Christopher Capozzola: World War I, Ideology, Propaganda, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #320
the lesson i would want everyone to take from the story of the first world war uh is that human life is not cheap um 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 he said that world war one gave birth to the surveillance state in the u.s can you explain the following is a conversation with christopher capazola a historian at mit specializing in the history of politics and war in modern american history especially about the role of world war one in defining the trajectory of the united states and our human civilization in the 20th and 21st centuries this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's christopher capazzola let's start with a big and difficult question how did world war one start on the one hand world war one started uh because of a series of events in the summer of 1914 that brought sort of the major powers of europe into conflict with one another but i actually think it's more useful to say that world war one 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 and 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 like the the leaders and within the populace they started accepting sort of 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 a sense that military action is the way that nations operate at the global scale yes yes and right so yes um there's a sense that the military can be the solution to political conflict uh in europe itself and the and is that war and military conflict are already happening right uh that there's war particularly in africa in north africa in the middle east you know balkans conflict is already underway and the european powers haven't faced off against each other they've usually faced off against an asymmetrical conflict against much less powerful states but you know in some ways that that war is already underway 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 you could have avoided the war your senses 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 um 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 was france and great britain us could usp call that empire at that moment yet when do you graduate to empire status um 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 um and it has sort of mindsets of of rule and military acquisition that would define em empire in a kind of more informal sense so you would say you would put the blame or the responsibility of starting world war one into the hands of the german empire and kaiser wilhelm ii you know that's a really uh tough call to make um and you know that deciding that is going to keep historians in business for the next 200 years and i think there are people who would lay all of the blame um on the germans right and you know who would point toward a generation of arms buildup you know alliances that that germany made and promises that they made to uh to their allies in the balkans um to the austro-hungarians um and so yes there's an awful lot of responsibility there um there has been a trend lately to say um no it's no one's fault right that uh 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 uh 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 ultra hungarian empire france joseph the first his nephews archduke franz ferdinand he was assassinated and so that didn't have to lead to a war and then the the leader of the german empire geyser wilhelm ii pressured sort of uh started talking trash um and boiling the water that ultimately resulted in the explosion um plus all the other players so what can you describe the dynamics of how that unrolled what us what's the role of the us what's the role of france what's the role of great britain germany and also hungarian empire yeah over the course of about uh four weeks right following the assassination of uh of the archduke um in sarajevo um it sort of triggers a series of political conflicts and ultimately ultimatums sort of demanding sort of that that one or other power sort of stand down in response to to the demands of either you know britain france or 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 um 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 are they think they are getting ready in a defensive maneuver and they if they think if there is conflict well it might be a skirmish it might be you know sort of a standoff uh it could be solved with diplomacy later because diplomacy's failing now um 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 in over the course of the fall of 1914 um 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 um of 18 of 1870 and they really do sort of you know kind of want to have a quick sort of lightning strike in some ways against france um to kind of bring the war to a speedy conclusion uh france turns out to be able to fight back more effectively than the germans expected um and then uh the battle lines sort of harden and then behind that uh the the the french and the germans as well as the british on the side of the french start digging in literally right and digging trenches trenches that at first are you know three feet deep to you know to avoid shelling from artillery then become six feet ten feet deep you know two miles wide um that include telegraph wires that include whole hospitals in the back and then at that point um you know the the front is is locked in place and the only way to break that is sort of basically dialing the war up to 11. right sort of massive numbers of troops massive efforts um none of which work right and so the war is stuck in this but that's the 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 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 right and so you see sort of machine guns you see artillery uh you know these are the kind of the the key weapons of war on both sides right the vast majority of battlefield casualties are from artillery shelling from one side to another um not you know sort of rifle or or even sort of you know machine gun kind of uh attacks in some ways the weapons of war are are human beings right um you know 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 um you know but but holding the territory that had been gained often proved to be even more demanding than gaining it and so often um you know 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 what is the order of events here right it becomes a global war yeah so britain france and and russia uh are at this time and in there an alliance um and so the the conflicts you know in the summer of 1914 that lead uh sort of to the declarations of war happened sort of one after another right um at the in august of in late august of 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 uh 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 into conflict at the exact same moment they're also for many of these countries bringing not just their their national armies uh but also their empires into the conflict right so britain and france of course have you know enormous uh sort of global empires they begin mobilizing soldiers as well as raw materials germany uh has you know less of an overseas empire russia and the ottoman empire of course have their own sort of hinterland um you know within the empire and very soon you know sort of all of the warring powers are are bringing the entire world into into the conflict did 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 um the scale of the devastation of these sort of massive over-the-top uh attacks on the trenches is apparent to the military officers and it very quickly becomes apparent even at home you know there is of course censorship of the battlefield and and you know specific details don't reach people but you know for civilians in in any of the the warring powers they know fairly soon how destructive the war is and to me that's always been a real sort of um puzzle right so that by the time the united states comes to decide whether to join the war in 1917 they know what exactly what they're getting into right they're not backing into the war in the ways that the european powers did you know they've seen the devastation they've seen photographs they've seen injured soldiers um and they make that choice anyway when you say they do you mean the leaders of the people did uh the the death and destruction reach the minds of the american people by that time uh yes absolutely you know the the we don't in 1917 have the mass media that we have now but um but you know there are images in newspapers there are newsreels that play at the movie theaters um and of course some of it is sanitized but but that combined with press accounts often really quite descriptive press accounts gory accounts reached you know anyone who cared to read them you know certainly plenty of people didn't follow the news felt it was far away but 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 there 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 is 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 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 in europe you know except for the areas where you know in belgium and france where the the war is you know right there in your backyard for other people yeah there's a there's a distance and soldiers of course feel this very strongly when they uh european soldiers when they're able to go home on leave often you know deeply resent the you know the what they see as the luxury that 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 um could it have stayed out to answer your last question first yes right um that the united states could have uh 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 it shaped trade it shaped goods and services agriculture you know whether you know there was a crop coming whether there were immigrants coming across the atlantic to work in american factories right so the u.s can't ignore the war but the u.s makes a choice in 1917 to enter the war by declaring war right on on germany and austria uh and in that sense um this is a war of choice um but it's it's kicked off by a series of events right so uh president woodrow wilson