100 Mistakes That Changed History (30 page)

Within days, the Austrian army was invading Serbia. This meant that Russia, committed to support their fellow Slavic nation, declared war on Austria. So Austria turned to Germany with the expectation that Russia would back off rather than face the two of them. Russia did not back off, but instead invoked its treaty with France, who also declared war on Germany. So Germany, who already had armies on the French border ready to act, attacked into northern France. They attacked across neutral Belgium in an attempt to outflank the French army. Britain had a mutual defense treaty with Belgium and so declared war on Germany when that small nation was overrun. World War I had begun.

The mayor’s driver took a wrong turn, and as a result, two weeks later, all of Europe was at war. World War I might have been inevitable anyway. But given more time and different circumstances, it may have started months or even years later. Without the fuse being lit in Sarajevo, there might have been a chance for peace. But because of that wrong turn, World War I broke out, and over the next five years, millions died.

59

TOO SUCCESSFUL A DEVIOUS PLAN

The Enemy of My Enemy
1917

T
his mistake is one of a lack of foresight. In April 1917 a truck, sealed almost airtight, entered Germany from Bern, Switzerland. In that truck were nineteen Russians. All nineteen had been considered too dangerous to allow to travel through, or even enter, virtually any nation in Europe. Only adamantly neutral Switzerland would tolerate them. Now they were going home. One of the nineteen men in that truck was Vladimir Lenin. The Russian revolutionary had fled the czar’s secret police and eventually ended up in Switzerland. From there he coordinated the actions of his outlawed and small, but fanatical, Bolshevik Party.

The start of World War I had made any communications with Russia difficult. It was a most frustrating time for a revolutionary being cut off and far from the action. Finally, Lenin approached the ambassador to Switzerland from one of the nations where he had been one of the most wanted enemies of the state, Germany. The kaiser’s government did not like revolutionaries. But Germany was three years at war, and losing. One of the nations allied against Germany was controlled by the same Russian government Lenin wished to overthrow. His promise of leading a revolution and then taking Russia out of the war was enough to interest the hard-pressed Germans. They agreed to return him to his native country. It is unlikely that anyone in the German army actually expected Lenin and the Bolsheviks to really seize power. There were barely 50,000 Bolsheviks spread across dozens of cities among the tens of millions of people living in Russia. But obviously anything that distracted the new Menshevik or Kerensky government, who had kept Russia in the war after the czar abdicated, would benefit Germany.

So Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was sneaked into Russia by the German army. He was even given some operating money. To the surprise and dismay of Germany, by November Lenin had succeeded. Alexander Kerensky, a middle-class moderate, had made a number of poor decisions, including keeping Russia in the unpopular war, allowing food costs to remain so high few soldiers or workers could afford to eat, and not redistributing land to the desperate peasants who had reluctantly supported him. When the Bolsheviks finally acted, only one small military unit, the Petrograd Women’s Battalion, actually fought to defend the unpopular Menshevik government.

In the short term, the German army got what it wanted. Lenin kept his word and withdrew Russia from the alliance fighting Germany. The German government then demanded a high price for what they had already done. They wanted to be given Poland, the Baltic nations, and Ukraine. Lenin and Russia refused, and with those demands and refusal, any slight goodwill between the two nations was lost. Germany assisted Poland and the White armies to battle the Red Army for almost another decade.

But by the time Russia had withdrawn from the war, it was too late to save the kaiser’s war effort. The German troops who hurried west arrived in time to die in the Verdun offensive. That offensive had been the last hope for Germany to defeat the Allies before the power of the United States could affect the war. The Germans were stopped at Verdun, and soon fresh and enthusiastic American soldiers had more than balanced out any German reinforcements from the Eastern Front.

It was years until the Red Army actually controlled all of Russia. By the time it did, the enmity with Germany was mutual and intense. Stalin now led Russia, and communists were aggressively pursuing world domination. It is surprising that Russia was almost as self-defeating when it assisted in the secret training of the German army. But that is a mistake of its own.

So while in the short term the German army got what they wanted by smuggling Lenin back into Russia, doing so may have been one of the worst judgment calls ever made in the twentieth century. The Bolsheviks were one of the smallest and most radical of all the many revolutionary movements in Russia. Without Lenin’s genius, the Bolsheviks would likely have remained a minor, extremist group of no importance. The much more moderate Mensheviks, or at least a less reasonable populist government, would instead have emerged.

No Lenin, then no Stalin. The millions of Ukrainians and Kulaks Stalin killed to allow the collectivization of the farms and factories would have lived. In Germany, the strong Communist Party led to a political reaction that in 1933 put the Nazi Party in power. So if those German intelligence officials had not decided to send Lenin back to Russia, there might not have been the mass programs and starvation in Russia in the 1930s: no Nazis, no Holocaust, no World War II, no Cold War, no Mao Zedong, no Castro. Assisting Lenin and enabling the Bolshevik revolution that gave rise to communism just may be one of the worst, world-changing mistakes in this book.

60

THINKING SHORT TERM

A Fine Crop of Dust
1917

E
urope was hungry. World War I was raging, and many European farmers were now in the army. The nitrates that would have gone into fertilizer were being used to make munitions. So it was decided that the United States needed to grow more food. The way to do that was to plow formerly unused lands and plant wheat or corn on them. This came at a time when there was also a period of unusually high rainfall. That was fortunate in that it made a lot of marginal land productive. It was unfortunate because the extra rainfall didn’t last.

