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The second decade of the twentieth century witnessed little decline in tensions between a few elite power holders and large masses of populations. By far the weakest link in elites proved to be royal families and flimsiest of the flimsiest was China where the unconvincing ruling house disappeared in a tumultuous few weeks in late 1911 (Decisive Day #08, 01/01/1912). The long-lived dynasty, known in China as the Qing, first grabbed power in 1644.

A few months after republicanism settled on China came two events which each stimulated huge improvement in the quality of life – starting with the wretched loss of Titanic on a chill Atlantic day (Decisive Day #09, 14/05/1912). Arising from the 1,500 deaths was a transformation in safety at sea that helped improve the two haulages of emigration and commercial shipping. Quality of life made another advance in the following autumn when mass production line methods appeared in America (Decisive Day #10, 07/10/1913). Quickly copied in Europe and elsewhere around the world the new factories introduced ever-cheaper goods in every following decade of the century. Conveniently connecting these two advances – more safety at sea and more goods to transport – came the newly opened Panama Canal in the autumn of 1913 (Decisive Day #11, 10/10/1913). Essentially a fundamental reconfiguration of global sea lanes Panama slashed the transfer time between two of the world's great oceans. In December of 1911 Roald Amundsen of Norway had reached the South Pole, the first human to do so, and an event that caught more attention than opening the canal. People closely followed Britain’s Robert Scott who only arrived at the tip of Antarctica in January 1911 – having made the fatal mistake of using Siberian ponies where Amundsen used dogs. But it was Panama far more than conquering the South Pole that transformed the world.

One other impact of compressed transport times was how quickly news spread of the gripes and riots that popped up more quickly in Europe and America. Although usually managed or suppressed one more prominent incident, and one less ably managed and with effects lasting decades, was the Great March in South Africa (Decisive Day #12, 06/11/1913). Not that rebellion only appeared in distant colonies known only to many Europeans through books like Tarzan of the Apes – published for the first time during the decade. Seeing China had ditched one hereditary regime helped intensify assassinations of European aristocrats as much as royalty and by far the most noteworthy murder in Europe was of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (Decisive Day #13, 28/06/1914). New Communist newspaper Pravda, first published in Russia a couple of years earlier in 1912, praised the felony in Sarajevo gleefully. Pure Marxist-Leninist triumph, they roared.

Posterity more truthfully recalled the Archduke’s killing as the spark that ignited a European war that killed millions and squandered several generations of wealth in fifty-three extravagant months. Britain’s Lord Curzon wrote in 1915, a year into the Great War of 1914-1918, that for every two million Germans killed a matching number of Allied soldiers ‘will have to be sacrificed.’ Widely backed as a maxim it focused dismay and gnawing frustration at military treatment of human life in weighing the balance of brawn. After several more years of fighting and slaughter there seemed little noticeable change to what French General Foch reckoned before war started: ‘The consideration of what fire one may oneself receive becomes a secondary matter; the troops are on the move and must arrive, to march and march quickly, preceded by a hail of bullets.’

Generals like France’s Foch and Britain’s Haig, frustrated at the spending power of massacres to buy a few hundred metres of prime French mud, pushed for newer and more powerful weaponry. Prominent among the new bludgeons came mustard gas in 1915. Exploited first by Germany a surviving officer grimly reported on its outcome: ‘All the dead lie on their backs, with clenched fists; the whole field is yellow’. Another witness, poet Wilfred Owen, morosely pleaded in 1917: ‘If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, my friend you would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old lie: Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori’ (It is sweet and becoming to die for one's country). Both sides used gases with varying degrees of recklessness. It may not have killed as many as the Armenian genocide of 1915 and later years where Muslim Turks slaughtered over a million Christians in the more traditional way – bullets and starvation. That tragedy of the Balkans crumbled the Ottoman Empire and delayed Armenian independence until 1991 after the break up of the USSR. But gas, in its vile way, smothered a new blanket of mass destruction over modern war and from which there was no return.

Mercifully the war did have some limits. Concentrated mostly in the trenches of Europe it spilled over rarely into the High Seas. The German Navy bombarded England’s eastern coast in December of 1914, killing 150 civilians in Hartlepool and Scarborough, and earning Winston Churchill’s accusation of the ‘baby-killers of Scarborough’. But results could not project power meaningfully or continue a snug blockade and both navies mostly confined themselves in port until the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Held in the North Sea near Denmark this spar was the largest sea battle since Trafalgar in 1805. Some wounds undoubtedly grazed Britain in unfamiliar ways. Following the unexpected explosion of two British battlecruisers, HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary where combined deaths exceeding 2,300, one British Admiral bitingly commented not on lost life but ‘there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.’