um has been president through the this entire period of time uh he has just run uh in the 1916 presidential election on a campaign to keep the united states out of war um but then in early 1917 the germans in some ways um sort of twist the americans arms right the the germans uh sort of high command comes to understand that you know that they're stuck right uh that they you know they're stuck in this trench warfare they need a big breakthrough their one big chance is to kind of as to sort of break the blockade and to push through uh that that the british have imposed on them to break the uh breakthrough against um against france and so they 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 uh you know it was a gamble but i think uh probably the their best chance they took that gamble they 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 you know americans would end up just being cannon fodder for the european empires um eventually as americans ships are sunk um first in the lusitania in 1915 then in much greater numbers in 1917 um you know that the tide starts to turn and americans feel that you know 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 so i was entering the war yeah yeah well that's really interesting because uh there's echoes of that in 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 sorry in terms of the politicians because then you appear weak but i will i wonder if that was always the case so you make the case that world war one 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 sort of 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 like what does it mean to belong right to be part of america right to feel american to uh you know to love it or hate it or be willing to die for it right 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 or you know any anything before suddenly have to but also what it means to be an american right uh to feel like it to be part of this project is also kind of being defined and enforced during world war one so project you know is a funny way to put a global war right so uh 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 right a lot of people know this poster i think in its original form it's mimified 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 post represent the birth of something new in america which is a uh 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 um 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 a an image that circulated first as a magazine cover later as a recruitment poster um 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 uh tool to 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 right at that point in 1916 we're still neutral in 1917 it's turned into a us army recruiting poster um and then it reappears in world war ii reappears generations after you know like you said it's now uh gets remixed memified um it's uh it's all over the place i think for me it's a 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 for the first time in in this new kind of way well in some sense is it fair to say that this the empire is born the expanding empire is born from the gnome 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 um and you know so so yes he's asking us to do that but but how do we respond and the people responded so the people are ultimately the the machines of history the mechanisms of history it's not the uncle sam sam can only do so much if the people aren't willing to step up absolutely they and you know the american people responded for sure but they didn't build what uncle sam asked them to do um in that poster right um and i think that's a you know kind of a crucial aspect that uh you know there never would have been sort of global us power without the response that begins in world war one what was the selective service act of 1917 so one of the very first things that uncle sam wants you to do right is to register for selective service for the draft right um and the the law is passed very soon after the us enters the war um it's sort of you know 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 that's the requirement to say no it is a legal requirement to register um not of course not everyone who registers is selected but over the course of the war 24 million men register almost 4 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 yeah this is uh this is a bigger turning point than than we might think right in some ways this is a tougher uh demand of the american public than entering the war it's one thing to declare war on germany right it's another thing to go down to your local post office and fill out the forums that 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 right and so you know ordinary people are participating um in the building of this war machine but at least a half a million of them don't right 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 uh register at least 500 000 is it surprising to you that that many registered since the country was divided it it is and that's what i i've you know sort of tried to dig in to figure out how did how did you get 24 million people to to register for the draft and uh it's certainly not coming from the top down right um you know there are maybe a hundred uh sort of agents in what's now called the fbi um you know it's certainly not being enforced from washington it's being enforced in you know through the the eyes of everyday neighbors um you know through community uh 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 uh anti-war movement as you would see maybe later with vietnam and things like this there was a significant movement before 1917 but 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 uh 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 level the fundamental right right is liberty right um that conscription sort of demands um you know uh sacrifice um on the behalf of some for the for notionally for the protection of all so even if you're against the war you're forced to fight yes um you know and there were small uh provisions for conscientious objectors um solely those who had religious objections to all war right not political objections to this war and so you know several thousand were able to take those provisions but even then um they faced uh social sanction they faced ridicule some of them faced uh intimidation you know so those liberty interests um both individual freedom religious freedom you know those are some of the first things to go so what about freedom of speech silencing of the press of the voices of the different people that will object uh yes absolutely right 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 right and that that provision is used to shut down uh radical publications to shut down german language publications um and you know this is 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 one so what is what is that what does that mean somebody that's should be willing to sacrifice certain freedoms to fight for their country um somebody that's willing to fight to spread freedom elsewhere in the world spread the american ideals like what what um does that begin to tell the story what it means to be an american uh i think what we see is a change right so citizenship during world war one now includes um uh the obligation to defend the country right to serve right and to if asked to die for it right and we certainly see that and i think we see the the close linkage of military service and u.s citizenship coming out of this time period but um you know 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 for equality for marginalized groups and so you know 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 abuse like to drag us into a war we need we need to be able to so there's a the birth of that tension between the government and the people it's a a rebirth of it you know of course that you know that tension is always there but but uh in its modern form i think it comes from this re-intensification of it yeah so what about you said that world war one gave birth to the surveillance state in the u.s can you explain yeah so the espionage act um you know 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 for germany which basically means you know all german americans come under surveillance initially um you know this is a very small scale but but soon every government agency gets involved from the treasury department secret service to the post office which is uh sort of reading mail to the justice department which mobilizes 200 000 volunteers yeah and you know it's 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 um most most fully is this also a place where government the size of government starts to grow in these different organizations or maybe create some momentum for growth of government oh it's uh it's it's exponential growth right that um you know that over the course of the war by almost any metric you use right the 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 one 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 i would maybe break that into two parts right that um uh on the one hand yes the there is war profiteering um there are investigations of it um in the years after the war there's a widespread concern that the profit motive had played you know 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 you know to think of it as you know at what point does the one side lock in the other right that military choices are shaped by industry uh stan you know objectives and and vice versa and i don't think that that was fully locked into place during world war one i think that's really a cold war phenomenon when the united states is on this intense kind of footing for for two generations in a row so industrial is really important there there is companies so before then weapons of war were created were uh funded directly by the government were like like who was manufacturing the weapons of war they were generally manufactured by private industry um uh there were of course art well arsenal sort of 19th century iterations where the government would produce its own weapons um partly to make sure that they got what they