Immigrant Groups Bring Their Characteristic Skills to the Frontier: The Germans and the Scotch-Irish

Starting with the Spanish presence in Florida (1513) and the English settlement at Jamestown (1607), the cultures of the various waves of immigrants have shaped the societies in the areas that would become the United States. Each ethnicity brought with it talents and abilities, techniques refined in the previous centuries in its home territory, as well as new applications of those old artisan trades in a new land.

Each culture was, or became, inventive in its own way. Life on the frontier demanded creativity. Settlements which lacked resourcefulness often disappeared.

Some of these groups were quite different from one another, which led at times to frictions, and at other times to a fruitful complementarity. The groups cooperated and collaborated when necessary, but often ridiculed each other when times were easier. Many of the stereotypes and cliches which still circulate in American society about these ethnicities come from this era — from the mid-1600s onward.

The Germans and the Scotch-Irish were two contrasting groups who moved into the frontier regions, as historian Thomas Sowell writes:

As the German farming communities spread down through the Appalachian valley near the frontier, they found themselves often near the Scotch-Irish, who were frontiersmen par excellence. The Scotch-Irish often led the way into the untamed wilderness, hunting, fishing, clearing land, and fighting Indians, with the Germans and others following after the area became more settled.

The Scotch-Irish were rugged people who cared little for form and propriety. They were “pioneers” in the etymological sense: they were foot soldiers, if not literally, then at least in their attitudes.

The Germans were methodical, precise, and process-oriented. German families operated on mottos like “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” The value they placed on organization meant that not only were there correct things to do, but correct ways to do them. Thomas Sowell contrasts the two:

The Germans and the Scotch-Irish were very different in temperament and behavior and generally kept quite separate from each other, even in adjacent settlements. The Germans were noted for their order, quietness, friendliness, steady work, frugality, and their ability to get along with the Indians. The Scotch-Irish were just the opposite — quick-tempered, hard drinking, working intermittently, saving little, washing little, and constantly involved in feuds among themselves or with the Indians.

As recently as the first decade of the twentieth century, small German villages in Missouri retained the language, customs, and social patterns of Germany. They preserved the Germany they’d left in the early 1800s. To walk into the village of Frohna, Missouri in 1914 was like walking into a German village of a century earlier. The residents spoke German, and the children were exposed to the English language only when they were old enough to go to school. They brewed their own beer, and made their own wine, in accord with the methods which had been used in Germany for centuries. Once every few weeks, a family might venture to a neighboring village to “trade with the English” — meaning to buy from the marchants in the English-speaking villages.

The Scotch-Irish, meanwhile, made their own whiskey, were crude and vulgar by the standards of any of America’s ethnic immigrant groups, and fiercely independent. It is no coincidence that the most radical of the leaders in the American Revolution were not Germans. The Germans contributed more to the moderate aspects of the Revolution, like sorting out the details of representative government and refining the manufacture of weapons.

Religion, too, was a metric by which the differences between these groups could be measured, as Thomas Sowell reports:

Religious differences also divided them. The early German settlers were usually pious Lutherans, Calvinists, and other strict Protestant sects that avoided strong language or strong drink, while the Scotch-Irish were Presbyterians and were given to hard liquor and language that pious people considered blasphemous. After a century of sharing hundreds of miles of the great valleys of the Appalachian range, there was still little racial intermixture between the Germans and the Scotch-Irish.

Examples of the Scotch-Irish social patterns include the McCoy-Hatfield feud, which included both violence and whiskey (1863 - 1891); and the Whiskey Rebellion (1791 - 1794). Both these examples are predominately, but not purely, Scotch-Irish. Individuals of English ancestry were also involved.

Examples of the German influence include Concordia Publishing House, whose roots and antecedents reach back to 1844, making it one of the earliest publishers, if not the earliest publisher, in the state of Missouri and on the western frontier in general. The Germans also led the way in founding commercial beer breweries, e.g., Pabst (in the 1840s) and Yuengling (in the 1820s). Yuengling was originally spelled Jüngling. Germans planted vineyards and made wine on a commercial scale throughout the United States, especially in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Apart from large-scale operations, individual German farmers around America routinely made their own wine and brewed their own beer.

The cultural contrasts between the two groups are clear. Yet in the course of the American Revolution, and in the process of creating an American civilization and an American society, they both contributed, without surrendering their cultures and ethnicities.

Generosity on an Industrial Scale: Andrew Carnegie’s Charitable Giving

Long before Bill Gates and Elon Musk, there was a Scotsman, born in the county of Fife in 1835. His parents were poor and they emigrated to the United States in 1848, bringing him along and looking for economic opportunities and upward social mobility. His name was Andrew Carnegie.

