The Wrights' airplane symbolizes the emergence of a technology
based on new scientific knowledge, a technology that became one
of the central forces shaping twentieth-century life. In the following
decades, scientists rapidly expanded their insights into the basic
properties of chemistry, biology, and agronomy . Medical and sanitation
practices based on these insights dramatically improved health
and longevity. New concepts of mathematics, physics, space, and
time revolutionized the thinking of many on the meaning of history
and the nature of the universe.
This notable twentieth-century advance in scientific knowledge
led to a spectacular technological explosion. Automobiles and
airliners, motion pictures and television, atomic energy, plastics
and synthetics, vaccines and antibiotics, satellites and space
probes, missiles, lasers, and computers are only a few examples
of the technological outpouring of the decades after 1900. The
changes that resulted from twentieth-century science and technology
came with increasing rapidity and ensured that each new generation
lived in a world markedly different from that of preceding generations.
Few living in 1900 imagined, for example, that by 1930 many would
be spending evenings listening to voices coming out of a box or
watching people moving and talking on a screen. Even fewer dreamt
that in 1969 hundreds of millions of people around the world would
sit in their homes and see men walking on the moon, or by 1993
would see simulcasts of disasters via cable television.
Unfortunately, scientific and technological breakthroughs frequently
have had negative as well as positive consequences and have often
strained humanity's capacity to adapt to them. By 1993, life expectancy
for many people had doubled since 1900; yet enough nuclear weapons
still existed to extinguish all human life in a few hours.
At the same time that the Wright brothers were pursuing their
dream, famine was destroying hundreds of thousands of lives in
India. Observers wrote of the sunken eyes, hollow stomachs, and
emaciated arms and legs of multitudes of suffering Indians; by
the end of 1900 over a million had died. According to one estimate,
15 million Indians died from famine in the years 1875-1900, ten
times the number who had died from hunger in the first fifty years
of the nineteenth century. The British government tried to provide
relief, blaming the tragedy primarily on rapid population growth,
aggravated by drought.
In actuality the 1899-1900 famine in India dramatically illustrated
the role that another force, economics, played in the twentieth
century Although the famine in India was immediately precipitated
by drought, its more fundamental cause lay far away from the stricken
villages and urban slums of India, in the boardrooms of the cartels
that operated in a global economic context. Even though food production
had increased as a result of scientific and technological improvements,
the companies or governments controlling the global supply of
essential grains often created an unequal distribution of such
foodstuffs.
In this context, Great Britain during the nineteenth century had
encouraged the great landlords of India to produce export crops
for Britain's global trading empire. The opening of the Suez Canal
in 1869 and the rapid expansion of the Indian railroad network
dramatically cut the time and costs of importing Indian products
into Great Britain and other parts of the Empire. Landowners were
encouraged to utilize their lands and peasant labor for the production
of jute, cotton, tea, and wheat for sale abroad rather than to
cultivate food crops for the growing population. In 1901, when
some were still perishing from hunger, landowners in India exported
two and one-half times more food grains than they had in 1858.
In addition, British-imposed land taxes and other agricultural
policies were driving more and more Indian peasants into poverty.
As illustrated by the situation in India in 1900, a major economic
theme of the twentieth century was the continuing disparity between
the impoverished and the affluent areas of the world. Particularly
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, malnourished people remained
tied to meager local economic resources, while at the same time
the great international businesses that controlled the world's
resources helped to create prosperity for a few favored nations,
particularly in Europe, North America, and parts of East Asia
and the Middle East.
Climatic conditions, overpopulation, political rivalries, civil
war, and domestic economic policies also contributed notably throughout
the twentieth century to the recurrent tragedy of famine, a tragedy
that occurred in nations of varying economic systems. In the 1930s,
for example, millions starved in the Soviet Ukraine as a result
of the policies of Joseph Stalin, even though Ukrainians produced
enough food to feed themselves. Owing to a variety of governmental
and international business policies and natural disasters, in
the decades following 1960, millions died of hunger in such varied
nations as China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Ethiopia,
Mozambique, and Somalia. In the same period, on the other hand,
the international marketing of an array of industrial and consumer
products brought a comfortable standard of living not only to
many in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe but also
to increasing numbers in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Singapore, and the petroleum-rich states of the Middle East.