wanted um but 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 the military-industrial complex didn't start then what was the what was the important thing that happened in the cold war i think one way to think about it is it it's the cold war is a point at which it uh switches from being a dial to a ratchet right so during world war one uh you know the relationship between the military and industry dials up you know fast and high and stays you know stays that way and it dials back down whereas during um the cold war um sort of the relationship between the two often looks more like a ratchet yeah because it becomes unstoppable it goes up again and in the way that you start i think the way the military-industrial complex is often involved um disgust is as a system that is unstoppable right like it expands it almost 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 can then fuel and make money from that is certainly one of the concerns um of both people um you know who are critical of the first world war and then also of dwight eisenhower right when he's uh president and and sort of in his uh 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 a fear that that eisenhower had that no one had an interest in stopping this right and that no one had a voice in stopping it and that the ordinary american could could really do nothing um to sort of uh you know to kind of to dial it to dial things down is it strange to you that we don't often hear that kind of speech today with like eisenhower speaking about the military-industrial complex so for example we'll have people criticizing the spending on the on war efforts but they're not discussing the yeah the machinery of the military-industrial complex like the the basic way that human nature works that we get ourselves trapped in this thing they're saying like there's better things to spend money on versus describing a very seemingly natural process of when you build weapons of war that's gonna lead to more war like it pulls you in somehow yeah i would say throughout the cold war um and even after the end of it uh there has not been a sustained conversation um in the united states um about uh about our defense establishment right what we you know what we really need um and uh you know what what serves our interest um and uh and to what extent um sort of other things like market forces profit motives um you know belong in that in that conversation uh what's interesting is that in the generation after the first world war that was that conversation was on the table right um through a series of investigations in the u.s the nye committee um in britain a royal commission journalistic expose you know this would have been just talked about constantly in the years between about 1930 and 1936 as people were starting to worry right 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 for versus uh intel like a versus a thinking leader those discussions are often marginalized um framed as conspiracy theory um etc um and um you know i think it's it's important to realize that you know uh in the generation after world war one this was a serious civic conversation it led to you know sort of investigations of defense sort of finance it led to experiments in britain and france and public finance of war material and i think those conversations need to be reconvened now in the 21st century is there any parallels between world war one and the war in ukraine the reason i bring it up is because you mentioned sort of there was a hunger for war a capacity for war that was already established and the different parties were just boiling the uh the tensions so 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 uh when you think about it in the context of world war one 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 one uh and the war in ukraine um but i don't think they really work um that you know the first world war in some ways is generated by a you know fundamental conflict uh in the euro european system of empires right in the global system of empires so in many ways if there's a parallel the war in ukraine is the parallel to some of the conflicts in um you know in the mediterranean and the balkans in 1911 to 1913 um that um you know that then later there was a much greater conflict right and so i think if there's any lessons to be learned um for how not to you know let uh world war iii look like world war one um it would be to make sure that um you know that systems aren't locked into place um that escalate wars out of out of people's expectations well that's i suppose what i was uh 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 they're creating tension they're creating military conflict with a kind of unstoppable imperative for a global war that's i mean many kind of people that are looking at this are really worried about that now the the stopping 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 what's 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 and so do you worry about that that there's a kind of descent into a world war one type of scenario yes i mean that that keeps me up at night and i think it should keep uh you know the citizens of both the united states and russia up at night um and i think again it gets back to what i was saying in that in the summer of 1914 um even then um things that looked um like a march toward war could have been different right and so i think it's important for leaders to um of both countries and of all of the sort of related countries you know of ukraine of the various nato powers and to really sort of imagine off-ramps and to imagine alternatives and to make them possible you know whether it's through diplomacy whether it's through other formats um you know i think that you know that that's the only way to prevent sort of greater escalation what's the difference between world war one and the civil war in terms of how they defined what it means to be an american but also uh the american citizens relationship with the war um what what the leaders were doing is there interesting differences in similarities besides the fact that everybody seems to have forgot about world war one in the united states and everyone still remembers civil war i mean it's true um and uh you know the the american civil war defines american identity um uh in some ways along with the revolution and the second world war more so than any other conflict and you know it's it's a fundamentally different war right it's one uh because it is a civil war right because um you know because of secession because of the confederacy and you know this is a a conflict happening on the territory of the united states between americans and so the dynamics are are are really quite different right so you know the the leaders particularly lincoln have a different relationship to the home front to civilians than they than say wilson or roosevelt have in the in world war one and two 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 like 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 the the war is over slavery in part perhaps that's a radic drastic oversimplification of what the war was actually about in the moment like how do you get pulled into an actual war versus a uh hot discussion and 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 uh quote-unquote good war uh that there's an atrocity that had to happen to make it really uh 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 one and so that doesn't stay in the american mind we try to uh sweep it under the rug even though overall 16 million people died so so to you the difference is in the fact that you're fighting for us for ideas and fighting on on on the homeland but in terms of people's participation you know um fighting for your country was there similarities there yeah i mean i think uh i mean the civil war in in both the north and the south uh troops are raised overwhelmingly um through volunteer recruitment uh there is a draft in in both the north and the south but um uh you know it's it's not significant um only eight percent of of uh of confederate soldiers came in through conscription um and so in fact you know the the mobilization for volunteers often organized locally around individual communities or states um create sort of multiple identities and levels of loyalty where people both in the north and the south have loyalty both to their state regiments to their sort of community militias and as well to to the country they are fighting over the country right over the united states and so at the end the union and the confederacy have conflicting and ultimately irreconcilable visions of that but but you know that sort of nationalism that comes out of uh out of the union um after the victory in the war is a kind of crucial force shaping america uh ever since so what was the neutrality period why did u.s stay out of the war for so long like what was going on in that interesting like what made woodrow wilson change his mind what what uh 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 right they entered it um you know some of them actually went and volunteered and fought almost exclusively on the side of britain and france at least fifty thousand joined the canadian army or the british army and serve 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 and 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 you know arguing about it and and you know at the same time they're worried that british propaganda is shaping their news system they are worried that german espionage is undermining them um they're worried that both britain and germany are trying to interfere in american elections and american news cycles uh you know there and at the same time uh a revolution is breaking out in mexico right so there are sort of you know concerns about uh what's happening in the western hemisphere as well as what's happening in europe so world war one was supposed to be the war to end all wars and it didn't how did how did world war one 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 this 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 and the culture of defeat and the experience