He started working in the telegraph business, then for railroad companies, and finally in the steel industry. From bitter poverty, he worked with focus and developed his mind, and eventually became one of the wealthiest men on earth. How much money did he have? The answer is not entirely clear. Naturally, his exact net worth varied over the years. Any dollar amount given would have to be adjusted for more than a century’s worth of inflation. Any figure ventured would be preceded by the word ‘approximately’ and qualified with the phrase ‘at least’ because such reckonings cannot be precise.

At various points, his net worth was at least approximately $500 million, and it could have easily been double that. Adjusted to dollar amounts in the year 2026, that would be roughly $20 billion.

These numbers are minimums. Depending on which assets are counted, and how they are counted, even tripling those figures might be possible.

Was Carnegie the “richest” man in the world? Again, it is difficult to give a precise answer. At the time, there were empires, and the dynasties who ruled them counted vast amounts of land and palaces as personal property. There might have been emperors — in Russia, China, Germany, Austria, or Britain — who were worth more on paper. Carnegie was probably the richest businessman in the world.

The newspapers of the first two decades of the twentieth century sometimes referred to Carnegie as “the world’s richest man.” Yet when he died in 1919, he made sure that he was no longer qualified for this title. “Carnegie, who acquired” the reputation of being the world’s richest man “in 1901, when he sold his Pennsylvania steel empire to rival J.P. Morgan for the then-unimaginable sum of $480 million, had spent many of the intervening years giving away his fortune,” writes historian Les Standiford.

Andrew Carnegie gave away hundreds of millions of dollars.

The amount of money he had at one point in time was amazing. Equally amazing was the amount he gave away, so that by the time he died, his net worth was not even a tenth of what it had been.

In addition to the funding of some 2,800 public libraries across the United States and as far away as Fiji and New Zealand, he had endowed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in his adopted hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Carnegie Research Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Carnegie Educational Foundation in New York City, as well as the Endowment for International Peace. This last endowment was, in the final decade of his life, the cornerstone of his attempts to sway the nations of the world from their fixation upon war as a solution to political problems.

Carnegie’s efforts to secure world peace would cost nearly $25 million ($5.5 billion today), but that was a pittance compared to all his giving.

Les Standiford wrote the paragraph above in 2005. By 2026, the number would be even greater.

Carnegie was personally involved in his institutional donations. He did not delegate these decisions. The cities of Braddock and Homestead in Pennsylvania, separated only by a river, were of special interest to him.

“At the 1889 dedication of the beautifully designed Braddock Public Library — a sprawling sandstone structure more aptly described as a community center, complete with auditorium, swimming pool, and spacious reading rooms — Andrew Carnegie had capped the ceremonies” by giving a brief speech by referring to himself as one “of those who labor and perform a use in the community.” He saw himself as serving society.

Directly across the Monongahela River from the city of Braddock was the city of Homestead. Carnegie owned production facilities in both towns. His relationship to the large workforces in those two towns had not always been the friendliest, yet he chose to give to these communities, as Les Standiford reports:

Carnegie finally built a library for the workers of Homestead in 1898, an even grander sandstone monument than its counterpart across the river in Braddock. The building, complete with pool, auditorium, and lofty reading rooms, still stands.

He also made gifts to towns in which he had no direct business interests. He gave to towns around the world. He was looking for opportunities to make a difference.

One of Carnegie’s libraries went up in the blue-collar hill town of Cambridge, Ohio, shortly after the turn of the century. It wasn’t on the scale of those virtual palaces in Braddock and Homestead; the library grants were tied to the size of the population, and Cambridge was an unprepossessing town of a few thousand souls.

The building seemed extravagant in such a town, and became a point of local pride.

The building seemed grand. The staircases were broad and made of marble, the ceilings were high, the walls paneled in wood.

Prior to his retirement from the business world in 1901, Carnegie had engaged in generous charitable giving. After retirement, his efforts in this direction increased significantly, and he spent a great deal of time funding projects to help society.

By all appearances, the principal occupation of “the richest man in the world” from the moment of his retirement was giving all his money away.

While he had long been building libraries around the nation and the world, and had, as early as 1892, provided $2 million to build Carnegie Hall (originally named the New York City Music Hall), the “wee Andra” now threw himself into philanthropic activity with a zeal.

In the Scottish speech of Carnegie’s childhood, “wee Andra” would be equivalent to “little Andy” in American English. His $2,000,000 donation in 1892 would be approximately $71,820,879 in 2026 dollars. One of his more famous comments was: “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”

Although entire volumes have been written on Carnegie’s philanthropy and on individual Carnegie foundations, a thumbnail overview might convey just how much $327 million can accomplish:

The endowment of nearly three thousand public library buildings around the world accounted for some $60 million of his total giving.

The reader will notice that the math of trying to express the size of Carnegie’s various projects in 2026 dollars is not entirely consistent in the examples here given. This is because various historians and economists reckon differently. These numbers are best understood as impressions.

It’s worth noting that some of the public buildings that Carnegie funded took on his name only after his death. While he was alive, he gave many of these institutions names which did not include any reference to him. Many of these buildings never took on his name, and so he remains effectively an anonymous donor to this day, e.g., in the case of local libraries.

