1913 Read online

  As calendars flipped over from 1913 to 1914, American eyes looking south to Mexico saw a cautionary tale. Somewhere south of the Rio Grande the promise of the New World seemed to have been blunted by the demons of the Old.

  Within little more than a year of the novel’s publication, much of the political programme Colonel House had fictionalised in Philip Dru had come to pass. Washington had seen more activity in the last twelve months than in the previous twelve years, bringing the rest of America with it. On the economic front, tariffs had been reduced and an income tax introduced. A Federal Reserve system was under construction. A casual traveller through the United States in that year might not have fully grasped the importance of what had happened. For others, however, the significance of the moment was beyond doubt. Walter Hines Page, on a golfing holiday in Dornoch, Scotland, wrote to President Wilson that ‘the passing of commercial supremacy to the United States will be dated in the economic histories from the Tariff Act of 1913 … It is so good to be alive at such a time that I have driven my golf ball clean over the greens and lost the game from excitement’.27

  Perhaps the tone of the country had changed too. America’s richest citizens were maybe less high-handed; maybe the country’s poorest had a touch more confidence in their future, notwithstanding an economic slowdown which gathered pace towards the end of the year. The nation was perhaps more bound together in a common purpose of renewal. America was a little closer to operating as a single whole, rather than as an aggregation of cities and their regional hinterlands.

  However, much more remained the same. Philip Dru envisaged women being granted the vote – but despite Wilson’s pledges of private support this moved no closer to being realised, except at the state level. Nationally, the situation of the country’s African-American population remained unchanged – in Washington itself, it had worsened. Colonel House’s fantasy of Mexico being drawn closer to the United States had been spurned by events.

  Above all, the United States remained, for most Americans, a continent unto itself, inviolate. A continent on whose shores arrived people from around the globe, to be sure, and a continent from whose shores flowed goods and people to the earth’s farthest corners, but nonetheless a protected country – perhaps even a country with a singular destiny – floating above the world’s troubles. Although accounts of fresh atrocities in Mexico were splashed across their evening newspapers, these events did not touch the average American directly. News of battles in the Balkans, or of war scares in Europe, merely emphasised the advantages of having the depths of the Atlantic ocean between America and Europe.

  The assurance of America’s invulnerability was rarely disturbed – and then only momentarily. In May 1913 a senior British delegation visited the United States by way of planning for the celebration of a hundred years of Anglo-American peace, which was to fall on 17 February 1915. The delegates dined with former President Roosevelt. In Washington they were granted an audience with President Wilson. At their final meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Anglo-American delegates adopted the proposal that the centenary – a hundred years to the day since the end of the misnamed War of 1812 – should be marked by a five-minute silence across the English-speaking world and by the simultaneous inauguration of two monuments, one in America and one in Britain, by King George V and President Woodrow Wilson.

  Professor Hugo Münsterberg, well-known in America as one of the fathers of industrial psychology, head of Harvard University’s institute on the matter, interrupted proceedings. Were the delegates aware, Münsterberg asked: ‘a general idea prevails in other countries that Great Britain and America are getting together to join in a war against Germany’? Charles Peabody, a member of the New York committee, quietened him down. Neither country was contemplating war, he said. Indeed, he continued, all nations could be part of a universal bond of brotherhood which would abolish it. Everybody clapped.28

  The celebration of Empire Day in Winnipeg, Canada, May 1913. Similar celebrations were held on the same day in Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa and all across the British world.

  PART III

  THE WORLD BEYOND

  There were few blank spaces left on a map of the world in 1913. Bar a few dotted lines in the far northern and southern hemispheres, the landmasses of the world would be confidently filled in, their outlines firmly marked in thick black ink. The South Pole had been reached little more than a year previously, and the North Pole only a few years before that. The world was now, for the first time in history, cartographically complete, its different parts coloured according to the kingdom, republic or empire under whose sway they fell, particular colours – red and blue, above all – standing out to denote the extent of European empires. The age of exploration was coming to an end. The world map showed unruly nature being increasingly ordered by man, and by the empires of men.

  Connected by man, too. On most maps, notched lines showed railway lines spreading across continents from city to city and dotted lines the routes of passenger ships across the seas from port to port. On more specialised maps one might find routes of telegraph lines, crisscrossing the earth and the depths of the sea, connecting Vancouver to Brisbane via Fiji, or Europe to Latin America via the islands of the mid-Atlantic and Brazil. Rudyard Kipling wrote a hymn of praise to the world’s deep-sea cables, bringing a single world to life through communication:

  They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time

  Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.

