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What does the future hold? Let’s turn back the clock to the end of a year over a century ago. Posting this article has become an annual tradition ever since the grim end of 2012. It’s a reminder that the end of each year ushers in unknowns, but also opportunities for heroism. History does not stand still, and we should never assume that we know how it will come out.
December 31, 1912.
The crowds are large, the men wear hats, and the word ‘gay’ means happy. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year has fallen on a Sunday.
There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today’s urban metropolis.
The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York’s Finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.
On Ellis Island, Castro, a bitter enemy of the United States, and the former president of Venezuela, had been arrested for trying to sneak into the country while the customs officers had their guard down. Gazing at the Statue of Liberty, Castro denied that he was a revolutionary and bitterly urged the American masses to rise up and tear down the statue in the name of freedom.
Times Square has far fewer billboards and no videos, but it does have the giant Horn and Hardart Automat which opened just that year, where food comes from banks of vending machines giving celebrating crowds a view of the amazing world of tomorrow for the world of 1912 is after all like our own.
The Presidential election of 1912 ended in disaster. Both Taft and Roosevelt lost and Woodrow Wilson won. In the White House, President Taft met with cabinet members and diplomats for a final reception.
Woodrow Wilson, who would lead America into a bloody and senseless war, subvert its Constitution, and begin the process of making global government and statism into the national religion of his party, was optimistic about the new year. “Thirteen is my lucky number,” he said. “It is curious how the number 13 has figured in my life and never with bad fortune.”
In Indianapolis, the train carrying union leaders guilty of the dynamite plot was making its secret way to Federal prison even while the lawyers of the dynamiters vowed to appeal.
The passing year, a century past, had its distinct echoes in our own time. There had been, what the men of the time, thought of as wars, yet they could not even conceive of the wars shortly to come. There were the usual dry news items about the collapse of the government in Spain, a war and an economic crisis in distant parts of the world that did not concern them. The Federal Reserve Act would be signed at the end of 1913, partly in response to the economic crisis.
“Unless Socialism is checked,” Professor Albert Bushnell Hart warned, “within sixteen years there will be a Socialist President of the United States.”
At New York City’s May Day rally, the American flag was torn down and replaced with the red flag, to cries of, “Take down that dirty rag” and “We don’t recognize that flag.”
There was tension on the Mexican border and alarm over Socialist successes in German elections. An obscure fellow with the silly name of Lenin had carved out a group with the even sillier name of the Bolsheviks. China became a Republic. New Mexico became a state, the African National Congress was founded and the Titanic sank.
There was bloody fighting in Benghazi where 20,000 Italian troops faced off against 20,000 Arabs and 8,000 Turks. The Italians had modern warships and armored vehicles, while the Muslim forces were supplied by voluntary donations and fighters crossing from Egypt and across North Africa to join in attacking the infidels.
The Italian-Turkish war has since been forgotten, except by the Italians, the Libyans and the Turks, but it featured the first strategic use of airships, ushering in a century of European aerial warfare.
There was a good deal going on while the horns were blown and men in heavy coats and wet hats made their way through the festivities.
World War I was two years away, but the Balkan War had already fired the first shots. The rest was just a matter of bringing the non-phosphorus matches closer to the kindling. The Anti-Saloon League was gathering strength for a nationwide effort that would hijack the political system and divide it into dry and wet, and, among other things, ram through the personal income tax.
Change was coming, and as in 1912, the country was no longer hopeful, it was wary.
The century, for all its expected glamor, had been a difficult one. The future, political and economic, was unknown. Few knew exactly what was to come, but equally few were especially optimistic even when the champagne was flowing.
If we were to stop a reveler staggering out of a hotel, stand in his path and tell him that war was five years away and a great depression would come in on its tail, that liquor would be banned, crime would proliferate and a Socialist president would rule the United States for three terms, while wielding near absolute power, he might have decided to make his way to the recently constructed Manhattan Bridge for a swan dive into the river.
December 31, 1912 was a door that opened onto many things.
Our December 31 is likewise a door, and if a man in shiny clothes from the year 2120 were to stop us on the street and spill out everything he knew about the next century, it is likely that there would be as much greatness as tragedy in that tale.
As the year sweeps across the earth, let us remember that history is more than the worst of its events, that all times bear the burden of their uncertainties, but also carry within them the seeds of greatness. Looking back on this time, it may be that it is not the defeats that we will recall, but how they readied us for the fight ahead.
America has not fallen, no more than it did when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1912. Though it may not seem likely now, there are many great things ahead, and though the challenges at times seem insurmountable and the defeats many, another year and another century await us.
I wonder what those Nutcases are doing with their Doomsday Clock as they screw around with the Hands
All because Teddy was in love with his mirror.
What a great essay. Brilliant!
Bill Clinton also got in because of a 3rd Party candidate.
“Things are more like they are than they ever were before.” Thanks Ike, uh, I guess.
One prediction . If the nuclear option isn’t invoked by congress in the next 6 months , Dementocrats will overthrow the American people into a totalitarian nightmare through voter fraud , just like the UK and Australia . etc etc .
I’m certain the nuclear option will not be invoked and America will be completely overthrown by voter fraud by 2036 .
Happy New Year !!