of defeat at the end of world war one leads to a culture of resentment recrimination finger-pointing blame that um makes german politics very ugly um as one person puts it brutalizes uh german politics um pleases resentment at the core of the populace and its politics yeah and you know so in some ways that lays the groundwork for the kind of politics of of resentment and hate that that comes from the from the nazis um you know for the united states in some ways the failure to win the peace um uh you know uh sets up the possibility for for the next war right that um that the united states uh you know through wilson is sort of crafting a new international order in order that this will be the war to end all wars but because the united states failed to join the league of nations um you see that the united states really sort of on the hook for another generation uh in asia the story is more complicated right and i think it's worth bearing that in mind that that world war ii is a two-front war um it's it starts in asia for its own reasons um world war one is transformative for japan right um it is a time of massive economic expansion and a lot of that uh sort of economic wealth is poured into sort of greater industrialization and militarization and so when the military wing in japanese politics takes over in the 1930s they're in some ways flexing muscles that come out of the first world war can you talk about the end of world war one the treaty of versailles um what's interesting about that dynamics there of the parties involved of uh how it could have been done differently to avoid the resentment is there or again is it inevitable so the war ends and very soon even before the war is over um the the united states in particular is trying to shape the peace right and the united states is the central actor um at the paris peace conference in 1919 woodrow wilson is there he's presiding um and he knows that he calls the shots so he was respected he was respected but uh but resentfully in some ways by by the the european powers britain and france and italy to a lesser extent who you know felt that they had sacrificed more um they had two goals right they wanted to shape the the imperial system in order to make sure that their you know kind of fundamental economic structures wouldn't change and they also wanted to sort of weaken germany as much as possible right so that germany couldn't rise again what this leads to is a peace treaty that you know maintains some of the fundamental conflicts of the imperial system and makes bankrupts germany starves germany and kind of feeds this politics of resentment that make it impossible for germany to kind of participate in a european order so people like historian neil ferguson for example make the case that if britain stayed out of world war one 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 thing 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 in the entire global world i wish it were that easy and you know i think um it's useful to think and counter factuals um you know what if um and if you believe as historians do in causation then if that one thing causes another then you also have to believe in counter factuals right that if something hadn't happened then maybe that wouldn't you know that would have worked differently um but uh i think all the things that led to world war one um are multi-causal and nuanced and this is what historians do we make things more complicated um and so you know there was no one thing that could have you know uh like that could have turned the the tide of history um you know and you know oh if only hitler had gotten into art school or if only fidel castro had gotten into the major leagues you know uh uh those are interesting thought experiments but few few events in history i think are that contingent well hitler is an example somebody who's a charismatic leader that seems to have a really disproportionate amount of influence on the tide of history so you know if you look at stalin you can imagine that many other people could have stepped into that role and the same goes for many other 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 um 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 is it possible that i mean could hitler have been stopped could we have avoided if he just got into art school right uh 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 uh is hitler the individual as a sort of charismatic leader who's able to mobilize you know the the nation um and part of it is hitlerism right his own sort of individual ability to play for example play off his subordinates against one another to set up a system and you know of that of that nature that that in some ways escalates violence including um you know the violence that leads to the holocaust um and some of it is also hitlerism um as a as a leader cult and we see this in many other sort of you know things where where a political movement surrounds one particular individual who may or may not be replaceable um so so yes the world war ii we got um would have been completely different um if a different um sort of uh faction had risen to power in germany um but uh 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 uh 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 ohler it makes the 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 it's uh 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 the way the strategy the decisions could be explained through drugs or at least implies that kind of thing um 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 in this context so here come along this semi-historian because i don't think he's even a historian he's a um a lot of his work is fiction um 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 um of this period and also of the man of hitler what are your sort of feelings and thoughts about um 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 i have read it and i i also had this sort of eye-opening experience that a lot of uh historians did and they're like why didn't why didn't we think about this right um and you know i think uh whether he's you know the the the author older is um you know 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 um and i don't think anyone uh you know sort of criticizes him for for that um i like the book as a as a window into the third reich you know of course drugs don't explain all of it but it helps us see um you know uh it see helps us see the people who supported hitler the ways in which um you know it was that mind altering and performance altering drugs were used to kind of keep soldiers on the battlefield and the ways in which um you know i think that we take we don't fully understand the extent to which the third reich is held together with like duct tape from um you know from a pretty early phase by like 1940 or 41 even you know it's all smoke and mirrors and i think that wartime propaganda both germans trying to say you know we're winning everything and america trying to mobilize uh and the other allies you know to mobilize against germany uh described a more formidable enemy than it really was by 1941 and 42. yeah i mean i could see both cases uh one is that duct tape doesn't make the man but also as an engineer i'm a huge fan of duct tape yeah 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 it 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 uh then it would be very different yeah it worries me how compelling it is of an explanation you know yeah so that's why it's maybe better to think of it as a window into the third round yes 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 um his practices with drugs gives you a window into the person it reminds you that as a human this is a human being like a human being get that gets emotional in the morning gets thoughtful in the morning hopeful sad depressed angry like a story of emotions of the human being is that somehow we construct um which is a pretty dangerous thing to do 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 a soldier instant lesson which is all of us to some degree are capable of evil or maybe if you want to make it less powerful a statement many of our leaders are capable of evil that this hitler is not truly singular in history that uh yeah when the the resentment of the populace matches the right charismatic leader it's it's easy to make the kind of not easy but it it's possible to frequently make the kind of uh initiation of military conflict that happened in world war world war ii by the way because you said not a trained historian one of the one of the most compelling and i don't know entertaining and fascinating exploration world war one comes from dan carlin i don't know if you've gotten a chance to listen to his sort of podcast form telling of the blueprint for ar armageddon which is the telling of world war one what do you think about dan carlin are you yourself as a historian who has studied who's written about world war one do you do you enjoy that kind of telling of history absolutely and i think again you know uh you don't need a phd in history to to be a historian right um does every historian agree with that uh he gets quite a bit of criticism from historians uh you know i mean we you know we like to argue with each other and pick with each other but um but the one thing i have no patience for is when we like pull rank on each other you know i think um we depend on uh 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 histories saving documents and history is a it's 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 for fun and then and you can appreciate both the the knowledge production um as well as the storytelling um and when you get a good oral storyteller like dan carlin and 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 correct and then and then to tell the story off of those because the the facts are so fuzzy so it's uh i mean you have the probably my favorite telling of world war ii is william shires rise and fall the third reich and uh or at least not telling of 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 