However both fleets retreated largely intact and spent the rest of the war growling menacingly from harbour, leaving British dominance in surface ships effectively intact and massacres on the high seas to a minimum. Germany temporarily intrigued around another new weaponry, submarines. Berlin had not been slow to note views floated in 1904 by Jules Verne that submarines might end war by making surface fleets helpless. ‘As other war material continues to improve,’ the seafaring French writer hoped, ‘war will become impossible.’ For a while this looked vaguely, perhaps, at a stretch, possible. After the indecisive Battle of Jutland and seeing no change in stubborn trench warfare Germany turned not to negotiation but, starting in early 1917, unrestricted submarine warfare. Sinkings pock-marked the North Sea, fringes of the Irish Sea and portentously the wider Atlantic. While both gas and submarines inflicted signature catastrophes, though, neither became a decisive peacemaker. Sensing U-Boats could strike relatively few and usually isolated ships straying off shipping lanes or neglecting zigzag frenzy Germany turned instead to that most ancient of weapons, intrigue and politics. That too failed. Among their more clumsy acts was the notorious Zimmerman Telegram incident and baiting scrawny Mexico to fight muscular America.

Eventually neither mustard gas nor submarines nor politics worked hard enough for Germany. Only time was an ally of sorts but it too proved fickle. That few advances other than better munitions appeared from the war – X-Rays being a notable exception that helped locate shrapnel and bullets inside soldier’s bodies – gave Berlin hope on two fronts: first, Germany would tire last. Mathematics made that questionable but not impossible. Second, the American continental colossus would saunter past the whole war. It proved a forlorn duo of hopes. There was too much energy for killing across Europe and too little patience in America. Through the unpromising massacres of 1916 President Wilson's administration gradually warmed to American troops playing a part in trench warfare even though many outside Washington remained unconvinced. Many in the mid-West and southern states instinctively warmed more to Kipling’s characterization of war as deception and deceit – ‘If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied’. Not only new immigrants from Europe felt cynical on any involvement in their old continent either. Also dissenting were many blue-collar workers. New ways of expressing this anti-Washington and antiestablishment dissent seemed like another source of hope to Germany and notably a new musical form called jazz (Decisive Day #14, 27/10/1916). The new freestyle music helped to voice feelings of rebellion initially among African-Americans but later among many Americans fretting at the horror of war and the general dreadfulness of industrial life. But it did not prevent America’s late entry into the war (Decisive Day #15, 16/04/1917) that as the Kaiser feared proved crucial even though it appeared after 34 months of the 53 months conflict – or 65%. It was also history's more ambiguous entries into war. The Balfour Declaration, a British commitment to creating a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, with all its attendant risks (Decisive Day #16, 02/11/1917), only added to American unease. Before America entered war Tom Watson had noted in 1915, in a thinly disguised anti-Semitic note, that European countries ‘empty upon our shores the very scum and dross of the Parasite Race’.

In the climate of bereavement and anger at contemptuous rulers arising from the war it was unsurprising to find republicanism take more notable strides, in fact its most notable since the French revolution of the 1790s. To add to the Chinese republic from 1912 another mostly European continental power also expelled monarchy – this time in the vast Russian Empire (Decisive Day #17, 07/11/1917). Exit of the Tsars proved far more significant than the death of hereditary monarchy in Germany and Austro-Hungary, both in 1918-1919, as it transformed a largely intact Tsarist Empire into a much more brawny Soviet Union. Of the wealthier and larger European nations only Britain kept monarchy cooking with a recognizable recipe. But even this exception to the rule involved significant new flavourings to suit modern palates. The new Anglicized name of Windsor was an obvious additive, a switch from the Germanic etymology of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Other sugary changes involved a much less ostentatious court life and yielding of implicit authority.

Increasingly after the Treaty of Versailles (Decisive Day #18, 06/28/1919) which ended the war pressure for a more benign social landscape in the industrialized world ramped notably. Like British monarchism post-war British patriotism took on a different look-and-feel from the obedient optimism of the 1910s – when Land of Hope and Glory first appeared, Britain’s unofficial imperial anthem by A C Benson. (America adopted a rough equivalent, the Star Spangled Banner, in 1931). In early 1918 Britain’s young socialist Labour Party adopted a more practical constitutional commitment to ‘secure for the producers by hand and brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof’. For the toiling masses used to much less before the war this was a spectacular jump. Suffragettes in Britain and around the industrialized world also felt inspired and prodded authorities towards universal suffrage. Already famous protestors included Britain’s Emily Davison who had sacrificed herself under the King’s racing horse at the Epsom races in 1913 (and died a few days later). By 1918 women had played an eminent part in munitions factories during the Great War and all British people over thirty received votes. Full voting rights equalling men, active at age 21, appeared in 1928. Although quicker than others, to some extent anyway, eventually all the industrialized powers granted universal suffrage. Tentative France granted equality in 1945 and impish Australia only extended female suffrage to aborigines in the 1960s. Switzerland was among the last to equalize voting rights in the 1970s.