Economic inequality helped to stimulate another significant twentieth-century
phenomenon: social and political conflict. No one personifies
this better than Emma Goldman, a dynamic Russian Jewish émigré
to the United States who was a major figure in the rise of anarchism.
In the belief that the rich exploited the poor and that the state
was merely a tool of wealthy interests, anarchists advocated doing
away with all government. Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian nobleman
writer who was also an anarchist, urged the use of nonviolent
means to bring about this goal, but most anarchists advocated
violence.
In 1900 Goldman was a delegate to the Anarchist Conference in
Paris. Sitting in a cafe one day, she read of the assassination
of the Italian King Humbert by a fellow anarchist who had come
from the United States to perform the deed. Her reaction was that
such acts were inevitable as long as centralized governments continued
to exist. King Humbert had been the fourth royal figure or chief
of state to be assassinated within six years. In 1901 U.S. President
William McKinley became a fifth victim at the hands of a young
man named Leon Czolgosz. Earlier in the year, Czolgosz had attended
a Goldman lecture, and he allegedly stated later that her fiery
rhetoric had influenced his decision to commit his bloody act.
Goldman viewed herself as a spokesperson not only for the economically
downtrodden but also for all oppressed people, including women.
Although she criticized U.S. suffragettes for seeking what seemed
to her meaningless voting power and for ignoring the problems
of working women, her thoughts on the liberation of women echoed
down through the decades. Goldman argued that a woman had the
"right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever
she pleases, or as many as she pleases."'
Anarchism and women's rights became just two of the many ideas
and ideologies stirring political waters after 1900. Marxism,
liberalism, conservatism, syndicalism, populism, and progressivism
were some of the others. Later in the century, communism, fascism,
and Nazism became particularly powerful examples of the quest
of men and women for political solutions to their various problems.
Much blood flowed in many parts of the world as a result of the
conflicts among these ideologies and the men and women who espoused
them.
The Boxer Rebellion in China was one of the most dramatic events
of 1900. An anti-foreign group known as the "Boxers' (the
Society of Harmonious Fists) besieged the compound that housed
the diplomatic community in Peking. Persistent Chinese hostility
to predatory outsiders, coupled with a drought and other natural
disasters in northern China, and patronage by a parochial dowager
empress culminated in the Boxer fury. Almost two months after
the beginning of the siege of the foreign legations, an eight-nation
force rescued the survivors. Before his soldiers departed from
Germany on this mission, the bombastic Kaiser Wilhelm 11 encouraged
them to be as merciless as the barbarian followers of Atilla the
Hun. Upon occupying Peking, many soldiers from the invading armies
did their best to live up to the kaiser's militant exhortations.
The Boxer Rebellion and its quick suppression illustrated another
dynamic force of the twentieth century: turbulent, often aggressive,
international relations. For decades before the Boxer Rebellion
foreign powers had used imperialist policies and superior military
might to impose unfair treaties on the Chinese and to carve China
into spheres of influence. Even the United States' "Open
Door" policy was little more than a U.S. plan to gain a share
of the wealth of helpless China. As the twentieth century proceeded,
the international scene continued to be a key forum for the expression
of nationalism, imperialism, and militarism.
Many great powers displayed the imperialism by which stronger
countries imposed and maintained their rule over weaker nations.
Early in the century, for example, France forced Morocco to accept
its "protection," the United States took de facto control
of a number of Caribbean nations, and Japan annexed Korea. After
World War L Great Britain and France took over part of the Middle
East. In the 1930s and 1940s Japanese militarists sought to impose
their will on China; Hitler saw it as a German right to conquer
and dominate the nations of Europe; and Stalin annexed the Baltic
republics. Following World War 11, the Soviet Union imposed its
control over the states of Eastern Europe.
