drooling, but they did the same every time the bell rang, whether any food came or not. This suggested that behaviour and even instincts could be controlled – a lesson that some of the century’s dictators would learn very well.
Bye bye, blacksmith – here comes the car
Cars were soon changing the face of America and, as they spread to other countries, of the whole world. Out went the smithies and stables that horses needed and in came garages, petrol stations, hotels, holiday resorts, and even naughty nights out in the back of the car! Steel, rubber, and above all oil all boomed thanks to Henry Ford. To read about some of the impact Ford had, skip to Chapter 6.
Ford liked to claim that he had democratised travel, but the upper classes hadn’t given up their hold on motoring yet. The year after Ford set up his company, Mr Rolls and Mr Royce founded their company, selling luxury cars to the very, very rich.
Disaster areas
Great disasters have always happened, but the twentieth century did seem to start with an awful lot of them. Maybe it was because the newspapers could report them so much more quickly. One of the most shocking happened on Martinique in 1902 when Mount Pele erupted, spewing out poisonous fumes that killed the entire population of the island’s capital, St Pierre. Only one man survived, and that was because he was locked up in jail with no access to the outside. Mount Vesuvius erupted in 1906 and destroyed the town of Ottaiano, and an earthquake in India in 1905 left 10,000 people dead. Venice’s bell tower suddenly collapsed in rubble in 1902, and the following year 578 people were killed at a New Year party in Chicago when the Iroquois Theater went up in flames. The most famous disaster, though, was the earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906. It was followed by a firestorm that killed nearly a thousand people. It seemed incredible that a whole modern city could be so utterly destroyed by nature. The twentieth century would show that human beings were quite capable of doing the same thing.
Up, up, and away
Designers started working fast, trying to improve on the Wright brothers’ design. Everyone agreed that a seat for the pilot would be nice. In 1909, a French aviator called Louis Blériot caused a sensation by flying over the English Channel. Everyone cheered and waved flags, but for anyone who stopped to think, Blériot had shown something very important: The sea was no longer a barrier. Control of the sea in the twentieth century would be by air.
Wireless connection
The Titanic: A metaphor of the times
Historians sometimes use the famous story of the SS Titanic to illustrate the way in which the old nineteenth-century world was sailing steadily on, over-confident and arrogant, towards destruction in the First World War. Titanic was a British luxury liner which, like all liners at the time, segregated its passengers very strictly by social class. Poor passengers were kept below decks in steerage, well away from the incredible luxury in which the first-class passengers were enjoying their trip. Middle-class passengers went second class. Hidden away from all of them were the stokers and engineers keeping the enormous engines going. The ship was like a floating version of the Western class structure. The different shipping companies competed fiercely for the Blue Riband, awarded to the fastest ship to cross the Atlantic, and the White Star line had high hopes that Titanic, which they were already declaring ‘unsinkable’, would prove fastest of all. Just like the Western world and its leaders, the shipping owners were over-confident and took no notice of warnings. One of the company directors was on the ship for its tragic voyage and put pressure on the captain to go fast through the ice packs, even against his better judgement. Result: Disaster. The ship struck an iceberg and sank within hours. Something like 1,500 people drowned.
After the sinking people on both sides of the Atlantic were angry. They wanted to know why the ship had been sailing so fast and why there had been so few lifeboats. Quite a few of the richest passengers, including the White Star director, had got away, leaving the poorer passengers to drown. Some lifeboats had gone off only half-full and people in the lifeboats had stopped others from getting in. To socialists and Marxists, the Titanic disaster seemed to illustrate the class struggle openly. Two years later, in 1914, the Great War would finally destroy the confidence and luxury of the world of the Titanic.
Read all about it!
The newspapers got into the mass communications world, too. Newspapers were nothing new, but by the 1890s a handful of ‘press barons’, like Britain’s Lord Northcliffe or William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in the United States, were making a fortune from mass-circulation papers aimed at the newly educated classes. These popular papers served up their news spiced with plenty of sensation, and getting the facts right was much less important than getting the sales figures up. This, er, noble standard of journalism is, I’m pleased to say, rigorously upheld by much of the popular press to this day.