To catch up, I am in the National WWI Museum in Kansas City...
The largest set piece of the museum follows shortly after in the Horizon Theater. From a crosswalk, Matt and I looked down at more soldier mannequins trudging through muck and rubble on a set at least 80 x 30 feet. By this point we had come to understand that hell is not made of fire, but rather made of mud. After three years, millions of soldiers had died and millions more remained stretched across a 475 mile front line, from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps. The background of the set was a projector screen that ran a 15-minute movie presenting the question, “Should America enter the war?” By 1917, not only had the Germans sunk the Lusitania and other vessels carrying Americans but President Wilson had won reelection on the somber campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out of the War.”
10 million German immigrants lived in the US. One of them, Eric Muenter, tried to blow up Congress—in mixed act of insanity and necessity. For the previous hour in the museum, we had been so stuck in European misery that I only barely realized the museum held back the spoilers in history. How would this war end? Who would win? What could America do? More questions are asked and more pictures are faded into one another and more Terminator-inspired music plays. The suspense was killing me, or maybe it was just the chemical warfare the museum patron next to me unleashed during the film.
Through another doorway we learned of the Zimmerman Telegram and German’s plea for Mexico to join the war by attacking the United States. Unfortunately for Germany, Mexico and the U.S. may have had, and still have, our own problems, but we don’t fight each other. Well…except for that whole Mexican War thing. And the drug and gun trafficking. And college kids getting trashed in Tijuana. Anyway…
A whole new round of propaganda posters line the walls as if bearing the load of the ceiling. My personal favorites were the ones telling Americans that it was time to repay France for their help during the Revolutionary War. It takes a historical surgeon to make that kind of argument, a careful avoidance of intentions and facts. Beyond that, American-French relations have been slow to grow back from our 2003 low-point. Maybe we need to send them more study abroad students. Maybe we need to send them less. Maybe they need to quit being jerks; they got a Woody Allen movie, isn’t that enough?
With America’s introduction to the war, Matt and I saw how radically out-of-touch America had been with the rest of the world in the years before the first shots. As mentioned earlier, the European countries (and Japan) had begun a military build-up in the event of war, which turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as everybody’s military build-up scared everybody else into building-up their own militaries. America, though, was absolutely nowhere; and the American didn’t realize it until the day after Congress declared war. To get four million American soldiers in Europe by 1918, we needed 2.5 million rifles and 72 million pairs of underpants. I don’t know, I think the soldiers would have needed so many changes of underpants had they just been given more rifles, but, hey, I’m no military genius (surprise!). Embarrassing to anybody more enlightened than Strom Thurman, America’s first bunch of soldiers sent to the front lines were entirely African-American and outfitted in (sigh…) former uniforms from the Civil War.
Continuing the regrets of the past, before America could send much of an army overseas, President Wilson signed into law the Espionage Act of 1917 and jailed several women suffragists and former presidential candidate Eugene Debs—where he remained until receiving a commuted sentence from President Harding in 1921. Of course if there’s one thing America does better than imprisoning people, it’s building bad ass weapons and you better believe this museum has those by the armful.
The best “weapon” is a criminally easy to miss wooden cane, as it is seemingly lumped in with assorted WWI airplane memorabilia. The cane was carved from a wooden propeller off of the crashed airplane flown by Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest and most Theodore-like son of former president Theodore Roosevelt. Quentin Roosevelt was a daredevil—which his father loved—and always pushed himself past the limits of normal people—including his three older brothers who ALL served on the front lines in WWI. Because the only thing that can kill a Roosevelt is himself, it seems with almost certainty that Quentin’s gun on the plane was disabled during a dogfight and so he whittled his own propeller into a wooden cane, beat a German pilot over the head with it and then crashed the plane into the ground—which also would have created the Grand Canyon on the other side of the world. The museum makes no such claim, but I think we all know that I’m right.
-Look at this, said Matt. Our allies called American soldiers “witty” and “stubborn.”
-Yeah, I think we’re okay with that description.
-Yeah.
Not far after this, Matt continued reading the lengthy chronology of events and quotes still on the interior wall while I looked at motorcycles, wagons, cannons, maps and a tank that got an artillery shell shoved up its tailpipe. A museum can’t just all be about learning, it requires a little bit of imagination, too. When you look at a handwritten letter, really look at it. See how deep the pencil marking go into the paper. Look at the stains on the paper. That letter isn’t just a movie prop, it was really somewhere else at one point. It was important to somebody and the fun is in imagining when that importance was new. People like books because it can take them to another world inside their heads and people like movies because there is something visceral to experience and I think the best museums capture the essence of both.
At the end of the museum I was struck by how much of World War I, the Great War as once called, felt untouched. The museum felt less like an immersion and more like an introduction. Modern estimates say over 9 million combatants were killed. Over 21 million seriously wounded. This doesn’t count the uncountable amount who suffered the loss of their homes, means of support or even their complete sanity. 9 million killed. That’s like wiping out all of New York City when the world’s population was a fourth what it is now. How can a two or three hour tour encompass all that? Simply, it can’t.
World War I was the collapse of empires. Even the Allied nations were too defeated to maintain the stranglehold on natural resources they had just five years prior. Worse off, Russia and Germany were not allowed at the negotiating table, which raises the question: who was negotiating about what? Russia went under the knife and cut out its old self-identity with the Bolshevik Revolution. Germany fared no better and the Allied nations—in an act rivaling grade school children—refused to let Germany join the League of Nations for six years after the creation of the world’s largest tree house club. My guess is that even then, Germany still had to eat a worm to hang out with the other neighborhood kids. That kind of stuff hurts people’s feelings…and their economies.
From the conception, through the build-up and execution and finale and aftermath, WWI remains an unrivaled low point for far too many people. It was a war like no other and properly remembered as an absolute disaster. And that’s okay. What continues the misfortune is when the war is disregarded, misunderstood or forgotten. Forgive, but don’t forget. So how did the war end?
On the one hand, nobody won. Everyone loses in war and the last country to know it’s losing claims victory. In this case, Germany saw the writing on the wall before Britain, France and the U.S. And for seeing the destruction for what it was and what it would become, Germany asked for peace—at the sacrifice of it’s own pride and people. For pleading for peace, U.S. ran away in disgust and France and Britain shoved mountains of self-righteous debt onto Germany. For ending the war, Germany was branded The Loser. And for losing over 116,000 men in a little over one year and having a President who didn’t mind a sea voyage, America was found to be the biggest winner.
And twenty years later, the world went back to war.
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