Few acts of philanthropy have enjoyed such universal, enduring recognition; nearly a thousand of the buildings are still in use as libraries to this day, more than thirty in the boroughs of New York City alone.

Likewise, houses of worship contain valuable musical instruments with no obvious reference to the Carnegie name. While Carnegie was religious and spiritual, he was not exceptionally enthusiastic about organized religion. For most of his life, he was a member of the Presbyterian church, but was not much involved beyond sporadic Sunday morning attendance. He was personally friends with several of the church’s pastors, and donated generously to the church.

Despite his complicated relationship with organized religion, he funded the construction and installation of approximately 7,000 pipe organs in various churches, as Les Standiford writes:

Even more ubiquitous than his libraries were the organs he had given to churches. This was a program that had begun almost by accident, after Carnegie gave an organ to a church in Allegheny City, his first American home. Before it was over, Carnegie, an agnostic who said he continued the practice because it “lessened the pain of the sermons,” had given away nearly eight thousand organs, at a cost of over $6 million.

Keeping his eyes open for projects, he encountered many of them serendipitously. This accounts for the broad range of interest areas: from libraries to churches to education.

“In 1902, he” donated “$32 million to endow the Carnegie Institution of Washington, a still-extant think tank for advanced research in the sciences,” writes Les Standiford.

Carnegie had a deep attachment to the United States, but also to the country of his birth, and was happy to fund projects in both places.

At about the same time, he established the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland with a gift of $10 million.

One library in particular became the seed for a much larger project:

In 1895, Carnegie dedicated the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, an imposing, 300-foot-long structure made possible by a grant of $1 million. By the turn of the twentieth century, the library had become the centerpiece of the still-standing Carnegie Institute, a monument to culture that included art and science museums and a concert hall. Ultimately, Carnegie’s original $1 million investment would grow to more than $25 million.

At a Pittsburgh dinner in late 1900, Carnegie announced that he was offering the city a $1 million endowment to build a technical school as an adjunct to the Institute. He would later add another $6.5 million. First called the Carnegie Technical Schools, then the Carnegie Institute of Technology, it was merged in 1967 with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (founded by Andrew Mellon in 1913) and is known today as Carnegie Mellon University.

Constantly making connections to various non-profit schemes, he seems to have worked as hard in giving away his money as he did in earning it in the first place.

Another major gift to education came in 1905, when Carnegie, prompted by a visit to Skibo from Henry Pritchett, the president of MIT, gave $15 million to create the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The foundation went on to found such programs as the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and the Educational Testing Service. It still operates worldwide.

In 1911, somewhat overwhelmed by the task of giving away money, he made his single greatest gift, endowing the Carnegie Corporation of New York, formed for “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge,” with $125 million. The corporation was to oversee many of the projects already undertaken, as well as to create a board of trustees that would assume the burden of determining worthy recipients for the remainder of Carnegie’s fortune, which totaled about $180 million. Today the Carnegie Corporation’s endowment is valued at about $1.8 billion and continues its work in teacher education, and increased participation of the citizenry in the political process.

Carnegie’s gifts supported a wide range of projects, many still in operation, including the Carnegie Hero Fund ($5 million), designed in 1904 to recognize extraordinary acts of peacetime bravery and compensate those injured while performing those acts of heroism.

Over a century later, Carnegie’s cash is still at work. The libraries are still operating in towns around America and in towns around the world; the organs still playing hymns on Sunday mornings; the university buildings still standing and the university endowments still funding educations; the peace institutes still orchestrating diplomatic meetings.

Such creations as the Hero Fund continue to affect the lives of citizens worldwide (the fund made a significant number of awards in the wake of the September 11 tragedy).

Like many people of his time, Andrew Carnegie saw WW1 approaching. The competitions and tensions between the European powers clearly were nudging that continent toward war.

He hoped to fund diplomatic efforts to diffuse tensions and avoid wars.

In all his record of giving, however, nothing came to engage Carnegie more deeply than his quest to put an end to war between nations. Though it may be commonplace today for a schoolchild to begin an essay with a heartfelt desire “to achieve world peace,” for Carnegie, it was no mere wish upon a star.

Carnegie’s efforts to find diplomatic solutions to international conflicts lifted The Hague from being a national capital to a global ambassadorial meeting place and the seat of international justice. Les Standiford explains:

Carnegie delivered a blistering speech early in the century at New York’s Metropolitan Club, where he denounced war as the “foulest blot upon humanity today.” He questioned just how far civilization could be said to have progressed, “as long as we can find no better substitute for the settling of international disputes than the brutal murder of one another.

