All language subtitles for Oliver.stones.untold.history.of.the.united.states.S01E11.720p.BluRay.x264-WiK.English-WWW.MY-SUBS.CO

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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 ll...

...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 mean, 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.

NARRATOR". 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.

McKINLEY:
Upon this platform we stand...

NARRATOR". By contrast,
Democrat William Jennings Bryan...

...was an outspoken anti-imperialist.

BRYAN:
I can conceive of a national destiny...

NARRATOR".
Few noticed a third choice...

...Socialist Presidential Candidate
Eugene V. Debs.

DEBS: The socialist
movement is as wide as the world.

NARRATOR".
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:

BRYAN:
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.

NARRATOR". 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.

NARRATOR". 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.

[ALL YELLING]

[COMMANDER SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY]

Fire!

NARRATOR". 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!

[ALL SHOUTING]

NARRATOR". 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.

[English - US - SDH]