  Hush! Men talk to-day o’er the waste of the ultimate slime,

  And a new Word runs between: whispering, ‘Let us be one!’1

  Kipling was suggesting that time and distance had been slain. This was an overstatement – they had been tamed, not abolished. After all, communications were accelerated, not instantaneous: information flowed around the world at the speed of the telegraphist’s tap certainly, but only between telegraph stations themselves, and only when the line was free. Cargoes travelled around the world more securely, more cheaply, and with greater certainty of their arrival in a given place at a given time, but only at the speed that infrastructure and technology allowed. Human travel was quicker and easier than in the past, but unevenly so. It could still be a laborious and time-consuming process, particularly in inland areas where roads might be poor to non-existent, and railways still just a glint in the promoter’s eye. Large sections of the planet remained remote, even if none of it was now truly inaccessible.

  Yet this was a world increasingly interconnected and in motion. There were now few parts of the globe that were entirely untouched by foreign travellers or tourists, by goods produced in a different corner of the planet, by the ready money of a foreign investor, or by the political edicts of some distant metropole. Different parts of the world could no longer evolve along parallel lines of development, meeting only occasionally. Now, when crop returns in Canada were reported on a Tuesday as more promising than had been expected, this would affect prices in London the following morning and demand for Russian wheat by the week’s end. News of battles won and lost, of famines, massacres, floods and revolutions, would spread more swiftly and more widely, sparking sell-offs, celebrations or demands for retribution. Nationalist Irish, Indians and Indochinese could now more readily communicate and share their grievances, viewing themselves as similar groups, engaged in a common struggle for greater autonomy against control exerted from London or Paris. Arabs, Africans and Asians could all more easily articulate and sustain a common identity in 1913 than at any time in the past. In 1905, Japanese victory in a naval encounter with Russia ricocheted around the world, and was celebrated in Cairo and Calcutta. In 1913, a march of Indians resident in South Africa against unequal laws in the province of Natal provoked comment in London and protest in Bombay. Was this a sign of something new, an emergent globalism or even, as some saw it, the emergence of a global moral conscience?2

  The disparate corners of the globe were b
eing pulled steadily towards each other. In many cases, this was a matter of money. The flowering of such far-off places as Winnipeg, Melbourne and Buenos Aires shared common roots: the demand for food and raw materials in wealthy and industrialising Europe, the abundance of these resources in Canada, Australia and Argentina – and the ability to match up the two. The hopes, dreams and ambitions of European and American investors and prospectors, and their search for raw materials and for markets, shaped what happened in Persia and in central Asia, in China and in Argentina, in South Africa and in India. ‘Capitalism has triumphed all over the world’, wrote an exiled Russian Marxist living in Austrian Galicia, Vladimir Lenin.3

  But the wider world was still a messy place, shaped by more than capital, and by more than the demands and tastes of Europe and America. Most countries and regions followed weaker and more elliptical trajectories around the European continent, drawn in different directions by their own histories, their own perceptions of the universe around them and how they aspired to relate to it. They had their own hinterlands and their own horizons. What Europeans perceived as the planet’s edgelands were to others their backyard.

  The bold colours of a few empires on a map hid variations between and within them. After all, empire, a political form so dominant all over the world, meant different things in different places to different people. In Jerusalem, a multi-confessional Jewish and Arab city within an Ottoman Empire run above all by Turks, empire could be seen as a guarantee of security, as an imposition from above or simply as a fact of political existence. In Persia, empire meant being crushed between the Russian quest for territorial expansion and the British quest for the security of India, a chessboard for others’ imperial ambitions and anxieties. In Algeria, formally a part of centralised Republican France yet not quite administered as such, empire meant (to the French) the aggrandisement of the metropole, the spread of French civilisation and influence, the bringing of light to the dark corners of north Africa. In India, empire meant something different again, an enterprise in which Indians themselves were active participants, a sort of British tutoring for Indian political development – as some saw it – within a wider British Empire where, despite some very general overarching principles, expedient recalibrations of local relationships were the empire’s modus operandi, and where a virtue had been made of what was essentially haphazard.4

  Empire Day, ostensibly a day of imperial commemoration common to all corners of the British Empire, was a case in point. It meant subtly different things wherever it was celebrated. In Melbourne and Winnipeg, to genuflect before the empire was, for the mostly British-origin residents of those two cities, to reconfirm the covenant of Britannic people around the world and to recommit to the principles of mutual defence. In Durban, Empire Day reminded the white British population of the city of their status as a politically dominant minority in a country populated by far more black Africans than whites, and where even amongst the white population power was shared with Dutch-speaking Afrikaners, many of whom felt no allegiance to an empire which had defeated them in war, interned their families and deprived them of their independence a few years earlier. In Bombay, for the Indian elite of the city at least, to celebrate Empire Day was to remind oneself of British promises of greater self-government and of the practical advantages of British rule – notably security, railways and the rule of law.

