A History of the World (74 page)

There ensued a tumult of inventiveness from the United States to Italy, Austria to France, Britain to Switzerland, as individuals and small companies competed to improve both the fuel and the engineering, with new camshafts, cooling and steering systems, brakes and bodywork. The Clément-Panhard four-wheeler, launched in 1894, was perhaps the first to look more like a modern car – well, a little – but it was quickly overtaken.

The development of the car was a triumph of the capitalist system, which had evolved first in Britain, then had quickly spread. Part of the Germans’ secret was their excellent technical and engineering education and their long tradition of craftsmanship; and Germany, like the US and France, now had an effective patent system, enabling inventors like Benz and Otto to become rich. (Poor Diesel was less good at business, and having run out of money, probably committed suicide in the English Channel.) Technical journals and the robust exporting of different models accelerated the race to improve automobiles, which soon outpaced earlier industrial breakthroughs like steam-powered trains and shipping. To start with, cars were for rich show-offs and regarded with widespread suspicion and derision, particularly when exported far from their place of origin, to Australia or Japan.

America’s single greatest inventor, Thomas Edison, whose creations included the light bulb, the phonograph and the movie camera (among more than a thousand patents in his name), was a fanatical enthusiast for mass production. He is certainly a rival to Benz as one of the shapers of the coming century. One of his protégés, an engineer from an Anglo-Irish immigrant family called Henry Ford, was encouraged by Edison to set up an automobile manufacturing company. After various setbacks and downright failures, in 1908 Ford introduced his Model T, a cheap, easy-to-maintain and easy-to-drive car for the masses. The spread of newspapers was fundamental to the new publicity machine used by Ford and other motor manufacturers – they advertised local and national car races, featuring famous drivers and gimmicks of all kinds. More important still, in 1913 Ford and a group of his employees evolved the moving assembly line, which enormously speeded up production. This, along with Ford’s paternalistic attitude to his employees – he was a relatively high payer, but bitterly hostile to trade unions – led to ‘Fordism’ becoming shorthand for the next phase of industrial capitalism.

We have already seen the effects of the hunger for rubber (first bicycle tyres, soon car tyres) on Africa, but Ford-era capitalism needed a lot more – gas, oil, minerals and steel. Its products sold to Europe and her colonies, the US and parts of South America, but its hunger for raw materials reached even further afield. These developments would release mankind from a heavy dependence on horses and human portering, while creating a world where far more people had far more liberty of movement, freeing them up to do more business. Such innovation would also, of course, produce serious atmospheric pollution and expand oil-drilling, with particular political consequences for the Middle East.

But feeding people matters more than allowing them the freedom of mobility. So, more important even than the car were the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century breakthroughs in fertilizing soils. The depletion of phosphorus and nitrogen is an inevitable by-product of intensive farming, which slowly but surely reduces crops. Birdlime, or guano, collected from the cliffs of Chile and Peru, was brought to Europe and the US to help replace nitrogen; the invention of an artificial phosphate-based fertilizer by an English farmer also kept up yields. However, it was only in 1908 when a German scientist,
Fritz Haber, worked out how to extract nitrogen from the air using ammonia, that the huge expansion in agricultural productivity followed. Haber was a fervent nationalist who later made poison gas for the German army during the First World War, but as a Jew he had to flee to Britain when the Nazis took power – so, an ambiguous figure. But it has been claimed that artificial fertilizers have allowed an extra two billion people to live, and eat, today, making Haber one of the most influential figures of all time. In the short term, however, there were other Germans whose effect on the world would rival his.

The Cheerful Fellow from Berlin

What sort of person best defined the first part of the twentieth century? Not a soldier, despite the wars. Not a professional revolutionary, or a scientist. Not even Ford or Edison. No, from the British in India to the colonial administrators of France, through to the terror state of Lenin and the capitalist economy of the United States, the characteristic noises of this time are the scratch of pen on paper and the clack of the typewriter. So the answer to our question is: the bureaucrat. This is the age of the professional administrator taking a trolleybus to work, where his files are waiting. In his office, he will hang up his coat, light a cigarette, then settle down at his desk to tally tax receipts or numbers of counter-revolutionaries arrested, or write a report about typhoid cases. And what he wants above all things, whether he is working behind mosquito screens in Calcutta or ice-rimed windows in Moscow, is promotion.