Our country had socialists and Marxists in 1912, but they were few in number and far from mainstream. But that has changed, along with our demography. Millions of recent arrivals who are now citizens come from the Third World, and their world view remains Third World; the USA is viewed as a racist and imperialist, its wealth ill-gotten, and its (now shrinking) white majority hostile and unwelcoming. In 1912, there were barely any Muslims here, and now, despite the Muslim- orchestrated mass murders of 9-11, they number in the millions, resistant to assimilation because of the supremacist nature of their religion. Many have come here to establish * rabats* – i.e. beacheads for Islam, achieved by mosque building, the takeover of existing neighborhoods and the building of new ones (such as EPIC City in Plano, Texas); by being elected to public office, funding (i.e. bribing) academic institutions, etc. They are a grave threat, and unless further Muslim immigration is banned and many already here expelled for inveighing against Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims and for attempts to replace our Constitution with Shari’a, the USA as we know it will no longer exist in a few generations. We cannot accommodate or tolerate large populations who are restive, belligerent, and disloyal. Action must be taken before we are irretrievably destroyed by the very groups we have so stupidly welcomed into our country.
A brilliant write up, except for one thing. Wilson was human scum and unworthy of any trust or power, but he did not really “lead us” into WWI. And while that was bloody, it was not senseless. In reality he responded to the US being dragged into the war by the “War Socialist” government of Imperial Germany rescinding the Sussex Pledge declaring an end to unrestricted submarine warfare (including and even especially against neutral American vessels) with the right hand and conspiring through its diplomatic staff to conduct a series of bomb planting campaigns on American soil (which would not be exceeded until the bloody 1960s) and to drive Mexico into war with the US with its left hand.
It is all but impossible to imagine any of the founders putting up with this for as long as they did., as the British, French, and Barbary Pirates learned. Teddy Roosevelt certainly would have gone to war much earlier. Of course Wilson was not the Founders or even the much over-lionized Teddy. He was slavishly admiring of the Prussian “rational government” bureaucratic tyranny and helped restructure much of the US Government on its lines – especially education – while frustrated that the warlords at Potsdam still treated him as just another capitalist democrat and massively violating American safety and neutral rights. Eventually it was too much even for the most pro-German President in American history.
Not sure who you are reading,
but it’s not correct.
Sounds like revisionism to me.
It is a fact that German embassies in Washington and New York coordinated sabotage in the US on land and on ships. This involved German and American citizens as their agents. A major example is the Black Tom explosion. At the end of the thirties there was a procedure resulting in German agreement to pay damages. It is also true that Germany was trying to get Mexico to attack the US. The sinking of US ships by subs happened and affected US public opinion and policy. Statements on Wilson and T. Roosevelt are better called opinions than revisionism.
I have read a whole host of things, including authorized translations of primary source documents like Kaiser Wilhelm II’s diary. I also have had the luxury of getting some cutting edge new or draft references from scholars and friends writing on things like the finer points of cavalry tactics and how they evolved over the course of the 20th century (such as how just weeks before the end of the war the Belgian Army launched a cavalry charge on German trench lines.. and broke through).
I am also well aware of Wilson’s odious nature, and can speak in depth about his abominable conduct. I don’t do so now because I think it’s worth remembering that as unfathomably bad as the scumbag who managed to synthesize Klanner Racism with Prog Central Government overreach was, the likes of Ludendorff and Kaiser Wilhelm were even worse.
“But it’s not correct.”
Ok NANC. I’ll bite. What is not correct? And what evidence do you have? Have you bothered reading things like the diary entry Willy made where he simultaneously authorized a return to unrestricted submarine warfare he KNEW would kill dozens of thousands of noncombatants – including neutrals -, acknowledged it would probably lead to the US declaring war over such perfidy, justified it on the (ultimately failed) hope it would gut Allied trans-Atlantic transport and logistics enough, further ordered the severing of diplomatic relations with the US, and then tried to blame Wilson for the coming war?
I’m guessing not.
Also, “revisionist history” is not always bad. Revisionist history can be Fuentes claiming the Holocaust did not happen or the NYT claiming slavery was fundamental to America’s “true founding” in 1619, or it could be Vladimir Bukovsky copying classified Soviet archives to reveal things like Gorbachev’s ruthless and sadistic streak when massaging peaceful protestors or Niall Ferguson showing the depths of Labour’s betrayal of Britain.
If you want to get into discussion about how Ribbentrop helped mastermind bombings like Black Tom and the attempt to create a form of “Royal Socialism” that was anti-constitutional, anti-democratic, and deeply hostile to the US (in spite of Wilson’s gandering) , I am happy to discuss along with citations. But we on the Right – and especially on the American Right – need to recognize Wilson and his heirs came from somewhere, and that he pales in comparison to his Potsdam Predecessors and ultimately enemies.
Yes, it was due to submarine warfare.
Serious and sad.
I love the optimism too.
My grand parents were born in 1903.
I received their combined wisdom and observations as a child.
Long and deep lectures on Wilson, FDR, economics, communism, and both wars.
Granddad was enamored with William F. Buckley’s eloquence, but otherwise he was a flaming conservative.
While it is true … the nation survived.
Many Americans did not.
… and the cost has risen and risen and risen and risen …
… to the point that the Demonkkkrats are importing our enemies and forcing us to pay them billions of dollars to hate our guts …
The toll of the Demonkkkrats crimes has mounted into an insurmountable debt that cannot be repaid.
If a resolution cannot be forced upon them,
America shall surely fail.
Happy New Year.
Just one more unhappy note – the enemies you describe are being paid by taxpayers to breed.
Daniel Greenfield,
This article is a grand example of why I enjoy your writing. Thank you.