The Untold History of the United States (2012–2013): Season 1, Episode 11 - Prologue: Chapter A - World War I, the Russian Revolution & Woodrow Wilson - full transcript

People watching here tonight,

they want to base their vote

on differences between the two of you as president.

Is there any difference?

We have a fundamental choice to make.

Are we gonna step up to the plate as a nation the way we did after World War II

the way that generation of heroes said:

"Okay, the United States is gonna be the leader."

And the world benefited tremendously from the courage

that they showed in those post-war years.

I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world



and say: "This is the way it's gotta be."

We can help.

And maybe it's just our difference in government,

the way we view government.

I wanna empower people.

I want to help people help themselves

not have government tell people what to do.

I just don't think it's the role of the United States

to walk into a country and say,

"We do it this way, so should you."

I'm not sure where the vice president is coming from.

What we need to do is convince people who

live in the lands they live in to build the nations.

Maybe I'm missing something here.



I mean, are we gonna have a nation-building corps from America?

Absolutely not.

Our military is meant to fight and win war.

That's what it's meant to do.

And when it gets overextended, morale drops.

But I'm gonna be judicious as to how to use the military.

It needs to be in our vital interest,

the mission needs to be clear

and the exit strategy obvious.

The 2000 presidential election between George Bush and AI Gore

confronted the American people with two different visions of the future.

Few remember that exactly 100 years before

the American people had been asked to make a similar choice.

They were asked to decide whether the United States should be an empire.

Republican William McKinley's vision of the American future

lay in free trade and overseas empire.

Upon this platform we stand

By contrast, Democrat William Jennings Bryan

was an outspoken anti-imperialist.

I can conceive of a national destiny

Few noticed a third choice

Socialist Presidential Candidate Eugene V. Debs.

The socialist movement is as wide as the world.

The socialist movement represented

the new working class

when no one else would.

To them, empire meant one thing and one thing only:

Exploitation.

Incumbent President McKinley was running off a soaring economy

and a victory over Spain in the war of 1898.

McKinley believed that America must expand to survive.

Bryan, known as the Great Commoner

was an enemy of industrial tycoons and bankers

and was convinced that McKinley's vision would bring disaster.

Quoting a letter by Thomas Jefferson, he said:

If there be one principle

more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American

it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.

Having now annexed several foreign colonies

the Philippines, Guam, Pago Pago, Wake and Midway Islands

Hawaii and Puerto Rico

and asserted practical control over Cuba

the United States was about to betray its most precious gift to mankind.

This is 1900.

While most Americans thought the United States

had fulfilled its manifest destiny by spreading across North America

it was William Henry Seward,

Secretary of State to both Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson

who articulated a far more grandiose vision of the American Empire.

Although he failed more often than he succeeded

he set his sights on acquiring Hawaii

Canada, Alaska, the Virgin islands, Midway Island

and parts of Santo Domingo, Haiti and Colombia.

A lot of his dream would actually come true.

But while Seward dreamed,

the European empires acted.

Britain led the way in the last 30 years of the century

gobbling up 4.75 million square miles of territory

an area significantly larger than the United States.

As the Romans did

Britain believed her mission was to bring civilization to mankind.

France added 3.5 million square miles.

Germany, off to a late start, added 1 million.

Only Spain's empire was in decline.

By 1878, European empires and their former colonies

controlled 67 percent of the Earth's land surface.

And by 1914, an astounding 84 percent.

By the 1890s, Europeans had carved up 90 percent of Africa.

The lion's share claimed by Belgium, Britain, France and Germany.

The United States was anxious to make up for lost time

and although empire was a hostile concept to Americans

most of whom had come from immigrant stock

it was now an era dominated by the robber barons.

In particular, an aristocracy known as the Four Hundred

with their huge estates, private armies, legions of employees.

Men like J.P. Morgan,

John D. Rockefeller

and William Randolph Hearst

held enormous power.

The capitalist class, haunted by visions of the revolutionary workers

who formed the Paris Commune of 1871

conjured up similar visions of radicals upsetting the system in the United States.

What's the use of talking? Talking's done nothing.

The pamphlets are no good either.

- What we want is action. ALL: Yeah!

We'll tear up the streets of Paris.

If they've got bayonets, we've got knives!

These radicals or Communards were also called Communists

almost 50 years before the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Jay Gould's 15,000-mile rail road empire epitomized the worst of the robber barons.

He was perhaps the most hated man in America,

having once boasted that he could

hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

When the financial panic of Black Friday hit Wall Street

it triggered the nation's worst depression to date.