Chinese officialdom had once been famous for its meticulous records and impartial, if ruthless, administration. By the late nineteenth century, the advanced economies of the West had caught up. The power of the state was growing fast. In Britain, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill planned to create state pensions and state insurance. In Japan, the ministers of the Meiji restoration were pushing ahead with their crash course in modernization and education. But nowhere was the advance of bureaucracy in the service of modernization more thoroughgoing and professional than in Berlin. The German Chancellor Bismarck had unified Germany by means of war and by the extension of a trade-friendly customs union, and then
further knitted the nation together with the world’s most impressive welfare state. German officialdom was famous. It had an almost military atmosphere. But the difference was that in the wood-panelled offices of the German state, unlike in the crack regiments of the Prussian army, non-aristocrats could rise to the top.

Arthur Zimmermann was one of the most perfect examples of the new man. He was genial, a ‘good fellow’, modest, efficient and tireless. In 1916, the American ambassador in Berlin described him as ‘a very jolly large sort of German’, and the
New York Times
celebrated his rise towards the top of the Kaiser’s foreign service as a victory for ‘a man of the people’ who had worked his way into a world previously dominated by Prussian Junkers, aristocrats with their ‘von’ titles. Zimmermann was middle-class, ‘a big, ruddy, good-humoured, square-headed bachelor of fifty-eight with blue eyes, reddish blond hair and bushy moustache’.
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Born in a part of Prussia now in Poland, he had trained as a lawyer before joining the consular service in Berlin. On his adventures he had seen the suppression of the rebels in China. By dint of hard work, efficiency and obedience he had risen through the ranks and still seemed bluff, direct and unstuffy; and he sported a duelling scar, then almost mandatory for an ambitious German male. He had moved to the foreign service in 1902, and had continued to rise. His pen never stopped. His advice was always sound.

Yet there is a case to be made that Zimmermann was the most destructive man of his generation. He was responsible for drawing America into the First World War, and thus for the ruinous postwar peace treaties dominated by President Woodrow Wilson. He fomented the Irish Easter Rising, with its tragically bloody consequences. He tried to have Islamic jihad against the British declared across the Middle East (but luckily failed). And he was also a key player in the German decision to send the revolutionary leader Lenin in a sealed train to Russia in order to make things worse there. That was undoubtedly a kind of success. Without the arrival of Lenin it is far less likely that his minority Bolsheviks would have been able to hijack the anti-Czarist revolution and create the Soviet state. It is quite a charge list.

The American historian Barbara Tuchman surely got it right when she said that being ‘a self-made man in the aristocratic ranks of the Foreign Office’ had the effect ‘of making Zimmermann more
Hohenzollern than the Kaiser. Because he wanted to be “one of them” he was the more anxious to be orthodox, the more easily taken into camp by the ruling elite.’
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The zeal of the outsider to belong, and so to be pliable, is a story often encountered in institutions, from governments to international banks. In this case, the rise of Zimmermann to the very top of the German foreign service came at a crucial point in the First World War, when there was huge political pressure for a giant gamble. Zimmermann was there because he would force the pace inside what had become a kind of royal-military dictatorship, not because he was a democratic or modern kind of man.

The issue was simple. Imperial Germany’s first gamble had failed. The lightning-fast strike against France in 1914 had failed to reach Paris and end the war there and then – though they had got within a tantalizing forty-three miles of their target. Instead, the small British Expeditionary Force, alongside desperate French and Belgian armies, had held the German attack. By 1915 both sides were literally bogged down along a line of trenches running from the North Sea to Switzerland. It was clear that the new technology of warfare, a combination of huge artillery pieces, machine-guns, gas and barbed wire, was far more effective defensively than in attack. Nobody could break through. Although the German army had inflicted huge defeats on Czar Nicholas II’s Russian armies in the east, Germany was now blockaded by sea; she could not hold out for ever.