One of the immediate results was the endowment of an international law library and center for the arbitration of disputes between nations at The Hague, site of an 1899 conference on world peace. Though he was at first hesitant about usurping the business of nations, Carnegie ultimately gave $1.5 million for the construction of the International Peace Palace and the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

In 1910, heartened by President Taft’s resolve to ensure his own legacy as a peacemaker among nations, and disturbed by growing tensions in Europe, Carnegie approached Taft with the idea of endowing a private organization to support the president’s agenda. After consulting with Taft and his secretary of state (and former Carnegie Company attorney), Philander C. Knox, Carnegie made his proposal. In return for Taft’s efforts to secure a network of peace treaties between the United States and other major powers Carnegie would contribute $10 million to endow the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “to a thorough and scientific investigation and study of the causes of war and of practice methods to prevent and avoid it.”

Andrew Carnegie decisively shaped many features of our world today, and he did so not seeking power, fame, money, or self-aggrandizement, but seeking rather to rid himself of his huge fortune and make the world a better place.

The Administrative State vs. Constitutional Freedom

One of several continuous threads which run through the history of the United States from 1789 onward is the question of how to preserve the constitutional system of the “checks and balances” by means of the “separation of powers” as embodied in the judicial, legislative, and executive branches. This much should be familiar to any student of history or civics.

Preserving this constitutional system amounts to preserving the human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties which it was instituted to protect. The task of preserving this system often takes the form of asking whether each of the three branches is performing its tasks and avoiding the tasks assigned to the other branches.

A branch of government is negligent if it fails to perform its assigned tasks; it is usurpative if it performs tasks assigned to other branches.

It is therefore necessary, not only to limit the power of government as a whole, but rather also to limit within the government power of each part.

Opposing this constitutional system are those who embrace the idea of an administrative state. These two views compete: on the one hand, a central bureaucracy which makes laws and collects taxes apart from a freely-elected representative legislature; on the other hand, a decentralized system, in which federal and local governments each have separate assigned powers, which avoids permanent bureaucracy and standardized administration.

The administrative state comes into conflict with constitutional rights when the agencies of the executive branch make laws and collect taxes, usurping the role of the legislative branch. This leaves the citizens at the mercy of unelected agencies who do not represent the voters, but rather impose on the voters.

The need for limited government arises from the same source as the need for separation of powers: from human nature. The goal in the creation of such systems is to prevent situations in which individuals or groups have positions of great power, because sooner or later they will fall to the temptation to use that power in ways which do not represent the desires and thoughts of the voters, as John Marini writes:

James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers that factionalism is “sown in the nature of man”; thus there will always be political conflict — which at its starkest is a conflict between justice, the highest human aspiration concerning politics, and its opposite, tyranny. This conflict between justice and tyranny occurs in every political order, the Founders believed, because it occurs in every human soul. It is human nature itself, therefore, that makes it necessary to place limits on the power of government.

President Woodrow Wilson wanted to take some of the budgetary powers assigned to the legislative branch. To this end, he proposed legislation which would reassign those powers to the executive branch. He vetoed the first version of this in 1920, because he thought that it did not give enough power to the president. A revised version, giving that power to the president, was passed by Congress in 1921 under the title “The General Accounting Act of 1921” and signed into law by President Warren Harding.

The passage of this bill was part of the progressive political agenda — Wilson was a leader in the progressive movement — and did damage to the constitutional system. Ironically, the anti-progressive Harding was the one who signed it into law. It will be left as an exercise for the reader to discover why Harding signed it.

The progressive vision was that government should control, rather than be controlled, as John Marini explains:

Progressive leaders were openly hostile to the Constitution not only because it placed limits on government, but because it provided almost no role for the federal government in the area of administration. The separation of powers of government into three branches — the executive, the legislative, and the judicial — inhibited the creation of a unified will and made it impossible to establish a technical administrative apparatus to carry out that will. Determined to overcome this separation, one of the chief reforms promoted by early Progressives was an executive budget system — a budget that would allow Progressive presidents to pursue the will of a national majority and establish a non-partisan bureaucracy to carry it out. Congress was initially reluctant to give presidents the authority to formulate budgets, partly because it infringed on Congress’s constitutional prerogative — but also because it was still understood at the time that the separation of powers stood as a barrier to tyranny and as a protection of individual freedom. Eventually, however, Congress’s resistance weakened.

When laws are made by the executive branch instead of by the legislative branch, they are unconstitutional and therefore illegitimate. In an attempt to hide this fact, many such laws, made by unelected officials in federal agencies, are labeled as “rules” or “regulations” instead of laws. When agencies impose penalties on those who violate such regulations, the agencies are usurping the role of the judicial branch, and such trials and their verdicts and sentences are therefore also unconstitutional and illegitimate. When these agencies collect taxes, which are labeled as “user fees” or other similar misleading phrases, they are usurping Congress’s exclusive right to levy taxes. Despite the attempt to label them as something other than taxes, they are in fact taxes, and are illegitimate and unconstitutional because again the executive branch has stolen the role of the legislative branch.