Mills, factories, furnaces and mines shut down everywhere in large numbers.

Four million workers lost their jobs.

Unemployment reached 20 percent.

The American Railway Union, headed by Eugene Debs

responded to layoffs and pay cuts by George Pullman's Palace Car Company

and shut down the nation's rail roads.

Federal troops were sent in on the side of the rail road magnates.

Dozens of workers were killed and Debs spent six months in jail.

Socialists, trade unionists and reformers at home

protested that capitalism's cyclical depressions

resulted from the under-consumption of the working class.

In his pioneering photography, Jacob Riis shocked the nation

b y first documenting the misery of New York City's poor.

Working class leaders were arguing for redistributing wealth at home

so that working people could afford to buy

the products of American's farms and factories.

But the Four Hundred, the oligarchs

responded that this was a form of socialism.

They said there could be a bigger pie for all

and argued that the U.S. had to compete with foreign empires

and dominate the trade of the world

so that foreigners would absorb America's growing surplus.

The profit for them was clearly abroad in trade.

The chief prize was China.

To tap this vast market, the U.S. would need

a modern steam-powered Navy and bases around the world

to compete with the British Empire

with its major concession at the port of Hong Kong.

Russia, Japan, France and Germany were all clawing to get in.

Businessmen began pressing for a canal across Central America

which would help open the door to Asia.

In this climate of global competition,

in 1898 the United States annexed Hawaii.

Almost a hundred years later

a U.S. Congressional resolution apologized to native Hawaiians

for the deprivation of their right to self-determination.

Cuba, less than 100 miles from the shores of Florida

had revolted against the corruption of Spanish rule

and the Spanish reacted by incarcerating much of the population

in concentration camps, where 95,000 died of disease.

As the fighting increased, powerful bankers and businessmen

like Morgan and the Rockefellers, who had millions invested on the island

demanded action from the president to safeguard their interests.

President McKinley sent the USS Maine to Havana Harbor as a signal to the Spanish

that the U.S. was keeping an eye out on American interests.

On a night in February, 1898, with the tropical heat more than 100 degrees

the Maine was suddenly blown up, killing 254 seamen

supposedly sabotaged by the Spanish.

The U.S. yellow press, embodied in mogul William Randolph Hearst

led a crazed tabloid reaction and created a vigilante climate for war.

We have no secrets from our readers.

Mr. Thatcher is one of our most devoted readers.

He knows what's wrong with every copy of the Inquirer since I took over. Read.

"Girls delightful in Cuba. Stop.

Could send you prose poems about scenery

but don't feel right spending your money. Stop.

There is no war in Cuba." Signed Wheeler. Any answer?

Yes. "Dear Wheeler, you provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war."

NARRATOR: The Journals cry, "Remember the Maine. To hell with Spain!"

Millions read it, convinced that Spain, this decaying Catholic power

was capable of any evil trick to preserve her empire.

When McKinley declared war, Hearst took credit.

"How do you like the Journal's war?"

Often remembered by Teddy Roosevelt's

symbolically colorful charge up San Juan Hill

the Spanish-American War was over in three months

Secretary of State John Hay calling it "a splendid little war."

Out of almost 5500 U.S. dead, fewer than 400 died in battle

the rest succumbing to disease.

Sixteen-year-old Smedley Darlington Butler

lied about his age and signed up with the Marines.

He would become one of America's most famous military heroes

winning two medals of honor

in a career that would shadow America's destiny to come.

With victory, American businessmen swept in, grabbing assets where they could

essentially making Cuba into a protectorate.

United Fruit Company locked up 2 million acres of land for sugar production.

By 1901, Bethlehem Steel and other U.S. businesses

owned over 80 percent of Cuban minerals.

More than 70 years later, in 1976

an underreported official investigation by the Navy

found that the most probable cause of the sinking of the Maine

was a boiler which exploded in the tropical heat

causing the ship's ammunition store to explode.

As with Vietnam and the two Iraq wars

the U.S., basing its reaction on false intelligence

went to war because it wanted to.

In the glow of victory, however, the U.S. found herself with a much bigger problem.

She'd acquired from the Spanish a gigantic but ramshackle land mass in the far east

. . . the Philippine Islands. . .

which were viewed as an ideal refueling stop for China-bound ships.

As in the invasion of Baghdad in 2003, the fighting there began successfully.

Commodore George Dewey had destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in May 1898.

One anti-imperialist noted

"Dewey took Manila with a loss of one man and all our institutions."