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 uh try to make you feel what it was like to be there which i i think he does by trying to tell the story of like individual soldiers and [Music] 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 a 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 um and um you know i think that that uh that kind of of 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 uh both are humbling one realizing that they lived in a different space and time but to realizing that if you 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 a also a sense of um of possibility you know there's this famous line right that um 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 um you know other people have have lived through worlds like this one before it's like when you fall in love as a teenager for the first time there's and then there's a breakup you think it it's the greatest strategy 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 have lived through it at the individual in the societal scale let me ask 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 has slowly parted ways that somehow nationalism is when patriots and pictures haven't gone bad or something like this yeah they're they're different right um patriotism um you know patriotism is in some ways best thought of as an emotion right and a feeling of of love of country right um you know literally um and in some ways that's a necessary condition to participate in nationalism you know whether to me i think nationalism is crucial in a world organized around nation states and you have to sort of believe that you are engaged in a common project together right um and so you know in the contemporary united states uh you know uh in some ways that that question is actually on the table in ways that it hasn't been in the past but you know 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 um and um and that you would sacrifice for them whether it's by paying taxes for them or um you know or going to war to defend them um that's a vision of you know what we might call civic nationalism um that's that's the good version the question is whether you could have that without having um exclusionary nationalism you know hating the other right fearing the other saying uh yeah you're part of this nation uh against all others um and i think there's a long tradition in america of a very inclusive nationalism um that is open inclusive welcoming um and you know new people to this shared project that's something to be defended exclusionary nationalism is based on you know uh ethnic hatreds and and others that we see throughout the world and 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 i mean i don't want to paint too rosy a picture and certainly you know the united states um as a nation has often found it easier to define ourselves against something um than to clarify exactly what we're for yeah yeah the cold war china today not that's not only united states i suppose that's us 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 know you can you you know you compete with competitors you you fight with enemies yeah with competitors is 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 they the lesson i would want everyone to take from the story of the first world war is that human life is not cheap um 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 and in the end the regular people paid the price of their lives they did and people who people who had been told that their lives were cheap uh remembered that right and it sort of you know reshapes mass politics for the rest of the 20th century both in europe and around the world yeah the 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 i saw in ukraine is the birth of at scale of generational hate not towards administrations or leaders but towards entire peoples and that hey i mean overnight that hate is created and it takes perhaps decades for that hate to dissipate it takes decades and it takes uh it takes collective effort to build institutions that divert that that hate into into other places one of the biggest things i thought was not part of the calculus in when the united states invaded afghanistan and iraq is the creation of hate when you 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 yeah like what um how many years minutes hours months and years of hate do you create with a single bomb you you drop and like calculate that like literally in the pentagon have a chart how many people will hate us uh how many people does it take do some science here how many people does it take uh when you have a million people that hate you how many of them will become terrorists uh how many of them uh 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 in a chart it was more about short-term effects uh yes it's again it's the idea of using uh military force to solve political problems um and i think there's a squandering of of goodwill that people have around the world toward the united states um you know that's a respect for uh you know for its economy for its consumer products and so forth and i think that's um uh 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 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 with a 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 um from the masses in their countries that were something that they want stopped so the people ultimately have a really big say they do you know that it was the it was mass movements by people in the united states for the nuclear freeze um in russia pushing for for openness that brought for example um ronald reagan and mikhail gorbachev to reykjavik to sort of debate um you know and eventually sort of put caps on on nuclear weapons you know those two people did you know made choices in the room that made that possible but they were both being pushed and knew they were being pushed by 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 i think about hitler and stalin and think that if certain conversations happen they could have 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 and the pacifists the people who believed hitler were foolish enough to believe hitler didn't act properly and if the leaders just woke up to that idea in fact um 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 he that force was um they gave birth to somebody like churchill who said we'll never surrender right yes she'll fight in the beaches yeah and it you know it's a i think uh world war ii britain is a good example of that you know it's uh it is clearly a you know a dynamic leader who has his pulse on what the people are want and demand and are willing to do um and you know it's a dynamic art of of leading that uh and shaping those wants at the same time as as knowing that you're 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 uh impossibly difficult task of teaching a course in uh 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 um what is going on in america that we have the leaders that we do today so the 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 than were in the past what do you understand about the american citizen at the beginning of this century uh from the leaders we have elected yes obviously we are a divided country in our rhetoric in our day-to-day politics um uh 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 you know we haven't come to blows but that we are fundamentally one society one economy and sort of you know deeply integrated as a nation both domestically and on the world stage in ways that you know look nothing like the united states in 1861. um you know will there be you know will political rhetoric um continue to be extreme of course um but uh but but we're we're not as divided as people think we are well um then if you actually look throughout human history does it always get so outside the people do the elections get as contentious as they've recently been so there's a kind of perception 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 we are um it hasn't it hasn't i mean i do think right now is is different um and there it's worth distinguishing you know 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 we what political scientists call hyperpartisanship right and that the two parties have taken sort of fundamentally different positions and moved further you know apart from one another and um you know 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 uh you know a divergence from 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 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 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 id attention 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 uh it's easy to say that it's a feature of uh of a political system that has two parties right and the united states is in some ways unique right in in not being a parliamentary democracy and so in some ways it you would think that would be the feature that is causing uh partisanship and to reach these heights that said um you know we can even see in parliamentary systems and you know all around the world that the same kinds of rhetorics of of irreconcilable division a kind of politics of emotion are proliferating around the world some of that as you say i think is is not as real as as it appears on on television on social media and other formats so you know i don't i don't know that other countries are um that are experiencing sort of political conflict i'm not sure that they're deeply divided either so i've uh had the fortune of being intellectually active through the george bush versus al gore election then the obama and just every election since right 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 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 in austin along the river and somebody said like oh a huge fan of the podcast and they said like what do you think about this is just not right what's happening in this country that um the 2020 election was obviously rigged uh from their perspective uh 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 you know is is clear for that um you know regardless of which uh election you're