To defend this violation of the principle of the separation of powers, substantial mental gymnastics are required, as Philip Hamburger notes:

The Constitution authorizes three types of power, as we all learned in school — the legislative power is located in Congress, executive power is located in the president and his subordinates, and the judicial power is located in the courts. How does administrative power fit into that arrangement?

The answer is that laws, even when they are called ‘regulations’ and ‘rules’ or other technical words, are to be produced by the legislative branch, not the executive branch. ‘User fees’ are taxes and are therefore to be levied only by the legislative branch. ‘Hearnings’ which are trials are to be conducted only by the judicial branch, and ‘fines’ which are rulings are to be declared only by the judicial branch.

Administrative power as a standalone concept is neither constitutional nor legitimate.

Pinpointing the precise moment at which ‘administrative law’ began is difficult, but in any case, it is at least more than a century old. The concept of administrative law is entrenched and ossified, even though plainly corrupt and usurpatory.

Most often, the alleged need for administrative law is introduced as a practical necessity. It is practical and necessary only if one wishes to increase the power of government — and when government power increases, individual freedom decreases. The principle of limited government is intended to prevent the government from becoming an efficient manager or a practical regulator.

Citizens don’t want to be managed or regulated. Citizens elect representatives, not rulers. Those in government are to represent the ideas and desires of the citizens.

One of the several benefits of the separation of powers, and of checks and balances, is gridlock. Gridlock is a benefit and an asset. It prevents the government from becoming too adept at imposing control on citizens. One of the goals of the constitutional system is to maximize personal freedom and individual political liberty.

The progressive movement casts itself as modern, and therefore its opponents as reactionary and retrograde. This is, however, merely a verbal flourish, as Philip Hamburger writes:

The conventional answer to this question is based on the claim of the modernity of administrative law. Administrative law, this argument usually goes, began in 1887 when Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission, and it expanded decade by decade as Congress created more such agencies. A variant of this account suggests that administrative law is actually a little bit older — that it began to develop in the early practices of the federal government of the United States. But whether it began in the 1790s or in the 1880s, administrative law according to this account is a post-1789 development and — this is the key point — it arose as a pragmatic and necessary response to new and complex practical problems in American life. The pragmatic and necessitous character of this development is almost a mantra — and of course if looked at that way, opposition to administrative law is anti-modern and quixotic.

Although the progressives presented the idea of an administrative state, or a managerial state, as something modern, it was in fact a step backward in time, to the governments of kings like Frederick the Great, who were called ‘enlightened despots’ and ‘enlightened absolutists’ because they considered themselves to be wise and therefore entitled to enforce upon their subjects whichever regulations occurred to them.

What is truly modern is a limited government, which regards freedom as the property of each human being. This replaces the monarchist view which regards the right to rule as the inherited family property of one ruler.

Although reason and justice are violated when one branch of the government seizes the powers assigned to another branch, reason and justice are equally violated when one branch of government is negligent and fails to carry out its assigned role. It is an illegitimate government when the executive takes on the legislative task; it is equally illegitimate when the legislative branch fails to legislate, as Christopher DeMuth writes:

Part of the shift has resulted from presidents, executive agencies, and courts seizing congressional prerogatives.

If it is a crime when a president steals Congress’s authority, then it is equally a crime when Congress fails to embrace its own authority; Christopher DeMuth continues:

But the most important part of the story has an opposite plot: Congress itself, despite its complaints about executive and judicial poaching, has been giving up its constitutional powers voluntarily and proactively.

It is a crime when the legislative branch fails to legislate; it is equally a crime when the Congress fails to organize taxation and outlays:

Congress has even handed off its constitutional crown jewels — its exclusive powers, assigned in Article I, Sections 8 and 9, to determine federal taxing and spending.

The details of the Constitution were crafted to keep the government bogged down in its own sluggishness — checks and balances countering each other, negotiating agreements between the branches of government — so that the government could not be efficient or effective in its regulation of human beings. If one of the purposes of government — indeed, the main purpose of government — is to protect individual freedom, then government should not be curtailing freedom.

The United States Declares War in April 1917: Why?

The United States declared war on Germany in April 1917. President Woodrow Wilson had campaigned for his reelection by promising that he would continue to keep the United States out of the war. The election was close, and decided mainly by domestic issues rather than foreign policy. Wilson won by a thin margin. His messaging had been clear: he had not pushed America into WW1, and he would continue to avoid any U.S. entry into the war.

His message was false.

Prior to his reelection in November 1916, he foresaw that America would be in the war soon. Uncertain of an electoral victory, Wilson developed a contingency plan: should he lose the election, he’d appoint the president-elect to the office of Secretary of State, and then Wilson and his vice president would resign. The winner of the election would thus take office immediately, instead of waiting for an inauguration in March 1917.

Why did Wilson want this accelerated post-election timetable?