The Anti-imperialist League was founded in Boston in 1898

seeking to block U.S. annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

Its ranks included Mark Twain, who famously asked:

TWAIN: Shall we go on conferring our civilization

upon the peoples that sit in darkness or shall we give these poor things a rest?

NARRATOR". President McKinley did not share that mindset

opting finally for annexation.

McKINLEY: There was nothing left for us to do but to take the Filipinos

and uplift and civilize and Christianize them

and by God's grace, do the very best we could by them

as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.

NARRATOR". McKinley was ignoring reality.

Under the fiery leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo

the Filipinos had established their own republic

in 1899 after being freed from Spain

and, like the Cuban rebels, expected the United States to recognize them.

They had overestimated their ally, and now they fought back.

After one protest, Americans lay dead in the streets of Manila.

America's yellow press cried out for vengeance against the barbarians.

Torture, including waterboarding, became routine.

The insurgents, or "our little brown brothers," as they were nicknamed

were pumped full of salt water until they swelled up like toads to make them talk.

One soldier wrote home:

MAN: We all wanted to kill niggers.

This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces.

NARRATOR". It was a war of atrocities.

When rebels ambushed American troops on the Island of Samar

Colonel Jacob Smith ordered his men to kill everyone over the age of 10

and turn the island into a howling wilderness.

[GUNSHOT]

More than 4000 U.S. troops would not return from this guerilla war

which lasted three and a half years.

Twenty thousand Filipino guerillas were killed

and as many as 200,000 civilians died, many from cholera.

But because of distorted press reports

mainland Americans comforted themselves

with the thought that they had spread civilization to a backward people.

American society grew more callous from this war

as this new doctrine of Anglo-Saxon superiority

not only justified a nascent empire, but changed social relations at home

as Southern racists resorting to similar arguments initiated a campaign

against the true meaning of the outcome of the American Civil War

and passed new jim crow laws enforcing White Supremacy and segregation.

In China, a similar yearning for independence

led to the homegrown Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

Nationalist-minded Chinese rose up with fury

to murder missionaries and throw out all foreign invaders.

McKinley sent 5000 American troops

to help the Europeans and the Japanese defeat the rebels.

Lieutenant Smedley Butler was in the invading force

leading his Marines into Beijing, where he saw firsthand

the way the victorious Europeans treated the Chinese.

He was disgusted.

Thus, as in 2008, the 1900 American election took place

with U.S. troops tied down in numerous countries.

In this case, China, Cuba and the Philippines.

And yet McKinley, basking in the glow of victory over Spain

beat Bryan by a wider margin than he had in 1896.

Socialist Eugene Debs barely registered with under 1 percent.

Americans had clearly endorsed McKinley's vision of trade and empire.

McKINLEY: My fellow citizens

recent events have imposed upon the patriotic

NARRATOR". At the height of his popularity

McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901.

The assassin had complained about American atrocities in the Philippines.

The new president, Theodore Roosevelt

an even more unabashed imperialist, continued his policies.

[ALL CHEERING AND APPLAUDING]

You gonna build that canal in Panama, Teddy?

I'll dig it with my own hands if I have to.

NARRATOR: And Roosevelt, orchestrating a revolution in Panama

a Province of Columbia

signed a treaty with the newly created Panamanian government

to lease the canal zone

receiving the same rights of intervention the U.S. had forced upon Cuba.

The canal was built with great difficulty and finally opened in 1914.

In the years to follow, U.S. Marines were repeatedly sent in

to protect U.S. business interests in what were now called banana republics

considered backward and in need of strong rule by sometimes brutal dictators

able to enforce U.S. business interests on the workers and a resistant peasantry.

It is my policy to protect American citizens

and American interests whenever, wherever they are threatened.

[ALL CHEERING AND APPLAUDING]

NARRATOR". Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua

the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama

Guatemala, Mexico.

U.S. occupations often lasted for years.

Sometimes for decades.

No one had more firsthand experience intervening in other countries

than Smedley Butler, now a major general in the Marine Corps.

Adored by his men, they called him Old Gimlet Eye

after a wound sustained in Honduras.

And at the end of his long and highly decorated service

he reflected upon his years in uniform.

BUTLER: I spent 33 years and four months in active military service

as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps.

I served in all commission ranks from second lieutenant to major general.

And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman

for big business on Wall Street and for the bankers.

In short, I was a racketeer. A gangster for capitalism.

Like all the members of the military profession

I never had a thought of my own until I left the service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place

for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics

for the benefits of Wall Street.

The record of racketeering is long.

I helped purify Nicaragua

for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1909 to 1912.

I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.

In China, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years I had, as the boys in the backroom would say, "a swell racket."