looking at in some ways whether even you know you look at a presidential election or even a local you know county election for dog catcher or something right that the um you know the amount of sort of time and resources and precision that go into uh voter registration vote counting um 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 um they're looking for an answer that you know they're looking for that one answer for what is in fact a complex system right so you know on the left when they say rigged they may be pointing to a wide range of of ways in which they think that the system um is is tilted um through you know gerrymandering you know sort of misrepresentation through the electoral college um on the right when people say rigged they may be concerned uh you know about about you know sort of voter security about ways in which the media pre may you know mainstream media may control messages and in which you know in both cases the feeling is my it's articulated as my vote didn't get counted right but the deeper concern is my my vote doesn't count you know my voice isn't being heard um so so no i don't think i don't think the elections are rigged so let me sort of push back right 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 non-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 uh that's a totally ridiculous argument because it's like all right well um i mean it actually lands to the question uh which is a hard question for me to ask us 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 a system to become from like uh corruption light to corruption uh to high level of corruption such that you could do things like regulations which is what happens quite a lot in many nations in um 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 the you know into the 18th century um you don't have to go back to you know texas in the 1960s uh at lbj to to find examples of 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 um you know are aren't are a matter of you know black and white or life and death um and um you will see people sort of organizing sort of um uh every way they can to shape elections right we saw this in the 1850s right when settlers you know pro and anti-slavery sort of flooded into kansas um to try to sort of uh you know uh 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 for black voters in the south um you know that the with that this history is not new it's it's there i think what um what the reason why i think that the system is sound is um is not or the reason when i say i believe that the election system is fundamentally sound um it's not um i'm not trying to be reassuring um or encourage complacency right i'm saying like you know this is something that we need to to do and to work on so the current electoral mechanisms are are sufficiently robust even if there is corruption even if there is rigging they're robot like uh the force that corrects it self 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 um 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 corrupt at 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 uh even if that desire is in the human heart the system resists it prevents it that's that's your that's your current belief uh yes as of today but i do you know i do think that those um you know the that will require um oversight by institutions ideally ones that are insulated as much as possible from partisan politics which is very difficult right now um and it will require uh the demands of of the american people and that they you know that they want um these elections to be to be fair and secure and that means you know that means being willing to lose them you know regardless of which which party you're 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 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 uh 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 and like the very cynical view is i don't know if the media machine will stop the destruction of our democracy uh in service of getting more clicks it may destroy our entire democracy just to get more clicks just uh because the fire as the thing burns down uh will get clicks is am i putting too much blame on the media here um the machine of it you're diagnosing the incentive structure um you know you're depicting that with 100 accuracy but uh i think history teaches that you might be giving the media too much sort of causal power that uh you know that the american people are smarter than the media that they consume right and um you know and even even today we we know that right people who consume you know even people who consume just fox or just msnbc know what they're consuming right and you know 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 you know three news channels that all tell us one story is that's no golden age that we're trying to get back to uh for sure well there's a 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 um yeah how to maintain our basic freedoms our sense of uh [Music] democracy of our interaction with government and so on on this new media where medium of social media uh do you think twitter how do you think twitter changed things do you think twitter is good for democracy and do you think it has changed what it means to be an american citizen uh or is it just the same old media mechanism it has not changed what it means to be an american citizen um it has uh it may have changed the um the the day-to-day sound of of being and you know the the experience of it it got noisier it got louder um and it got more decentered i think twitter is a it's paradoxical on the one hand it is a fundamentally democratic uh platform right you know any and in some ways it democratizes institutions that um you know that had had gatekeepers and and you know authority figures for a very long time but on the other hand it's it's not a democratic institution at all it's a for-profit corporation um and you know it operates under under those principles um and so you know that said it's a you know is an institution of american and global life and that the people of of the united states have uh have the authority to to regulate or reshape as as they see fit both that and and other major media players so 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 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 um i mean the simple fact of the matter is um you know twitter is a platform it has uh rules of service twitter concluded that president trump had violated the terms of service and then blocked them right and if you have roles you have to enforce them um did it have um you know did it have consequences um it had direct and predictable consequences um you know that of creating a sense among millions of americans that twitter had taken aside in politics um or confirming their their belief that it had done so um will it have unintended consequences um you know this is where the historian can come in and say yes there's always unintended consequences and we don't know you know sort of what um what it would mean for political figures to be excluded from from various media platforms um under sort of under under these notions right of um that they had violated terms of service etc so you know so i guess we'll see as i guess well to me so 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 so there's a strong case to be made that banning somebody like donald trump increases the amount of resentment um 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 and so if you completely suppress this 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 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 uh hitler don't 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 steel man the case for uh for censoring but i boy is censorship a slippery slope and also boys twitter becoming a thing that's more than just a company it seems like it's a medium of communication that we use for um for information for for knowledge for wisdom even you know during the period of kovid 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 code 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 the best doctors with twitter uh the data the stats all that kind of stuff and that feels like like more than a com more than a company and then twitter and youtube and different places took a really strong stance on kovid which is the lazy 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 the press you're like there's a there's a um yes it's a really difficult position it's a really really difficult position to take uh but i 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 they need to do that but you know i'm struck by some of the things that you said ways in which um you know uh twitter has the power to shape the conversation um and i don't think in a democratic society uh democratic polities should cede that power um to to for-profit uh 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 as the power star wars like tweets have the power to start wars to to yeah to to change the direction of elections maybe in the sense in the ways in which uh you know a wave has the power to wash away sand right um you know it's it's the meat it's still the medium right it's not um 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 as similar to the wave it's not just a medium it's a it's a medium plus it's a medium that enables virality that benefits from virality of engagement and that means singular voices uh can can have a disproportionate impact like uh 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 it's a wave that can grow exponentially because of the intensity of the the initial intensity of the wave i don't know how to describe this as a dynamical system but it feels like it feels like there is a responsibility there not to excel not to accelerate voices just because they get a lot of engagement you have to have a proportional representation of that voice um but you're saying that a strong democracy should be robust to that uh a strong democracy uh can and should and and will be i mean i think the other thing a historian will tell you about twitter is that this too shall pass right yeah