  And everywhere over the globe, differing perceptions of race and civilisation shaped people’s attitudes towards each other and towards their own place in the world. That some civilisations and races were superior to others was axiomatic to the existence and practice of European empire. As Jules Harmand, a French colonial official, put it in 1910:

  One must accept the principle and point of departure that there is a hierarchy of races and civilisations, and that we belong to the superior race and civilisation … Our dignity rests on that quality, the foundation of our right to direct the rest of humanity. Material power is simply a tool.5

  But an account of the world in which some civilisations had progressed further than others was hardly the unique preserve of the colonial administrator seeking to burnish the mantle of his own political authority with the gold leaf of superiority. In 1913, one could find Indian nationalists, too, sadly commenting on the decline of Indian civilisation – while at the same time heaping praise on European civilisation, and the individual qualities of Europeans in which it had resulted. In French Algeria, one could find a group of assimilated Young Algerians – the Jeunes Algériens – arguing that it was precisely their Europeanness, as compared to the Arabness of the old-fashioned vieux turbans (‘old turbans’), which qualified them for leadership in Algeria, and on which basis they demanded the redistribution of political power. In China and Japan, many saw Westernisation as related to modernisation – and possibly even to political independence, for was not the acquisition of Western technology the best means of achieving the capability to protect themselves against the West’s political encroachments?

  The habit of looking at the world through the prism of race, meanwhile, was not limited to European colonisers either – even if they were sometimes the most ardent defenders of the ‘whiteness’ of their settler societies against perceived threats from outside and from within. While Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was in 1913 militating for the repeal of laws which persecuted the Indian community in South Africa, he was quite silent on the treatment of the ‘kafirs’ – South Africa’s majority black population. If anything, Gandhi wanted to ensure that Indians and blacks were not confused in the mind of the governing whites, but rather distinctly separated. The idea of the importance of race – and the validity of thinking of individuals in terms of assumed racial characteristics – was widely shared.

  So, within a global context of increasing integration and interconnectedness, articulated around the centrality of Europe, the world beyond was something more: a space of encounters of money and goods, but also people, ideas, hopes and fears.

  WINNIPEG–MELBOURNE

  Britain Abroad

  In May 1913 the imperially minded citizens of Winnipeg, Canada prepared themselves for the ‘Pageant of Empire’, a lavish commemoration of the British Empire to be held in the newly built Industrial Bureau building. Proceeds from the pageant, staged over several days, were to go to the local branch of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire, a Canadian women’s organisation set up a decade or so previously to foster the identification of Canadian nationhood with the broader conception of the British worldwide empire, stretching from Canada to Australia, from India to South Africa. The pageant was made up of a series of tableaux vivants representing different parts of the empire. ‘Five hundred ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls and even tiny tots of tenderest years’ were dragooned into the show, according to the Manitoba Free Press.1 The impression it left was one of ‘solemn loyalty and thrilling appreciation of the meaning of the British Empire and its flag’.

  The first tableau involved Britannia herself, resplendent with a trident in one hand, the symbol of Britain’s dominion over the seas. Behind her marched representatives of the imperial armed forces, entering to the strains of ‘Rule, Britannia’. England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland arrived next, accompanied by national songs, dances and instantly recognisable historical figures – an exercise in education as much as entertainment. The English danced around a maypole, joined by the figures of King Alfred, the medieval father of the English nation, and Queen Victoria, the contemporary mother of empire. Scotland appeared reeling on to the stage, the national bard Robbie Burns accompanied by Flora MacDonald, heroine of the Highlands. The Welsh Dramatic Society sang ‘God Save the King’ – the national anthem of both Britain and Canada – in Welsh. Ireland was represented by harpists, lace-makers and the shipbuilders of Ulster, singing ‘The Dear Little Shamrock’.

  Canada’s entrance was still grander, with hundreds of Maple Leaf girls and all the symbols of the Dominion, as vast as an empire in itself: Inuit, fur traders, wheat far
mers, miners, cowboys, the North West Mounted Police, Canadians in canoes, Canadians in snowshoes and Canadians singing ‘O Canada’ at the top of their voices, national patriotism happily allied with imperial affiliation. Next came the separate imperial territories of Newfoundland and Labrador, followed by the West Indies and South Africa. ‘A Zulu dance, though apparently exaggerated’, noted a newspaperman, ‘was doubtless true enough to life in “Darkest Africa”’.2 Then Australia – the ‘sister of Canada’ – and New Zealand, including women wearing badges declaring boldly ‘We Vote!’ (in contrast to the women of the Dominion of Canada). New Zealand Maori warriors were accompanied by figures representing Fiji and Polynesia, chased off stage by Egypt. Then the jewel in the crown of the British Empire: the princes and princesses of India. The global reach of the Britannic people was further represented in the British Empire’s ‘world girdling fleet of naval and merchant vessels’ and the network of coaling stations which fuelled it: Gibraltar, Malta, Hong Kong, Aden, Suez, Bermuda, Ascension Island, St Helena, Mauritius and Singapore. In a final tableau, recorded by newspaper photographers for the next day’s paper, the entire cast assembled on stage, grouped around Britannia in the centre, an affirmation of British greatness – and of Canada’s part in it.