Looking back on it, I feel I could have given Al Capone a few hints.

Best he could do is operate his racket in three districts.

I operated on three continents.

NARRATOR". His overall outspokenness over the years would cost Butler dearly

when he was passed over as commandant of the Marine Corps

which he now left in 1931 under a cloud of contention.

"War is a racket," is what Butler was saying.

And World War I was among the most dismal episodes in human history.

One of the lesser-known facts of this story is that on the eve of World War I

the banks of the British Empire were in crisis.

Britain's economic model of cannibalizing the economies

of increasing parts of the globe in order to survive

and not investing in its own homegrown manufacturing was failing.

Cycles of depression came and went.

In contrast, the newly unified German Empire

was leading the nations of Continental Europe

in a new system away from free trade to protectionist measures

that encouraged the growth of a domestic industrial base

not as dependent on colonization.

Germany was competing in the production of steel

electrical power, chemical energy, agriculture, iron, coal and textiles.

Its banks and rail roads were growing, and in the battle for oil

the newest strategic fuel that was necessary to power modern navies

Germany's merchant fleet was rapidly gaining on Britain's.

England, now heavily dependent on oil imports from the U.S. and Russia

was desperate to find potential new reserves in the Middle East

which were part of the tottering Ottoman Empire.

And when the Germans began building a rail road to import this oil

from Baghdad to Berlin through their alliances with this Ottoman Empire

Britain was deeply opposed.

The interests of their nearby Egyptian and Indian empires were threatened.

Enormous unrest in the Balkans, particularly in Serbia

helped block the Berlin-Baghdad Railroad from completion.

In fact, it was a minor affair in Serbia

that finally set off the chain of events of World War I

when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire

and his wife were assassinated on the streets of Sarajevo

in the baking summer of 1914.

The situation deteriorated quickly in a series of complex alliances

between competing economic empires

led to the greatest war yet in human history.

The war was a slaughter from beginning to end

on a level incomprehensible to the public.

In the first battle of the morn in 1915

the British, the French and the Germans suffered 500,000 casualties each.

The war lasted beyond all expectations.

In one brutal single day the Somme, Britain lost 60,000 dead.

France and Germany suffered almost a million casualties

during the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

Repeatedly ordered to charge into the teeth of German machine guns and artillery

France ultimately lost half of its young men between the ages of 15 and 30.

Germany first used poisoned gas successfully at the Battle of Ypres

in April 1915, blanketing French troops along four miles of trenches.

The Washington Post reported that French soldiers were driven insane

or died from agonizing suffocation, their bodies turned black, green or yellow.

The British retaliated with gas at Loos in September

only to see the wind shift and the gas blown back into the British trenches

resulting in more British casualties than German.

In 1917, Germany unleashed even more potent mustard gas weapons

against the British again at Ypres.

The novelist Henry James wrote:

JAMES: The plunge of civilization

into this abyss of blood and darkness

is a thing that so gives away this whole long age

during which we have supposed the world to be gradually bettering.

NARRATOR". Woodrow Wilson was the embodiment

of the Henry James pre-war ideal of hope in civilization.

First elected president in 1912, he echoed most Americans' sympathy

for the Allies, Britain, France, Italy, Japan and Russia

against the Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey.

But he didn't join the war, explaining:

WILSON: We have to be neutral

because otherwise our mixed populations would wage war on each other.

NARRATOR". He won reelection in 1916 with the slogan, "He kept us out of war."

But he would soon reverse himself.

Wilson was an interesting man.

He had been president of Princeton University

and governor of New Jersey.

Descended from Presbyterian ministers on both sides of his family

he exhibited a strong moralistic streak and sometimes a self-righteous inflexibility.

He shared a missionary's sense of America's global role

and believed in the export of democracy, even to countries unwilling to receive it.

He shared as well his Southern forbearers' sense of white racial superiority

taking steps to re-segregate the federal government.

When a delegation of African Americans petitioned him, he replied:

WILSON: Segregation is not a humiliation, but a benefit.

NARRATOR". The old anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan

now serving as Wilson's Secretary of State

tried to maintain American's sense of neutrality in the war.

But Wilson rejected his efforts to bar U.S. citizens

from traveling on ships of countries at war.

Britain, which for nearly a century now controlled the Atlantic

with its superior naval power

had launched a blockade of Northern Europe.

Germany retaliated with a highly effective U-boat campaign

that seemed to be able to tilt the balance of power on the high seas.

In May 1915, a German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania

leaving 1200 dead, including 128 Americans. It was a shock.

