Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I
I must admit, Alexander Watson’s Ring of Steel has been sitting on my To-Be-Read shelves since 2014. I received it from a publisher who hoped I would review it. I was in over my head on a writing project that had nothing do with World War I. Read a 500+ page book with no immediate application to the task at hand? Nope!
But there is a reason I seldom weed non-fiction from my shelves. Six years later, Ring of Steel turned out to be just the book I need.* It also turned out to be a wonderful read.
I dipped into Ring of Steel because I wanted to know what life was like in Berlin during World War I. The short answer? Not good. Watson takes a deep dive into food shortages, the black market, and largely unsuccessful government attempts to manage them in both Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire. He looks at how people tried to supplement their food, from urban gardening, food cooperatives, and “hamstering” —the name for city people traveling into the countryside to forage. He looks at the impact of conscripting men and animals on the ability of farms to produce crops. He also makes clear how dependent Germany was on imported food and, more importantly, on imported fertilizer. (Reading this in the days leading up to Thanksgiving has certainly made me it easier to count my blessings.)
Watson answered the questions I knew I had, and many that I hadn’t known to ask. For instance, Britain implemented a long-range, ever-tightening blockade of Germany that was illegal according to international law of the time.** Something I certainly didn’t know.
I found it particularly interesting to look at familiar events, such as the U-boat campaign and the infamous Zimmermann telegram, from the German perspective. It is worth remembering that there is always another side to the war.***
Ring of Steel is an excellent example of military history that moves beyond the battlefield and armaments to look at the the society, culture, and ideas that surrounded them. If that’s your stein of beer, I highly recommend it.
*With a hat tip to Elizabeth Lunday, who recommended it in the notes to an episode of her The Year That Was podcast. It is one of the best and most unusual history podcasts around: an extraordinary look at 1919 from many angles. I just finished re-listening to the episode on the Spanish Flu, which she recorded in October 2019. It came a bit too close to home.
** A technique the Germans borrowed with great success in World War II?
***In the case of the Zingermann telegram, there is a third side to the story that is often overlooked: Mexico’s response.
Shin-Kickers From History:Celebrate People’s History
The Celebrate People’s History project began in 1998. In the dead of the night, activist Josh MacPhee, aided by a half-dozen co-conspirators, pasted images of Malcolm X on boarded-up storefronts in Chicago’s West Side. Ten minutes after they started, they had attracted a small crowd of neighborhood residents. Some of them helped put up posters. Others asked for copies.*
Since then, the CPH project has become a multi-voiced conversation about history, social justice and public space in visual form using posters drawn from a wide variety of political traditions. Building on their experience in Chicago, the CPH project has pasted posters on the streets in more than a dozen American cities and exhibited them in more than 100 exhibitions. More important, at least from my perspective, teachers hang copies of the posters in their classroom and use them to kickstart poster-making projects.
The second edition of Celebrate People’s History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution shares more than two hundred posters celebrating and illustrating successful moments in the history of social justice, from the succession of Roman plebes in the fifth century BCE to protests against the Confederate Soldiers Monument in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. Some of the actions and people they depict were familiar to me: Eugene Debs, the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance group, the Rani of Jhansi (a long-time personal favorite).** Other posters sent me scrambling to learn more. I suspect that is MacPhee’s intention.
In short, it is an entire book of what I call shin-kickers. This makes me very happy.
The posters are visually stunning and as diverse as the political traditions and historical moments they illustrate. Celebrate People’s History is a feast for the eyes, the mind, and the heart
*Can you blame them? This is a seriously cool poster:
**To list only a few. If you write a global history of socialism, you learn a lot about the history of social justice movements
The bare bones of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Bonus Expeditionary Forces March on Washington
And while we’re talking about failures of compassion and the Great Depression, as I believe we were, consider the example of the Bonus Expeditionary Forces’ march on Washington—a story with uncomfortable modern-day echoes
Bonus payments to World War I veterans were a hot political subject in the years after 1919. Congress passed bills approving bonuses twice. First President Harding and then President Coolidge* vetoed those bills. In 1926, Congress overrode Coolidge’s veto and passed what became known as the Bonus Act.
From the veterans’ perspective, the act had a catch. Bonuses would not be paid out until each veteran’s birthday in 1945–26 years after the end of the war.** In theory, veterans could borrow against their bonus, beginning in 1927. That probably seemed like a generous option at the time, but by the end of 1929 banks were short on money to lend, even when backed by the security of the U.S. Government.
In May 1932, an unemployed veteran named Walter W. Walters organized other jobless veterans into a group that called themselves the “Bonus Expeditionary Forces” (BEF). Their goal was to get their bonus money immediately, when they desperately needed it.
The veterans set up camps around Washington D.C., including a large shantytown on the Anacostia Flats, across the river from Washington’s Navy Yard that was the “hooverville” to end all hoovervilles. Walters organized the camps on military lines and demanded that his forces indulge in “no panhandling, no drinking, no radicalism.” His announced intention was that the BEF would stay until the veteran’s bill was passed. By the end of June, between 20,000 and 40,000 desperate and hungry men occupied Anacostia Flats, many accompanied by their families.
Democratic Congressman Wright Patman of Texas, himself a WWI veteran, took up the cause and sponsored a bill that would give veterans an immediate bonus payment. The House of Representatives pass the bill on June 15. President Hoover’s vow to veto the bill was not put to the test, because it was defeated in the Senate two days later.
On July 28, the D.C. police attempted to remove about fifty protestors who had settled in vacant government buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue. Several of the protestors rushed the police and began throwing bricks. (You can tell this is going end badly, right?) In the ensuing riot, the police shot into the crowd and killed two protestors.
Then the army got involved.
Under orders from President Hoover to drive the protestors back across the river, General Douglas MacArthur formed a cordon around the protestors. Armed with tanks, fixed bayonets, and tear gas, the army drove the crowd of protestors across the Anacostia River to their main encampment. No shots were fired, but hundreds were injured.
With the area cleared, Secretary of War Patrick Hurley sent messages to MacArthur, twice, telling him not to pursue the BEF over the bridge because the president was worried that the government’s reaction might look overly harsh*** MacArthur ignored both messages. HIs troops pressed across the river, where they set fire to the shanty town.
The Bonus Expeditionary Force was effectively defeated by the Army they had served.
The Army tried to claim the operation as a success, but it didn’t play well in the press. The Washington Daily News, which generally supported Hoover, railed against the “pitiful spectacle” of “the mightiest government in the world chasing unarmed men, women, and children with Army tanks. If the Army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.” The New York Times, which was not pro-Hoover on the best of days, agreed: “Flames rose high over the desolate Anacostia Flats at midnight tonight and a pitiful stream of refugee veterans of the World War walked out of their home of the past two months, going they knew not where.”
The image of “pitiful” veterans under attack by the Army also didn’t help Hoover’s performance at the polls that November, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was swept into office.
*I’m getting curious about “Silent Cal”—so far every time he pops up in the story he’s vetoing something.
**And, ironically, the year World War II would end, producing a new crop of veterans to care for.
***Yah think?