World War I panel brings the past right up to the present

A century after a German U-Boat sank the British luxury liner Lusitania, the world is still reeling from the consequences of World War I, a panel of historians told a National Press Club audience on May 7.

Although the war has faded into obscurity, especially in the United States, it is the genesis of 100 years of conflict right up to the present turmoil in the Middle East, they said.

Co-hosted by the Club’s History and Heritage Committee and the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission, the evening started with Club historian Gil Klein describing the relationship of the Club with President Woodrow Wilson, including how Wilson’s speech here on May 15, 1916, laid the groundwork for America’s entry into the conflict.

Held on the exact date of the Lusitania disaster that took the lives of 1,200 passengers and crew, Adm. Samuel Cox (Ret.), the Navy’s chief historian, recounted the development of submarine warfare and the strategy of the German High Command in disrupting shipping to Great Britain.

Richard Striner, a Wilson authority from Washington College, described how the president thought that he had a divinely inspired mission in bringing about the war’s end, which could only be accomplished with strict American neutrality.

The Lusitania disaster touched off a British propaganda campaign aimed at convincing a reluctant American population to enter the war on the Allied side, said John Maxwell Hamilton, a scholar at Louisiana State University and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

America’s entry into the war also led to the first organized campaign on the part of the U.S. government to control information given to the press, Hamilton said. Klein described the role the Club played in seeking to modify that control and limit censorship.

World War I, Hamilton said, was the “beginning of information warfare and the systematic beginning of government manipulation of journalists.”

The war, Striner said, was a “global catastrophe” that instead of leading to an era of democracy resulted in the creation of a communist Soviet Union, modern totalitarian states and “the monstrous Second Word War.”

“It was a war that changed the world and has affected everything that has occurred since,” Cox said, including the arbitrary redrawing of boundaries in the Middle East that is causing so much conflict there today.

Watch the video of the event.