There were calls for America to go to war, but despite initial disclaimers

it was found that the ship was indeed in violation of neutrality laws

and carried a large cargo of arms to Britain.

Bryan demanded that Wilson condemn the British blockade of Germany

as well as the German attacks, seeing both as infringements of neutral rights.

When Wilson refused, Bryan resigned in protest.

Wilson was increasingly coming to believe that if the U. S. did not join the war

they would be denied a role in shaping the post-war world.

And in January 1917, he dramatically delivered

the first formal presidential address to the senate

since the days of George Washington.

He called for peace without victory

based on core American principles of self-determination. ..

freedom of the seas, and an open world with no entangling alliances.

The centerpiece of such a world would be a League of Nations

that would enforce the peace.

Wilson's idealism has always been suspect

because it seemed to be consistently undermined by his politics.

American neutrality in this war was, in effect, more a principle than a practice.

J.P. Morgan, along with Rockefeller of Standard Oil

had been one of the two titans of American finance since the Civil War.

He died in 1913, but his son J.P. Morgan, Jr. effectively served

as America's banker to the British Empire

between 1915 and 17, when the U.S. entered the war.

Initially the United States would not allow American bankers

to float loans to the belligerents. ..

knowing that this would undermine America's stated neutrality.

But in September 1915, in his first term, Wilson reversed himself.

And in that month, Morgan floated a $500 million loan to Britain and France.

By 1917, the British War Office had borrowed close to $2.5 billion

from the House of Morgan and other U.S. banks on Wall Street.

Only $27 million had been loaned to Germany.

By 1919, after the war, Britain found itself owing the U. S

a staggering sum of $4. 7 billion, 61 billion today.

Morgan also became the sole purchasing agent for the British Empire in the U.S

placing some $20 billion in purchase orders

and taking a 2-percent commission on the price of all goods

favoring friends like Dupont Chemical, Remington and Winchester Arms.

Socialist Eugene Debs had consistently urged workers

to oppose the war, observing:

DEBS: Let the capitalists do their own fighting and furnish their own corpses

and there will never be another war on the face of the earth.

NARRATOR: Whether for financial or idealistic reasons, in April 1917.. .

Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war, saying:

"The world must be made safe for democracy."

Six senators voted against it, including Robert La Follette of Wisconsin

and 50 representatives in the house

including Jeanette Rankin of Montana, the first woman ever elected to Congress.

Opponents attacked Wilson as a tool of Wall Street.

"We are putting a dollar sign on the American flag"

charged the respected senator George Norris of Nebraska.

Opposition ran deep, but Wilson got his wish.

Yet despite government appeals for a million volunteers

reports of the horrors of trench warfare dampened enthusiasm

and only 73,000 men signed up in the first six weeks

forcing Congress to institute a draft.

As 1918 dawned, it looked as if the Central Powers might indeed win the war

and defeat the Allies

which threatened to leave the U.S. bankers in a huge financial hole.

America rallied with patriotic Liberty Bond drives

and many of the nation's leading progressives

John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, took Wilson's side.

It was the Midwestern Republicans, like La Follette and Norris

who understood that the war was a death nail for meaningful reform at home.

And Congress demonstrated this in passing

some of the most repressive legislation in the country's history

the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918

which curbed speech and created a climate of intolerance towards descent.

University professors who opposed the war

were either fired or cowed into silence.

Hundreds were jailed for speaking out

including Industrial Workers of the World leader Big Bill Haywood.

Eugene Debs protested repeatedly and was finally arrested in June 1918, saying:

DEBS: Wars throughout history

have been waged for conquest and plunder and that is war in a nutshell.

The master class has always declared the wars.

The subject class has always fought the battles.

NARRATOR". Before being sentenced, he eloquently addressed the courtroom.

DEBS: Your Honor, years ago I recognized

my kinship within all living beings. And I made up my mind

that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth.

I said then and I say now that while there is a lower class, I am in it.

While there is a criminal element, I am of it.

While near there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

NARRATOR: The judge sentenced Debs to 10 years in prison.

He served three, from 1919 to 21.

With Wilson's permission

the Department of Justice destroyed the IWW, the Wobblies

while some Americans marched off to war to the strains of the hit song "Over There."

Over there, over there

Send the word, send the word over there

NARRATOR". The Wobblies responded with a parody of "Onward Christian Soldiers"

titled "Christians at War," which ended with:

"History will save you, that pack of goddamned fools."

One hundred and sixty-five of their leaders were charged

with conspiring to hinder the draft and encourage desertion.

Big Bill Haywood fled to revolutionary Russia.