He was certain that the United States would be at war in 1917, and wanted a faster and smoother transition of power. Wilson secretly planned on being at war as a certainty. Publicly, he pledged to avoid U.S. involvement in the war.

Once Wilson had been inaugurated in March 1917 and had safely begun his second term, he rapidly moved forward with his plan for war. The Americans had expressed overwhelmingly their desire to remain at peace, so Wilson needed excuses and a propaganda campaign to persuade them to go to war.

Wilson argued that two factors necessitated a declaration of war against Germany: the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and the German efforts to encourage Mexico to declare war on the United States.

While these two factors appear at first glance to be reasonable, they exhibit weaknesses upon closer examination.

Germany had implemented a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915, paused the policy in 1916, and resumed in 1917. So 1917 was the second time that Germany carried out unrestricted submarine warfare. The first time, in 1915, Wilson did not see it as a cause for U.S. entry into the war. His stance in 1917 was inconsistent with his previous view that the U.S. should stay out of the war despite unrestricted submarine warfare.

In January 1917 the German government sent a telegram to its ambassador in Mexico with a message for the Mexican government. This message became known as the Zimmermann Telegram. Germany promised to fund a Mexican war against the United States, and at the end of that war, Mexico was to possess U.S. land. Wilson argued that Germany’s attempt to start a war between Mexico and the United States was a reason for the U.S. to declare war on Germany. The Zimmermann Telegram was not the first, and not the most significant, effort made by Germany to start a war between Mexico and the United States. In 1914, the Germans had sent a ship filled with weapons and ammunition for the Mexican government. In 1915, the Germans had given $12 million dollars to the Mexican government to fund military activity against the United States. The actions of the German government vis-a-vis Mexico in 1914 and 1915 were not seen by Wilson as reasons for declaring war, but in 1917 he presented the Zimmermann Telegram as a reason for war.

It is clear, then, that Wilson used submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram as excuses for war. They were featured in his propaganda campaign. But what were the reasons for war?

Wilson had at least two reasons for declaring war.

First, the progressive movement in the U.S., of which Wilson was a part, saw the war as an opportunity: If the U.S. were a combatant, then the U.S. would be part of crafting peace treaties at the end of the war; these treaties would shape global diplomacy for years into the future. Wilson’s progressivism hoped to create new institutions and strengthen existing institutions in order to find peaceful solutions to diplomatic tensions and thereby avoid future wars. These institutions regulate relations and trade among nations; this was part of what was meant by the slogan, “Make the world safe for democracy.”

Second, the war would also be an opportunity for the government to argue that it needed extraordinary powers to intervene in the American economy and in society at large, because the war created an “emergency” situation. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party wanted these emergency powers to accelerate activities it had already begun. Some of these could be presented as part of the war effort, such as censorship of the press and the surveillance of individuals whose political loyalty was suspect. Other actions were clearly not related to the war, but carried out using emergency powers in spite of this: increasing racial segregation, reshaping educational institutions to conform to progressive ideas, rewriting housing policies, and generally regulating society. The draft was particularly appealing to the progressives, because it affirmed the government’s power to control the individual.

In addition to these two reasons, Wilson had a strong personal hatred for the Habsburg family, the ruling dynasty of Austria. One reason for this hatred was that Wilson saw the Habsburgs as opposed in some ways to his ideology: The Habsburg realm was a diverse, multiethnic territory; Wilson wanted a homogenous nation with one uniform culture. Other reasons for Wilson’s hatred toward the Habsburgs may be less rational and more emotional. Curiously, Wilson directed much less hate toward the Hohenzollerns, the ruling dynasty of Germany, even though the U.S. declared war on Germany.

Wilson was thus equipped with excuses which hid his reasons. After winning the November 1916 election with his campaign’s anti-war rhetoric, he promptly began to lobby energetically for the war.

Prior to winning reelection, he had been quite happy to profit from the war, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:

The American role in World War I derived its character less from strategic thinking in the United States than from the geopolitical notion that the future well-being of the United States depended upon the balance of power in Europe and the outcome of the war. Discarding the hallowed assumption that Europe’s affairs did not involve the United States and the security of the Western Hemisphere, the Wilson administration decided that the nation had a critical stake in an Allied victory. American involvement stemmed from economic self-interest as well as an emotional commitment to support “democracy” (France and Great Britain) against “autocracy” (Germany). After a brief economic dislocation when the war began in 1914, American bankers, farmers, industrialists, and producers of raw materials exploited British naval control of the Atlantic and Allied financial strength to make the war the biggest profit-making enterprise in the history of American exporting. Before American entry, the balance of trade, already favorable to the U.S., jumped by a factor of five; the Allies liquidated $2 billion of American assets and privately borrowed another $2.5 billion to pay for their purchases. In contrast, Germany secured only $45 million in American loans.