There was, though, one way for Germany to achieve victory, even over the manpower and industrial muscle of the British Empire, and that was to starve Britain of fuel, food and raw materials. This was entirely possible. Though the war at sea between battleships was no more decisive than the war on land, Germany’s awesomely effective U-boat fleet had a real chance of sinking so many merchant ships that Britain would be forced to sue for peace. At this point, the Royal Navy had no effective answer to submarine warfare, and the Atlantic was becoming a shipping graveyard. The problem for Germany was that, to be wholly effective, their U-boats had to be allowed to sink any ship making for a British or French port, including neutral ships, and above all American ones. ‘Unrestricted’ U-boat warfare would enrage the US public, which had so far avoided involvement, and might lead to the strongly anti-war President Wilson declaring against Germany. Yet if German U-boats sank enough ships quickly enough, Britain might
collapse before the United States could arrive to help, and the war would end. That race was the essence of the gamble.

Zimmermann had a cunning plan. If the Americans did declare war on Germany, why not persuade Mexico to invade them from the south? And it would be even more worrying for Washington, if Japan could be brought into the anti-American plot. Though Japan had plumped for joining the Allies against Germany, she might be persuaded to switch sides. Decades before Pearl Harbor, Imperial Japan and the US were rivals across the Pacific, and American public opinion was regularly shaken by fear of ‘the Yellow Peril’. By 1915–16 the US was worried that Germany and Japan were indeed ‘getting together’ in a new pact to squeeze out the democracies. In 1913 Japan had sold arms to Mexico’s dictator, General Huerta. In April 1914 just before the First World War, the US and Mexico had fought in the Mexican port of Veracruz over a German arms cargo, killing nearly two hundred. Mexico, though riven by its own political conflicts, was united in patriotic anger over the huge territories the United States had taken from them in the past century, and was increasingly anti-American in mood. Viewed from Berlin, this was dry tinder.

Zimmermann went to work. In January 1917 he sent secret messages to the German ambassador in Washington, Count von Bernstorff, informing him that unrestricted U-boat warfare would begin on 1 February and asking him to send on a still more dramatic message to the Mexicans via the German ambassador in Mexico City, Heinrich von Eckhardt. This read, in part: ‘Make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.’ It further suggested that Japan would join in against the US and that the German submarines offered the prospect of ‘compelling England to make peace within a few months’.

What Berlin did not know was that, long before, British Naval Intelligence had cracked their diplomatic codes, and the sensational news was read in London before it was read by the German ambassador himself. President Wilson was still desperate to avoid joining the war, but once he and the US public knew the Germans’ intentions, the pressure to go to war would be unstoppable. In a complicated manoeuvre to prove its authenticity, British Intelligence showed the
‘Zimmermann telegram’ to a US embassy official in London, who passed it to the White House.

In America, all hell broke loose. Wilson released the news first to senators and Congressmen and then to the press. German-Americans and the anti-war party were aghast, but promptly suggested that a German–Mexican–Japanese plot to invade the US was so outlandish it must be a British forgery. Many senior US politicians and writers harbouring no love for the British Empire loudly proclaimed it a fake, a cynical London ruse. Even at this late stage it was just possible that the Americans would be sufficiently suspicious to avoid the rush to war. But they had not reckoned on Zimmermann. Two days later, at a press conference in Berlin, he was called upon, by an American journalist secretly in the pay of Germany, to limit the damage. ‘Of course, Your Excellency will deny this story,’ said the reporter. ‘I cannot deny it,’ replied Zimmermann. ‘It is true.’

So, fuelled by fears of the Prussian Invasion Plot and with US newspapers warning their readers of ‘hordes of Mexicans under German officers sweeping into Texas, New Mexico and Arizona’ while Japan would seize and ‘Orientalize’ California, in April 1917 America went to war.
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Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare worked with deadly effectiveness and did indeed bring Britain very close to the edge, within weeks of running out of oil and other vital supplies, including many foods. Only the late realization that the convoy system could be made to work saved the day. By then, the US was sending boatloads of soldiers over to Europe. Germany would make a last attempt to break the deadlock on the Western Front, but she had lost her great gamble. And for that, the friendly middle-class bureaucrat Arthur Zimmermann must take much of the blame. Barbara Tuchman concluded that the US would have probably entered the war eventually, ‘But the time was already late and, had we delayed much longer, the Allies might have been forced to negotiate. To that extent, the Zimmermann telegram altered the course of history . . . In world affairs it was a German Minister’s minor plot. In the lives of the American people it was the end of innocence.’
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