Others followed.

German Americans were singled out with particular animosity.

Schools, many of which now demanded loyalty oaths from teachers

banned German from their curricula

and orchestras dropped German composers from their repertoires.

Just as French fries would later be renamed freedom fries

by Congressional xenophobes

furious at French opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003

during World War I, hamburgers were renamed liberty sandwiches

and sauerkraut was called liberty cabbage.

German measles, liberty measles, and German Shepherds became police dogs.

[BARKING]

The war years were to bring unprecedented collusion

between large corporations and the government

in an attempt to stabilize the economy, control unfettered competition

and guarantee profits to munition makers

who were sometimes characterized as merchants of death.

It was more than a year after declaring war that U.S. troops finally arrived in Europe

in May 1918, six months before the war's end

when they helped beleaguered French forces turn the tide along the Marne river.

With its manpower and its industrial might

the U.S. presence had an enormous psychological effect on the war

[GIBBERS LOUDLY]

and demoralized the Germans, who finally surrendered.

The long, dreary war ended on November 11th, 1918.

The losses were staggering.

Of the 2 million American soldiers who reached France

over 116,000 died and 204,000 were wounded.

European losses were truly beyond reason.

Up to an estimated 8 million soldiers and 6 to 10 million civilians dead.

The latter often due to disease and starvation.

But as happened in World War II

no people suffered more in this war than the Russians

with 1.7 million dead and almost 5 million wounded.

Those who survived were living in a new world order.

Britain, France had been badly weakened. The German Empire had collapsed.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire, more than 50 years old, was over

resulting in the chaotic restructuring of Eastern Europe.

And the great polyglot Ottoman Empire of Arabs

Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Muslims, Christians and Jews

which had lasted for 600 years, now crumbled.

In Russia, a mysterious group of revolutionaries known as the Bolsheviks

promising land, bread and peace, took power in October 1917

in the ruined realm of Tsar Nicholas II

who had lost the army in the slaughterhouse of World War I

and with it the trust of both soldiers and workers

who were fed up by the brutality of this war.

The Bolsheviks were deeply inspired by German-Jewish intellectual Karl Marx

calling for the social and economic equality of man.

And they immediately set out to reorganize Russian society at its roots

nationalizing banks, distributing land and estates to the peasants

putting workers in control of factories and confiscating church property.

And in March 1918, eight months before the end of World War I

and almost two months before the U.S. troops saw action in France

Vladimir Lenin signed a peace treaty with Germany

pulling Russian troops from the war.

Woodrow Wilson and the Allies were furious.

[LENIN SPEAKING IN RUSSIAN]

NARRATOR". The Bolsheviks were vowing to destroy the old secretive ways

of capitalism and empire building, throwing them into the dustbin of history.

They were promising, incredibly, world revolution

and there were uprisings in Budapest, Munich, Berlin.

The remaining European empires, Belgium, Britain and France, trembled.

Not since the French Revolution some 125 years before

had Europe been so profoundly shaken and changed.

NARRATOR". Inspired by the Russian Revolution

a wave of hope gripped colonized and oppressed peoples on six continents.

In one brazen act, Lenin's Red Guard

ransacked the old foreign office and published what was found:

A web of secret agreements between the European Allies

dividing the post-war map into exclusive zones of influence.

Much as the United States would react to the WikiLeaks publications

of its diplomatic cables in 2010

the Allies were outraged by this violation of the old diplomatic protocol

which now exposed the hollowness

of Woodrow Wilson's call for self-determination after the war.

Wilson, appalled as he was by Lenin's actions, was already aware

and disgusted by what the French and British had secretly agreed to.

But nonetheless, he sent American troops into battle

on behalf of the French and British Empires.

The conservative counter-revolution against the Bolsheviks was ferocious.

Separate armies were attacking the new Russia from all directions.

Native Russians and Cossacks, the Czech Legion

Serbs, Greeks, Poles in the west

the French in Ukraine and some 70,000 Japanese in the far east.

In reaction, Lenin's co-revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky

ruthlessly put together a Red Army of approximately 5 million men.

The outspoken but influential ex-Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill said:

"Bolshevism ought to be strangled in its cradle."

An estimated 40,000 British troops arrived in Russia.

Some deployed to the Caucasus to protect the oil reserves at Baku.

Though most of the fighting would be over by 1920

pockets of resistance persisted until 1923.

In a foreshadowing of what was to come some 60 years later

Muslim resistance in central Asia lasted into the 1930s.