In Britain pressure against the almost fully hereditary House of Lords had swelled in 1911. Mend ‘Em or End ‘Em had been a popular pre-war taunt that built on views stretching back to the liberal ground swell nurtured by Gladstone. ‘All the world over I will back the masses against the classes,’ the elder leader of Victorian liberalism believed in 1886. Many followed such political passion. James Kier-Hardie, pioneer leader of the Labour Party, spoke openly and more directly in 1894 that one Welsh miner was worth more than the entire royal family. A more direct successor to the Gladstone legacy, David Lloyd George, reckoned in 1909 that a fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep as two Dreadnought battleships. From that inferred the House of Lords deserved a right royal sinking. ‘The question will be asked whether five hundred men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from the unemployed, should override the judgement – the deliberate judgement – of millions of people,’ the Welsh politician hollered. After 1911 the House of Lords power reduced though in a curious British fudge not its core composition. Hereditary peers disappeared largely in 1999, after which a small rump of 92 remained, and fully by 2007.

Not only the politics in London changed Britain. David Lloyd George asked rhetorically of parliament on November 25, 1918, a fortnight after the armistice, what was the most important reconstruction task facing the fatigued island. Came the conclusion: ‘Slums are not fit homes for the men who have won this war or for their children. They are not fit nurseries for the children who are to make an imperial race.’ To some alarmed observers by the spring of 1919 Bolshevism or some form of radical socialism covered three-quarters of Europe. The first Labour and ostensibly socialist government appeared in Britain in 1924 although hopes for a radical new age fell short. Lloyd George cynically dismissed the new socialist leaders as ‘engaged in looking as respectable as lather and blather will make them’. Undaunted by such biting words, by 1930 Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald had picked up a taste for the pleasures of Balmoral, the Scottish home where royals welcomed Prime Ministers and other senior ministers. This of course was some way apart from tenement and urban squalor and poverty. Admittedly this extracted some royal response. Edward VIII visited slums in 1936 and publicly claimed shock at the squalor. The blue-blooded royal told residents: ‘I am going to help you. Something will be done for you’. Not too much obviously red happened for a decade when the exasperated Atlee government of 1945-51 daubed more heartfelt and fundamental socialist look on Britain.

America in this post-war climate looked only stronger. Victory over Germany had added to their forceful victory in the Spanish-American war (1898) and it became clear the mantle of global dominance was seeping westwards from London to Washington. Life and communications to many sparkled in the new country compared to dreary and scarred Europe. Far too much hoo hah accompanied the 1908 revelation that while for several millennia tea formed part of the diet in India and China it took an American to think up the tea bag. But other contrasts between the New World and the Old Word were real enough. Leisure was real. During the 1910s, for example, something like 26 million Americans each week visited cinemas. American governments seemed confident and self-assured and independent-minded. By contrast, Britain’s squeeze through the Boer War (1901), stealthy alliances with Japan (1902) and France (1904), and near collapse from the Great War, reinforced the view of one country on the slide and another on the up. There was optimistic political stability in America, too, free of any hereditary challenges where Britain juggled resolving and postponing. In 1913 seats in Congress reached 435 for the first time – 67% Democrat, 29% Republican and eighteen independents – a number which stayed the same for the rest of the century except for a brief exception in 1959-1963.

Not all of America appeared as unalloyed nobleness. Tensions against continued immigration surfaced more widely after the war. Subsiding from national identity was automatic affiliation to the idea of an American melting pot – a phrase that gained wide traction from Israel Zangwill’s 1908 book of the same name. More and more American politicians instead fretted at the gradual decline of whites as the dominant ethnicity and how non-white, non-English-speaking ethnicities increasingly defined immigration. In 1916, as war in Europe called, another commentator, Madison Grant, warned unswervingly that ‘immigrant labourers are now breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as the sword.’ Such views held much irony. In 1500, by some estimates, there were around five million Native Americans. By 1900 there were fewer than 200,000, a survival rate or under 1-in-20. It was one of the biggest genocides in history. But it defined an increasing bitterness in America to continued homes of world emigrants.