Because Wilson had spent the previous years proclaiming that he wanted to keep America out of the war, the U.S. military was not ready when war was declared in April 1917. By contrast, the U.S. industrial base was already partially on a war footing, because it had been producing and selling weapons, ammunition, and other war supplies to France and England.

The U.S. Navy had battleships and cruisers, but not enough destroyers. Shipping war materials and soldiers from America to Europe required destroyers to escort and protect the cargo ships. The task would be to build many destroyers quickly, as historian Russell Weigley notes:

For the kind of naval campaign in which it now found itself engaged, the United States also had built the wrong warships. The Navy should have had more destroyers. The Royal Navy had almost 300, but nearly 100 of them were busy screening the Grand Fleet. The United States had seventy, only forty-four of them relatively new oil-burning ships. It was not until early July, 1917, that as many as thirty-four American destroyers reached Queenstown to reinforce the British, and the rest of the American squadrons consisted mainly of the obsolescent types, which were retained in Western Hemisphere waters. Belatedly, battleship building was pushed aside for destroyers and smaller escort craft.

The role of the United States in WW1 was significant. Was it decisive? Responsible historians do not speculate about hypotheticals. There is no certainty in these counterfactuals, and great emphasis must be placed on the word ‘probably.’

If the United States hadn’t declared war, the war probably would have lasted significantly longer. Negotiations to end the war probably would have been more complex, because the two sides would probably have been of nearly equal strength. In reality, the Western Allies were significantly stronger after the United States declared war. It is not clear which side would have won if the U.S. had not entered the war.

The U.S. Army drafted more than four million young men in 1917. Approximately two million of them were transported to France, and approximately one million engaged in combat. Large numbers of American soldiers did not see combat until early 1918.

Aside from combat, U.S. Army engineers did significant work in laying railroad lines, building berths for ships, and setting up telephone systems.

The U.S. Navy was active, escorting convoys of ships across the Atlantic, and protecting those ships from submarine attacks.

The United States made a significant contribution to the war effort as it sold, and sometimes gave, war materials to its fellow Allies. The U.S. lent, and sometimes gave, vast sums of money to the Allies. Some of those loans were later forgiven.

In sum, the U.S. military influence on the course of the war began quite late in the course of the war, but its economic influence had been there from the beginning. The U.S. formally declared war, beginning its military participation, for reasons which were at the time not disclosed to the U.S. population.

Changes in American Attitudes Toward Alcohol and Their Unintended Consequences

Over centuries, American social thought about alcohol has developed significantly. To understand earlier phases of this process, it is first necessary to shed some stereotypes and cliches which still pervade historical images in the popular imagination.

Both the Pilgrims, who settled in southeastern Massachusetts around 1620, and the Puritans, who settled further north along the eastern coast of Massachusetts around 1630, cheerfully produced and consumed their own beer and wine. The conventional image of these two groups as opponents of alcohol is historically inaccurate.

More than a century later, George Washington oversaw the production of beer, wine, and distilled beverages, both at his home in Virginia, and at various army camps with his troops. Thomas Jefferson invested a great deal of thought and energy into growing specific breeds of grapes in order to make various types of wine. Samuel Adams was a maltster, making a key ingredient for beer.

Fermented apple cider was a popular beverage throughout North America.

In general, then, the area which was at first British colonies, and which was later the United States, had a culture which demonstrated no strong opposition to alcohol, and in which people of various social classes lost none of their respectability by consuming alcohol. This seems to have been the case for approximately two centuries.

There was very little legal regulation about who might consume alcohol, or where or when or how alcohol might be consumed. There was certainly some taxation of alcohol — hence the famous “whisky rebellion” in the early 1790s — but this taxation was for the purposes of raising revenue, and not for the purpose of changing social patterns of consumption.

This culture was also capable of clearly distinguishing between, on the one hand, the healthy and appropriate use of alcohol, and on the other hand, the excessive and unhealthy abuse of alcohol.

The fact that men who regularly enjoyed a glass of wine with supper were at the same time opposed to drunkenness was a fact so obvious that it did not need to be explained. A century later, however, that same fact was no longer obvious to many people, and required a great deal of explaining.

How and why did American society develop new attitudes toward alcohol?

One factor in this cultural shift was the distinction between various religious groups. The older and more established groups in North America were the Episcopalians (formerly Anglicans), the Lutherans, and the Roman Catholics. These groups had no objection to alcohol and forbade drunkenness.

Newer groups were represented initially and primarily by the Methodists. They argued for abstinence from alcohol in any form and in any amount. “Alcohol consumption,” writes historian Leah Rae Berk, “did not begin to decrease until the early 1830s,” indicating the era in which Methodist influence reached significant levels.

The Quakers and some branches of the Presbyterian Church also embraced the idea of abstaining from alcohol.

The anti-alcohol movement initially focused on distilled beverages, but eventually sought to eliminate all forms of alcohol.

From that point in time, it was less than a century until the passage of the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution prohibited the production, sale, and transport of almost all forms of alcohol in 1919. Leading up to that amendment was the growing Temperance Movement over the preceding century.