The encouragement to plant came from the U.S. Food Administration (USFA), which was founded as part of the Food and Fuel Control Act passed August 10, 1917. The USFA was created to encourage more food production and to control the distribution of agricultural products. So the USFA turned to the most traditional way to encourage an activity. They offered a bonus payment for every acre on which corn was planted. The bonus was enough to make corn growing profitable even on marginal land. Even less fertile soil in normally dryer states was used to grow wheat. The guaranteed high prices from the USFA subsidized the plowing of new lands in such states as Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. The soil in those states was normally too dry for wheat, but thanks to a few seasons of unusually high rains, large crops of wheat were possible.

When World War I ended so did the subsidies. A few of the new farms were able to get in several more good wheat crops, but many others were abandoned. Within a decade, there were only a few of the new farms left. They were replaced by ranchers raising cattle and horses, just like the farmers had replaced those ranchers when the land was first converted to crops. But there was a difference now. Before the land was farmed, the soil had been held together by the roots of sturdy, slow-growing grass. But that grass had all been plowed under. So with that ground cover gone, the hooves of the animals chewed up the unprotected soil.

Then in 1934, strong winds blew for weeks across the Southwest. Millions of acres of already pulverized soil turned to dust. Dust clouds, know as dusters or black blizzards, covered the skies. When they had ended, what little fertility the dry land once had was gone. So badly had the soil been ruined that any period of high winds created mini dust bowls up to as late as the 1950s.

For a few years, American wheat was able to feed the doughboys and our allies. The cost of that wheat was millions of acres of grazing land lost. The lives of tens of thousands of farmers were ruined and the Great Depression was made even worse. The drama was so tragic and widespread that it was the theme of one of John Steinbeck’s greatest novels,
The Grapes of Wrath
.

This pattern is recurring again today. In China the need for food led to the plowing of the lands adjoining their northern deserts. Today those deserts grow at a rate of 1,500 square miles per year and on some days the red dust clouds over Beijing are so thick that you cannot breathe without a mask. It appears this is one world-changing mistake we keep on making.

61

RIGHTEOUSNESS OVER REALITY

Prohibition: The Noble
Experiment?
1917

T
he reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.” Such was the opinion of the Reverend Billy Sunday, a proponent of Prohibition, one of the biggest domestic mistakes in U.S. History. Despite Sunday’s hyperbolic assertion that it was the panacea to all of society’s ills, it was not long before Prohibition came to be seen as an abysmal failure.

Prohibition, commonly called the “Noble Experiment,” was the anti-alcohol movement that gained steam throughout the nineteenth century and became a staple of the progressive movement at the start of the twentieth century. By 1900, more than half of the states had become dry states, which prohibited the sale of alcohol. The Prohibitionists believed that there was no way a person in a dry state could obtain liquor. However, they overlooked the postal service, which was run by the federal government, not the states. So alcohol could be purchased from a wet state and sent to a dry state.

When that loophole was discovered, the Interstate Liquor Act was passed in 1913, making it illegal to send alcohol to any dry state. Again, that caused more problems for the “dries” because after that law was enacted, there was no longer a legal way to get alcohol in a dry state. Soon illegal methods were proliferating, with crime syndicates and the liquor industry partnering up.

Though neither Woodrow Wilson nor his opponent, Charles Hughes, prioritized the Prohibition issue in the 1916 election, the forces of the temperance movement gained enough congressional and public support to propose the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1917, banning the sale and manufacture of liquor in the United States. Many states did not agree with the proposed amendment, so it was debated for two more years. The Prohibition movement had support from an array of sources, from various Protestant groups, to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, to the KKK; the opposition was spearheaded by immigrant groups and Catholics. Sympathizers for each position could be found in both political parties.

On January 29, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, but it was not to take effect until a year later. It banned all hard liquor with more than 40 percent alcohol content (80 proof). Many of the amendment’s original supporters were under the impression that it banned only hard liquor and thought they could still legally consume wine and beer. But in October 1919, the Volstead Act was passed prohibiting the sale and manufacture of all drinks with more than 0.5 percent alcohol content. Basically, any beverage with any alcohol content at all was banned.

The aim of Prohibition was obviously to reduce or eliminate the consumption of alcohol, but proponents believed the societal benefits would extend far beyond that goal. However, the end result was far from beneficial. During the years between 1920 and 1933 when the national prohibition of alcohol was in effect, the United States saw a dramatic increase in violence, organized crime, and corruption. The Prohibition of alcohol created a lucrative black market that crime lords, such as Al Capone, took advantage of. The Mafia grew in strength during Prohibition, and the rate of robbery also increased markedly. During those years, the homicide rate shot up by an alarming 78 percent. Saloons were replaced by speakeasies, illegal alcohol distribution centers that became increasingly common during the Prohibition era. These institutions became particularly prevalent in large cities, where the majority were run by crime syndicates. Violent crime peaked in 1933, the year Prohibition was repealed, and steadily declined in the years after that. When you criminalize the common man, crime becomes common and even accepted.

Even in the area of reducing alcohol consumption, Prohibition failed. While there was a small initial decrease in consumption, this decrease was short-lived. It was not long before consumption levels were higher than pre-Prohibition levels. Arrests of drunk drivers increased by 81 percent during the Prohibition years. Increases in consumption were mirrored by similar increases in money spent on enforcement. While speakeasies were frequently broken up by law enforcement, the black market was simply too profitable to stop the spread of alcohol. Moreover, corruption was rampant at all levels of government, be it in the form of a crooked cop or a bribe-taking politician. Millions of dollars were wasted in an ineffective attempt at eliminating alcohol; this lost money was compounded by the lost revenue that would have been generated via taxation and continued even into the Great Depression.