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

Adam Tooze, “The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931” Viking, 2014, 518 pp.

This book begins in 1916 during WWI with the battles of Verdun and the Somme and the 1917 US entry to the war; it then continues, covering the aftermath of the war as the US retreated into isolationism to the detriment of the world, even though the war had shifted the financial system from London to New York.  President Wilson comes across as extremely arrogant, bigoted, and manipulative, trying to establish the US as the world hegemon.  It is a difficult book to read but I persevered and was rewarded by a totally different perspective on this war and its aftermath.

My Notes:

Pg. 6:  The one nation that emerged unscathed and vastly more powerful from WWI was the US.  Many worried that the US was becoming the universal, world-encompassing empire similar to that which the Catholic Habsburgs had once threatened to establish.  The question would haunt the century that followed.  Tracing the ways in which the world came to terms with America’s new centrality, through the struggle to shape a new order, is the central preoccupation of this book.

Pg. 34:  It was only in 1893 that Britain had seen fit to upgrade its legation in the American capital to the status of a full embassy.

Pg. 65:  In February 1917 British intelligence intercepted a top-secret telegram from the German Foreign Office to its embassy in Mexico.  The telegram proposed an anti-American alliance to the Mexican government.  In exchange for military assistance from Germany, Mexico would launch an immediate attack on Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.  The telegram was at first believed to be a fake as it was so preposterous.  Then the German Secretary of State, Arthur Zimmermann, publicly acknowledged the authenticity of the reports.  Added to the now-routine sinking of American ships by German U-boats, this unprovoked aggression threat left Wilson with no option.  On 2 April 1917 he asked the Senate for a declaration of war.

Pg. 108:  In March 1918 the Russian Bolsheviks concluded the notorious Brest-Litovsk Treaty that stripped Russia of territories inhabited by 55 million people, a third of its agricultural land, more than half its industrial undertakings and mines that had produced almost 90 percent of its coal.  Brest-Litovsk has gone down in history as a stark symbol both of the excesses of German imperialism and Lenin’s stop-at-nothing determination to deliver peace. 

Pg. 120:  The phrase ‘self-determination’ appears nowhere either in the 14 Points or in the speech with which Wilson delivered the 14 Points to Congress on 8 January 1918.  In January of that year it was the Bolsheviks and Lloyd George who tossed this explosive concept into the international arena.  Wilson would not adopt it until later in the spring.

Pg. 174:  It was discussed at the peace negotiations that Germany should be disassembled as it was only recently united, at least this was the French view.  In 1849 Prussian troops had crushed a patriotic liberal revolution in southern Germany.  In the summer of 1866, in what is commonly but misleadingly referred to as the Austro-Prussian War, Prussia had faced not Austria alone, but a coalition consisting of Saxony, Bavaria, Baden, Wurttemberg, Hesse, Hanover and Nassau.  Over 100,000 Germans had been killed or wounded in what amounted to a North-South civil war.  Why should a state, united so recently and with such violence not be disassembled?  But this ignored the consolidation of German national sentiment since 1871. 

Pg. 317:  Rather than surrender their ships which were interned in the British naval base of Scapa Flow, the Germans in June 1919 scuttled their fleet.  They managed to sink 15 battleships, 5 cruisers and 32 destroyers.

Pg. 335:  A two-thirds majority of the senate consisting of mainline internationalist Republicans and moderate Democrats would have been willing to pass the treaty with reservations, above all to Article X of the League Covenant that provided for collective assistance in case of aggression against members of the League.  What they demanded was that Congress must have the final word in approving any collective enforcement action.  Since the weakly worded Covenant could easily have been interpreted in this direction, it was Wilson himself who presented the ultimate obstacle to compromise.  He insisted that the treaty must be accepted whole and complete, or not at all.

Pg. 346:  A devastating recession struck the US in 1919-21, often called the ‘Forgotten Recession’.  The associated agrarian crisis of the recession fuelled the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan.  Their membership surged from a few thousand in 1919 to as many as 4 million by 1924—one in six, the Klan claimed, of the eligible white male population.

Pg. 377:  From its opening in 1869 down to the Franco-British intervention of 1956, the Suez Canal was to be a consistent focus of British strategic attention. 

Pg. 442:  On 11 January 1923 the French Army marched into the Ruhr.  By March the Ruhr and Rhineland were isolated administratively from the rest of Germany.  The French were determined to extract coal from the area to thereby get some of the reparations due them.