As China's twentieth-century resurgence from the Boxer defeat
of 1900 indicated, however, the force wielded by powerful nations
to impose their will on weaker states often failed to snuff out
the nationalistic aspirations of conquered peoples to be free
from outside controls. Thus France failed to "assimilate"
the Moroccans, and Latin Americans resisted "Yankee imperialism."
A harsh Japanese colonial policy failed to make Koreans into docile
subjects, and the Soviet Union failed to make the Baltic peoples
into happy Soviet citizens or Hungarians into willing allies.
After World War II, one after another, colonial empires collapsed.
Hundreds of millions of the peoples of Asia and Africa became
citizens of new independent nations. Between 1989 and 1991 the
'Soviet Empire" also collapsed, and the subjugated states
of Eastern Europe regained their independence.
In 1900 the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche died in Weimar, Germany,
at the age of fifty-five. His ideas posed a major challenge to
the traditional Western religious beliefs and morality of his
day. At a time when Western imperialists thought of themselves
(in the words of the poet Rudyard Kipling) as taking up "the
white man's burden" to bring their civilization to "inferior"
peoples in Africa and Asia, Nietzsche's writings undermined confidence
in Western civilization itself. The son of a Lutheran minister,
Nietzsche preached that "God is dead" and that Christianity-"the
one great curse"-was a strategy of the weak, intended to
enslave the strong. He advised individuals who dared to go "beyond
good and evil" to become new "supermen." He had
contempt not only for the spirit of Christianity and much of the
Western culture that had evolved from it but also for democracy
and the ideal of equality. He predicted a future of uncertainty,
revolution, war, and turmoil.
Even after Nietzsche's death, his ideas lived on, testifying to
the importance of culture-that is, philosophical ideas and cultural
values-as another force that shaped the twentieth century. Many
European poets, artists, playwrights, and composers fell under
the sway of Nietzsche's ideas. During the twentieth century, a
world increasingly interconnected by ever more effective systems
of communication presented individuals with an unprecedented array
of often conflicting ideas and values. Both new ideas from thinkers
in technologically advanced nations and older ideas from traditional
cultures were propagated around the world. Although Nietzsche's
ideas represented, for many, a very powerful challenge to traditional
Western values, even more of the world's people in the twentieth
century felt liberated-or threatened by the theories of Charles
Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Some observers repudiated
what they considered to be the cultural and religious anarchy
of the modern era; others celebrated the multiplication of cultural
and religious choices.
The discontent with traditional Western values that Nietzsche
stimulated led some to seek enlightenment from other cultures.
The French artist Paul Gauguin, disenchanted with Western materialism,
sought what he considered a nobler existence in Tahiti, while
Nietzsche's faithful friend Paul Deussen became one of Europe's
leading experts on the religious philosophies of ancient India.
Later, some in Europe and the United States adopted Zen Buddhism,
or, like the boxer Muhammad Ali, converted to Islam.
To conclude, these five sketches from 1900-the Wright brothers
at Kitty Hawk, the famine in India, Emma Goldman's activities
in Paris, the Boxer Rebellion, and the death of Nietzsche-offer
a preview of the years ahead. They illustrate the five major forces
that this text will focus on throughout its discussions of the
history of the twentieth century: rapid scientific and technological
innovation; an increasingly global economy coupled with persistent
economic inequality; continuing social and political conflict;
aggression and reactions to it in international relations; and
the broad dissemination of conflicting philosophical ideas and
cultural values. These forces did not work in isolation but combined
in unique patterns to create important results throughout the
twentieth century. An example of how these factors intertwine
is this Boxer leaflet that cites both technological change and
the clash of cultural values in explaining the Boxers' hostility
to outsiders:
The arrival of calamities is because of the foreign devils. They
have come to China to propagate their teachings, to build telegraph
lines and to construct railways. They do not believe in spirits
and they desecrate the gods. It is the desire of the gods to cut
up the telegraph lines, to rip up the railroads, and to cut off
the heads of the foreign devils.'
This course will show how the forces underlying these events combined
in different ways to shape the history of the twentieth century.