Wilson initially hesitated to join the invading forces

rejecting the notion of overthrowing the new regime

but ended up sending more than 13,000 American troops

and helping arm and finance the anti-Bolshevik forces.

Robert La Follette, in the Senate, deplored this action

as a mockery of Wilson's idealism.

To deny the counter-revolutionaries their major rallying point

in July 1918, in a devastating shock to the ways of pre-war old Europe

Lenin ordered the execution of the czar and his family.

The family, who had been exiled into the interior

were shot and brutally finished off with bayonets in the cellar.

Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, were successful in mopping up

many of the Bolsheviks' remaining enemies.

Tales of the Red Terror, often exaggerated, were carried west

and when Wilson allowed U.S. troops to remain in Russia until 1920

it deeply poisoned the beginnings of any U.S.-Soviet relationship.

The U.S. would not recognize Soviet Russia

until Franklin Roosevelt's presidency in 1933.

When he arrived in Europe in December 1918 for the Paris Peace Conference

Wilson was mobbed by adoring crowds.

Two million in Paris.

When he entered Rome

the streets were sprinkled with golden sand as per ancient tradition.

The Italians proclaimed him "the God of peace."

Twenty-seven nations met in Paris on January 12th, 1919.

Wilson was a star. The world was going to be remade.

It was indeed his most glorious moment in time.

But as with Alexander in Babylon

Caesar in Rome and Napoleon on the frontiers of Europe

a zenith of success had been reached.

Wilson considered himself the personal instrument of God

and the peace conference was the crowning moment of his divine mission.

In reinterpreting World War I ideologically

along the lines of the wars of the French Revolution a century earlier

Wilson was claiming that this was a war to change humanity

a war to end all war.

In an address to the United States Senate that year, he was to say:

WILSON: America's world role has come by no plan of our conceiving

but by the hand of God.

It was of this that we dreamed in our birth.

America shall indeed, in truth, show the way.

NARRATOR". In Wilson's view, America's manifest destiny

was no longer a case of continental expansion.

It was now a divinely ordained mission to humanity.

This idea of saving humanity became essential

to the American national myth in all subsequent wars.

In an attempt to counter Lenin's revolutionary appeal

Wilson had one year earlier, while the war was still raging

announced a set of international democratic principles

including free trade, open seas and open agreements between nations

that would become the basis of a new international peace.

He called this the Fourteen Points.

The Germans surrendered on the basis of Wilson's Fourteen Points

believing he would guard them from dismemberment by the Allies.

They even changed their form of government, adopting a Republic

and opposed the Kaiser, who soon disappeared into exile.

The United States was the new dominant force in the world.

Although it had been a debtor nation in 1914, owing $3.7 billion

by 1918 it had become a creditor nation

and was owed 3.8 billion by its allies.

Nonetheless, the old multinational empires that had stood since the middle ages

had no interest in Wilson's idealism.

They wanted revenge and money and colonies.

British Prime Minister Lloyd George noted that in the United States

not a shack had been destroyed.

French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau

whose country had lost over 1 million soldiers, commented:

"Mr. Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points.

Why, God almighty has only 10."

As a result of this attitude, several of Wilson's ill-defined Fourteen Points

would be removed from the Treaty of Versailles.

Britain, France and Japan divided the former German colonies in Asia and Africa

and paying lip service to the promised self-determination of the Arabs

who had revolted against the Ottoman Empire

Winston Churchill and the Foreign Office divided that empire

creating new client states such as Mesopotamia

which was arbitrarily renamed Iraq.

LAWRENCE: They have only one suspicion.

We let them drive the Turks out and then move in ourselves.

I've told them that that's false, that we have no ambitions in Arabia.

Have we?

I am not a politician, thank God.

Have we any ambition in Arabia, Dryden?

Difficult question, sir.

I want to know, sir

if I can tell them in your name that we have no ambitions in Arabia.

Certainly.

NARRATOR". The prospect of a future Jewish homeland in Palestine

was also established in a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour

to the Jewish banker Lord Rothschild.

A protectorate was established by the League of Nations over Palestine.

Approximately 85 percent of the native population

was Palestinian Arab, and under 8 percent Jewish.

The old empires sanitized their actions by calling these new colonies "mandates"

and Wilson went along with it by arguing

that the Germans had ruthlessly exploited their colonies

whereas the Allies had treated their colonies humanely

an assessment that was greeted with incredulity

by the inhabitants of French Indo-China.

Ho Chi Minh, as a young man, rented a tuxedo and bowler hat

and visited Wilson carrying a petition for Vietnamese independence.

Like other third-world leaders in attendance, Ho would learn that liberation

would only come through armed struggle, not Woodrow Wilson's largess.