but um but i do think you know the structures of of the of the platform of the algorithm of of this and other major players are are eligible for scrutiny by 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 this is going to either save or destroy our nation that seems to be like the message of every single election um as i'm doing trump hands um do you think donald trump what do you think about the 2024 election do you think donald trump runs do you think the the tension [Music] will grow um or was that a singular moment um do you think you'll be like aoc versus trump or whoever whatever the most maxim drama maximizing thing or will things stabilize uh i think i can i can you know historians don't like to predict the future but i can predict this one that it will not be a calm and and stabilized election um i think as of you know the time that we're talking in 2022 we don't there are too many um you know sort of open questions particularly about whether joe biden will run for re-election he says he will but you know but uh the jury i think is out on that you know i i can't predict whether donald trump will run for for election uh or not i think um uh you know we do know that that that uh president trump doesn't like to 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 to enter the race and might might find more appealing a kind of the kind of sideline uh kind of king maker role that he's been crafting since he he left the white house um you know i think there are plenty of people who are uh you know dreaming that there's some sort of centrist candidate um you know uh you know whether it's a conservative democrat or a liberal republican who will you know save us from from uh from all of this um 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 right you know that the the the primary systems and the party uh you know party candidate selection systems you know will favor sort of more you know more partisan views right more conservative republicans more liberal democrats um as the kind of central candidates it seems like the system prefers mediocre executive mediocre leaders mediocre partisan leaders if i 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 and uh yeah i can assure you there's plenty of mediocre partisans in the 19th century okay and the 20th um well let me ask you about platforming um do you think donald it's the twitter question but i i was torn about whether to talk to donald trump on this podcast as a historian what would you advise i think uh i mean you know this is uh this is a difficult question right um for for historians who want um you know sort of want uh to make sure that they know sort of what americans are thinking and talking about um you know uh four centuries later so one of the the things that you know at least my understanding is that when uh president trump was banned from twitter his account was also deleted um and that is one of the most valuable sources that historians will use um to understand that the era and parts of it were sort of you know uh archived and reconstructed but uh you know but in that sense i think that that is also a real loss to the historical record and i mean i think that uh your podcast shows you'll you'll talk to you'll talk to anyone and so i'm here right right right um so you know i'm not in the business of saying you know don't don't don't talk don't talk that's one of the difficult things when i think about hitler i think um hitler stalin i don't know if world war one 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 can steer or flame what does it feed the flame of war or conflict or um abuses of power and things like this and that's i think the tension between the journalists 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 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 uh 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 um 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 and by the way a large percent of the country often supports them i bet if you pull legitimately poor people in 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 doesn't care they really want to but they care obviously deeply but they 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 uh both for journalists and historians um the challenge is not to be too close to your subject right um and you know not to be um overly influenced and used by them right you know when you're talking to a living subject which historians do you know um too um you know it's it's a matter of making sure that you triangulate their story with with the the rest of the record right um and that may paint a different picture of of the person than um and will prevent you as a journalist or a historian from kind of you know just telling someone else's story and so and historians also have the benefit of going back you know 30 40 years and finding all the other stories and figuring out you know uh playing two truths and a lie you know which parts are you know which parts are accurate which are which are not and journalists do that work in a day-to-day basis but historians um you know we get a little more time to think about what we're doing well i i personally also think it's deeply disrespectful to the populace to people to um censor and ignore a person that's supported by a very large number of people like that you oh i personally feel like you owe the citizens of this country a deep uh empathy and understanding of the leaders they support even if you disagree with what they say i mean that's the the to me i'm much more worried about the resentment of the censorship um that it's to having a good conversation with donald trump is ultimately valuable because he i think especially in this case i agree with you that donald trump is not a singular person he is a 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 the the man and then seeing the interplay there what does this really represent in this period in history in this slice of the world um yeah 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 um 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 so we have this representative 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 uh to do it right um uh i think um the answer is not you know to flip a switch and uh turn on something called pure democracy um uh when people are not ready for it when their uh incentive structures are not um sort of uh structured for it but you can um you know experiment with more democratic forms of governance one after another right whether it's uh you know sort of experimenting with um technology to find new ways of sort of of getting uh greater rates of participation in democracy um i think that we see some experiments and sort of more complicated systems of voting um that in fact might actually be more reflective of people's choices than simply picking one candidate right sort of ranked choice voting or runoffs other kinds of things and you know i think that we can think more creatively about something like participatory budgeting right in which um you know we put all this money into the government um and then um you know we we um you know should as a as a people there are more democratic ways of sort of of how we spend it and i think the most urgent in some level is a more uh democratic form of foreign policymaking right the foreign policy making decision-making um about the military about foreign policy is is very ways insulated from from popular participation um in in modern american history and i think you know they're technology is not the the going to solve this you know it's a combination of technology and and human creativity but i think um you know i think we can start heading that direction whether we get there before we get to mars i don't 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 teach the class and how will those fundamentals be met by the by the students that received that wisdom so what do you think about this dance especially such an interesting idea and now 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 you know it's worth remembering right that the students who are typical american student who's in college right now right has lived their entire life after uh the election of 2000 and bush v gore right um and after 9 11 probably and yeah absolutely yes after all of after all of these things right and and um so on the one hand they take um partisanship and contentious elections for granted um they don't i think share um you know sort of some vision that things were you know things used to be different right they don't remember a world that had like lots of moderate democrats and liberal republicans and uh you know sort of running around in it um but um you know so in some ways it's a way of of looking back into the past to find other ways of of of organizing our politics uh it's also a way of of reassuring students that we have been through contentious and even um sort of violent elections before in our history and you know that people have defended the right to vote right people have risked their lives to vote you know i think they will they will understand that that as well and maybe knowledge of history here can help de-escalate the emotions you might feel about one candidate or another and uh from a place of calmness you can more easily arrive at wisdom uh that that's my hope um yeah uh just as a brief aside you breathe aside 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 us some aspects of the story that is often perhaps not considered when you start to look more at the geopolitics of europe and soviet union and the united states what how did the the war in in the pacific define the 20th century yeah i came to this book bound by war um from a sense that um that our stories were too lopsided toward toward europe right that american history when viewed from the pacific specifically in the 20th century helps us understand american power in some new ways right uh not only american uh projection of power into asia right but also the ways in which american power affected uh people in asia right um either as you know 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 u.s 