CONTENTS - ouroboros ponderosa

1.")/1
()I.: I\ ;INS ,\N I I MI·:\N I Nt , tH· WWI
This rt.:commenuatioll was haillu hy Jllolierall': and radical ulliollists
alike;\; and brings to mind tht: advice ' of a few that the IWW's industrial
unionism was the specific brand needed to stabilize American capilal
relations. In fact, government-sponsored unions established the control
apparatus of scientific management, under the War Industries Board, and
survived long enough to administer the crucial blows to the three major
post-war strikes, those in coal, steel, and Seattle, in 1919.
John Dewey had predicted that the war would introduce "the begin
nings of a public control," and defended it thusly as a needed agency of
socialization. 56 But America's entry was far from basically popular; Ellul
concluded that U.S. participation "could be produced only by the
enormous pressure of advertising and total propaganda on the human
psyche.""
Zcman quotes a far from atypical, if anonymous, historian: "We still
don't know, at any level that really matters, why Wilson took the fateful
decision to bring the U.S. into the First World War."" John Higham
provides an acceptable if understated reply: "Perhaps a vigorous assertion
of American rights functioned . . .to submerge the drift and clash of
purpose in domestic affairs.""
Before examining the two most developed countries, Germany and
England, something of the depth of the prewar turmoil-and its pacifica­
tion-can be seen in even the briefest glimpse at cultural changes.
Stravinsky, whose Le Sacre du Printemps vi rtually incarnated the
promise of a new age, reminds one that the new music was noticeably
supranational in its composition and appeaL" Between 1910 and 1914,
more precisely, nationalism receded as a force in music, as it had in other
fields. In painting, the movement toward pure abstraction emerged
simultaneously and independcntly in several countries during the five
years preceding the war 6! Cubism, with its urgent re-examination of
reality, was the most important clement of the modern school and by far
the most audacious to date-notwithstanding the frequent and entertain­
ing accusation, in Roger Shattuck's words, that it was "an enormous hoax
dreamed up by the hashish-smoking, pistol-carrying, half-starved
inhabitants of Montmartre.""
Alfred Jarry's nihilistic anarchism, especially in his Ubu plays,"
constituted a one-man demolition squad, over a decade before Dada. In
Apollinaire, the new freedom and urgency in poetry, especially in French
poetry, is obvious. Apollinaire, however, can also be viewed as an art­
historical metaphor: having reached his height from 1912 to 1914, he
volunteered in 1914 and was wounded in 1916. His passion and spontane­
ity were drained away, replaced by patriotism and a sense of artistic
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