In a private letter written in 1918, the recently deposed German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg admitted that in the run-up to the Great War, “there were special circumstances that militated in favor of war, including those in which Germany in 1870-71 entered the circle of great powers” and became “the object of vengeful envy on the part of the other Great Powers, largely though not entirely by her own fault.”
Yet Bethmann saw another crucial factor at work: that of public opinion. “How else,” he asked, “[to] explain the senseless and impassioned zeal which allowed countries like Italy, Rumania, and even America, not originally involved in the war, no rest until they too had immersed themselves in the bloodbath? Surely this is the immediate, tangible expression of a general disposition toward war in the world.”
The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig got a taste of the war fever gripping France in the spring of 1914 while sitting in a movie theater in Tours. As Nicholson Baker recounts in Human Smoke, his monumental pacifist history of the Second World War,
an image of Wilhelm II, then Emperor of Germany, came on screen for a moment. At once the theater was in an uproar.
The good natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in the newspapers, had gone mad for an instant…it had only been a second, but one that showed me how easily people anywhere could be aroused in a time of crisis, despite all attempts at understanding.
America shared in the “general disposition toward war” of which Bethmann wrote. On April 6, 1917, the House of Representatives voted 374 to 50 in favor of America’s entry into the war. One of the holdouts, the first woman elected to Congress, Jeanette Rankin from Montana, was castigated not only by her fellow suffragettes but by her hometown paper, which accused her of being a “dupe of the Kaiser.”
The similarities between then and now are hard to miss.
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