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 you know from from a different angle you see it in in that way what are some aspects that define america from from when you take the perspective of the pacific what military conflict and and the asymmetry of power there right so i start in uh in 1898 um you know with the us invasion of the philippines um uh its conquest and annexation uh 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 right that the war in the philippines um is our uh our first extended overseas conflict our first conflict um in what would come to be called the developing world or third world it's a form of counter insurgency um you know this is the us army sort of learning lessons that are then repeated again in the second world war in korea vietnam and and even after 9 11. as the philippines our friends or enemies in this history well that's the interesting part right is that uh the book focuses in particular on filipinos uh who fight with the americans who fought you know sort of in the us army and navy over the course of the 20th century and they are in a fundamentally ironic position right they are they are from the philippines and they're fighting for the united states um which is the colonial power uh occupying their country um and i think that that irony persists right um so if you look at sort of polling data where they ask people all around the world you know you know do you think positively or negatively about the united states um that the highest responses are from the philippines right filipinos view the united states more favorably than people from any other country in the world including america right that they're more think more favorably of americans than americans do and so you know sort of unpacking that irony is 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 uh a large value to it in terms of what we can learn for the uh the american project yeah so in 1986 um the the president of the philippines ferdinand marcos is overthrown by a popular revolution known as people power um in the wake of a contested and probably almost certainly rigged election um that that sort of uh you know kind of confirms his his his rule um when that is over overturned through sort of mass movements in the philippines it's also sort of confirmed in many ways by the the reluctance of the united states to intervene to prop up a cold war ally ferdinand marcos had supported american policy throughout his administration um the reagan administration ronald reagan's president at the time basically chooses not to support him that's a personally wrenching decision for for reagan himself um but it it he's being shaped in many ways by the emerging voices of neoconservative political foreign policy voices in particular uh 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 um in south korea in eastern europe um and you know all around the world until it hits the wall in tiananmen square in june 1989. well what's that wall yeah what's what's the what's the what do you mean by it hits the wall so there are you know there are global movements for pot for democratization uh for for uh opening up you know throughout the world um starting in the 1980s and you know obviously they continue um in eastern europe with the fall of the berlin wall in 1989. um you know i say it hits the wall in in in china um in with the protests in tiananmen square and that are that are blocked and that are crushed and i think represent uh a real sort of turning point in the history of of democratic institutions on a global scale in the late 20th century so there's some places where the fight for freedom will work in some places not and that's the kind of lesson from the 20th to take forward to the 21st century uh no i think the lesson is is maybe one that that you know we talked about earlier that there's this dynamic dance between um between leaders whether uh totalitarian leaders or leaders of democratic movements and the people that they're leading and some you know sometimes it works and sometimes sometimes it doesn't let me ask a big ridiculous question because we talked about uh sort of presidential elections um 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 um you know washington had his uh had the statesman qualities he understood his power as as uh as the first president also relinquished power he was willing to relinquish power um he you know uh but but lincoln has the combination of personal leadership um a fundamental moral character and um and just the ability to kind of uh to fight the the fight of politics to play the game of it and to get where he's going to play the short game and the long game um to kind of you know make to uh you know to work with his enemies to to block them when he had to um and you know i mean he gets the united states through the civil war so you gotta give him some credit for that and he's pretty good at making speeches uh it you know obviously it helps that he's uh a remarkable speaker um and able to convey those kinds of visions um but um you know buddy but he is first and foremost a politician um and probably the best one we have both getting elected and ruling in some ways better better at the doing than at the getting elected right um you know that he uh you know the election of 1860 is a it's just a hot mess um you know that that could have worked out um many different ways and even the election of 1864 you know when we have a presidential election in the middle of a civil war um it was not a foregone conclusion that lincoln would be re-elected um so you know both times he sort of um you know he's not a a master campaigner by by any means but he he was a master politician as a as a governor do we have leaders like that today is is that 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 uh both of those things are true right um on the one hand um you know we we don't uh we are not surrounded by people of of lincoln's caliber right now that feels like the case um and i think that i think we can say that with some certainty but um you know i i always like to point to president harry truman who left office with you know some truly abysmal uh presidential ratings um was dismissed as a throughout his presidency as a you know as a as unqualified as not knowing what he was doing etc and then you know turns out um uh with hindsight we know that he was better at the job than anyone understood better at getting elected right you remember that sign dewey defeats truman right he showed them right and better better at holding power and better at sort of you know kind of building the kind of institutions that long after he was gone um demonstrated that he he he won the long game and some of that is the victor's do write the story and um i ask myself very much how will history remember vladimir zelinski it's not obvious and how will history remember putin that too is not obvious um 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 a probably 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 uh what which of the humans they will appreciate the most uh let me ask for advice do you have um advice for for young folks as they uh uh because you mentioned the 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 for the thing to load up for every single web page is that suffering they don't know what it's like to not have the internet and have a dial phone that goes and then the joy of getting angry at somebody and hanging up with a physical phone they don't know any of that uh 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 um yeah i've never given a graduation speech this is like warm up let's look for like raw materials before you write it uh if i did um i think um i think i would advise students that history teaches that you should be more optimistic than um than your current surroundings suggest right and i think it would be very easy as a young person today to think um 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 you know the planet um etc and just sort of give up um and i think history uh teaches that um you know uh you know we don't know who the winners and losers are in the long run but um but we know that the people who give up are always the losers right um so don't give in to cynicism or apathy yeah optimism paves the way uh yeah because human beings are deeply uh resilient and creative even under um far more difficult circumstances than you know than we face right now well let me ask a question that you don't even need to that you wouldn't even dare cover in your graduation uh commencement speech uh 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 of the whole thing what is the point all the wars all the presidents all the struggles to discover what it means to be human of 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 um to the clergy right um you know who but in the end um uh it's less of 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 um sort of dimension and you know so i think there is that i think even for people who who don't have uh religious belief um there's a way in which history um is about the shared the shared human condition um and i think historians aspire to telling all of that story right um you know we we drill down on the on the miseries of of war and depressions and and so forth but um but you know the story is not complete without you know blueberries and butterflies and and and all the rest uh that that go with it so both the humbling and the inspiring aspect that you get by looking back at human history that uh we're in this together christopher this is a huge honor this is amazing conversation thank you for taking us back to a war that uh not often discussed but in many ways defined the 20 the 20th century and then 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 to try to avoid world war three so it's a huge honor you talk with me today this is amazing thank you so much thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with christopher capazzola to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from woodrow wilson in 1917 about world war one 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