Dude, who even knows.

16th May 2023

Post with 11 notes

Occasional reminder that the American intervention into WWI really was to secure our investments, American money had funded the war but it was necessary to conclude things before the European nations were totally exhausted if the loans were ever to be repaid (between the Dawes, Young, and Marshall Plans, many were not!)

Occasional reminder that America invested the payment on this debt on industrialization that first yielded the Roaring 20s boom but went on to enable the country to serve as the WWII arms-producing “Arsenal of Democracy” and produce a postwar Golden Age of consumer bounty, which is to say this expenditure of American lives to fatten bondholders’ pockets really was key, as much as (rather, continuous with, as a succession crisis of the global order) WW2, to its later global dominance and world-beating quality of life

Tagged: amhisthistory

  1. tototavros said: oh i meant more in “prevent them from organizing a proper coalition”; a bunch of western states (colorado, montana, mb cali) were flirting with that style of progressivism
  2. kontextmaschine said: @tototavros I doubt going to war against the German-speaking empires was a bid to shore up support in the German-speaking upper Midwest, though there’s something in how NON-Germanophone immigrants from those empires (Czechs, Hungarians, etc.) leveraged anti-German national sentiment to advance their relative position in those areas
  3. tototavros said: do you think that a significant aspect was to quiet domestic unrest, particularly on wilson’s progressive front? wilson’d lost jennings bryan & was vulnerable in the dakotas, minnesota & wisconsin to lafollette’s progressives and the wartime censorship was an amazing tool for suppressing that (when combined with charges that lafollete was the kaiser’s man); idek how weak he was to the wobblies & similar but it couldn’t have helped
  4. kontextmaschine posted this
    Occasional reminder that the American intervention into WWI really was to secure our investments, American money had...