11 - The American Debate over Modern War, 1871-1914

Summary

“What shall we say of the Great War of Europe, ever threatening, ever impending and which never comes?” an American peace leader asked in 1913. “We shall say that it will never come. Humanly speaking it is impossible.” Because World War I erupted less than a year after David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, made these remarks, they have often been quoted to demonstrate the naivete of prewar peace advocates. Yet they were not all so naive as might appear from this comment. For Jordan had concluded: “Not in the physical sense, of course, for with weak, reckless, and godless men nothing evil is impossible.”

What Jordan was really implying was that war among the major powers might be rendered impossible if the elites and the general public recognized that it would be economically catastrophic and that modern weaponry and mass armies had made modern warfare militarily and politically disastrous as well as inhumane. Jordan was not the only American to make such a prediction, but many others disagreed. In the years before World War I, there was much uncertainty and debate over the evolving nature of modern war, a debate with important ramifications for U.S. foreign policy toward Europe and Asia.