Although Lenin was not invited to Paris

Russia's presence cast a pall over the meetings.

Lenin called Wilson a smoother-over.

He said, "Only genuine revolutionaries may be trusted."

And as the delegates sat, Communists took over Bavaria and Hungary

and threatened Berlin and Italy.

Lenin's call for worldwide revolution was heard in the third world

in lands as far away as China and Latin America.

Focused intently on his League of Nations

which he considered essential to preventing future war

Wilson failed to secure the kind of non-punitive treaty he publicly advocated

as Britain and France perversely applied Wilson's concept

of self determination against Germany

leaving millions of citizens stranded outside their new shrunken border.

In its famous War Guilt Clause

the Treaty of Versailles placed the entire blame

for starting the war on Germany and not the other colonial empires

and required them to play almost $33 billion to the Allies in war reparations

more than double what Germany expected.

Prominent in Wilson's delegation was Thomas Lamont

the House of Morgan's leading partner, upon whom Wilson relied.

Lamont would make sure that Germany's payments to Britain and France

would in turn allow them to repay the fortune

they had borrowed on Wall Street to survive the war.

In reality then, the entire new structure of international finance

was built on the shaky foundation of German war reparations

which would shortly contribute to a German economic collapse

out of which Adolf Hitler would emerge.

NARRATOR". In years to come, the U.S. Congress would investigate

the machinations of the so-called "merchants of death."

These were the industrialists and bankers who made obscene profits from the war.

No one was convicted, nothing proven

but there remained a lingering populist feeling of distrust for World War I.

Many including Congressional leaders felt that millions had been sacrificed

in a financial boondoggle for bankers and other war profiteers.

The bitterness of this feeling was intense.

Wilson came home to a country where American labor was rife with discontent

and desperate for reform.

In the year 1914, by example

as many as 35,000 workers were killed in industrial accidents.

Over 4 million workers went on strike in 1919 alone.

Three hundred and sixty-five thousand steel workers

450,000 miners, 120,000 textile workers.

In Seattle a general strike shut down the entire city.

In Boston, even the police force walked out

leading the Wall Street Journal to warn, "Lenin and Trotsky are on the way. "

President Wilson, in response, wanted to kill off Lenin's message.

Communism was a European madness, not an American one.

In the so-called Red Summer of 1919, even race riots exploded out of control

in Chicago and several other cities, including Washington D.C.

Federal troops arrived to restore order.

President Wilson continued to travel the land

arguing that the U.S. needed to ratify the Versailles Treaty

and establish the League of Nations to ensure his vision of world peace.

Progressive Republicans denounced Wilson's League of imperialists

bent upon defeating revolutions and defending their own imperial designs.

Critics demanded changes, but no modifications were acceptable to Wilson.

His health began to suffer and in a final speech in Pueblo, Colorado

in September 1919, he collapsed.

He suffered a severe stroke and was incapacitated for the rest of his life.

In November 1919, federal agents were unleashed

under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in the first of a series of raids

on radical and labor organizations across the country.

The operation was run by the 24-year-old director

of the Justice Department's Radical Division, J. Edgar Hoover.

Estimates vary. From 3- to 10,000 dissidents were arrested

many incarcerated without charges for months.

Hundreds of foreign-born radicals, including Russian-born Emma Goldman

were deported as civil liberties were increasingly abused

identifying dissent with un-Americanism.

The Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty by seven votes.

The League of Nations was born

but was crippled without the participation of the United States.

Wilson died in 1924, a broken man.

By the early 1920s, the America of Jefferson

Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan had ceased to exist.

It had been replaced by the world of Morgan

Wall Street bankers and huge corporations.

Wilson had hoped to transform the world, but his record is much less positive.

While supporting self-determination and opposing formal empire

he intervened repeatedly in other nations' internal affairs

including Russia, Mexico, and throughout Latin America.

While encouraging reform, he maintained a deep mistrust of the kind of fundamental

and at times revolutionary change that would actually improve people's lives.

While endorsing human brotherhood, he believed non-whites were inferior

and re-segregated the federal government.

While extolling democracy and the rule of law

he oversaw egregious abuses of civil liberties.

Wilson's failures capped a period in which America's unique mixture of idealism

militarism, avarice and diplomacy

propelled the country towards becoming a new empire.

The public in 1900 had rejected William Jennings Bryan

and embraced William McKinley's vision of trade and prosperity

and in so doing, legitimized his imperial conquests.

The 1900 election had indeed started the United States on a trajectory

upon which there was no turning back.