The goals of the Methodists and the Temperance Movement were clear: to reduce and eventually eliminate the consumption of alcohol.

Prior to the Prohibition Amendment, and after its repeal in 1933, the movement brought about incremental change in the forms of local and state laws. Such legislation limited when, where, and how alcohol could be produced, sold, or consumed, and who might consume it.

Their words and actions, however, were counterproductive. While the Temperance Movement was eventually successful in bringing about “blue laws” and finally Prohibition, it also set into motion the forbidden fruit effect.

The “forbidden fruit effect” is the desire for something which has been forbidden, precisely because it has been forbidden. In America during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, alcohol was an unremarkable part of American life. Parents and grandparents often gave children small sips, or small cups, of beer or wine. There was no legal boundary — at age 18 or at age 21 — for purchasing or consuming. Public consumption was not noteworthy. Moderate consumption was as normal a part of daily life as eating bread. A glass of wine or beer at mealtime was so common that it was uninteresting.

When the Temperance Movement began to make itself felt, through regulations and especially through social and parental attitudes, alcohol became an object of fascination, especially for young people. Alcohol became desirable in the minds of young people because they were forbidden to have it. Possessing and consuming it became a goal.

The Temperance Movement created the exact thing which it hoped to avoid: binge drinking, increased drinking among the young, and a greater attraction to alcohol.

The social dynamic, especially in the form of parental attitudes, varied significantly across the various demographic segments of America. Parents who were very diligent to ensure that their children never drank alcohol, or at least never drank it until some arbitrary age, saw their children devise every scheme to obtain alcohol secretly. Such children were more likely to drink to excess, because they had never seen adults model moderate consumption. In places where a set age was culturally or legally enforced, it became a tradition to consume to excess on one’s birthday, having finally reached that age limit. By making it into a forbidden fruit, the movement had increased the focus on, and desire for, alcohol.

By contrast, parents who resisted the legal and social pressure, and who served their children small amounts of beer or wine at mealtimes, saw their children to be less likely to consume to excess, and generally less interested in alcohol.

Looking at the social and cultural development of North America, and especially that part of North America which would become the United States, there is a clear turning point: the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were times in which alcohol consumption was unremarkable and moderate. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the rise of an alcohol phobia, and an attendant effort to impose legal and cultural restrictions designed ultimately to eliminate alcohol. This effort not only failed, but produced an increased fascination with alcohol, especially among young people.

A Bumpy Start: The U.S. Economy Immediately after the Treaty of Paris

The American Revolutionary War ended for practical purposes in 1781 with the near-cessation of hostilities, but it ended officially in 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

The treaty was finalized in September 1783. This gave the thirteen states, formerly the thirteen colonies, the final degree of certainty that they would now be recognized as sovereign. Markets are fond of reliable definitive conditions, and so the confirmation of American independence and autonomy were good for the American economy.

But there were negative factors under the surface of the initial economic enthusiasm: the thirteen states had accumulated debt in pursuing the war; private property had been destroyed in military action; there was not much capital for investment into new businesses; the currencies used as a means of payment were uncertain — individual colonies had printed their own paper money, denominated in pounds, shillings, and pence — and it was not clear if a shilling from Massachusetts was equal to a shilling from Virgina; coinage included a mix of Spanish dollars, colonial coins minted prior to the revolution under British auspices, and coins minted by the United States starting in 1783; counterfeit money was circulating.

The Continental Congress had begun printing money in 1775 and did so until 1779. Confusingly, one Continental dollar when issued was valued at 5 Georgia shillings, 6 Connecticut shillings, or 8 New York shillings. The value of the Continental dollars fell steadily. By 1780, they were valued at around one-fortieth of their face value.

Shortages of paper currency and coin caused instances of bartering or the use of “commodity money” — tobacco or desirable animal skins used as currency.

The British ended their blockade of the thirteen states when the treaty was signed in 1783. While this allowed an influx of goods into the new states, it dampened any domestic aspirations to start new businesses: competing with the British imports was difficult.

Under such circumstances, trade was sluggish.

The economic environment gave little motive for entrepreneurial expansion of business, as historian Ron Chernow writes:

After the Revolution, New York experienced a brief flush of prosperity that faded and then vanished in 1785, snuffed out by swelling debt, scarce money, and dwindling trade. Falling prices hurt indebted farmers, forcing them to repay loans with dearer money. As a Bank of New York director, Hamilton worried that defaulting debtors would also feign poverty and ruin their creditors. He later said of the deteriorating business climate, “confidence in pecuniary transactions had been destroyed and the springs of industry had been proportionably relaxed.”

Having only recently gained independence and sovereignty, the thirteen new states were facing a grave economic threat. The conditions were not the same in all thirteen, but the common elements were an oversupply of dubious confusing paper currency and large amounts of debt.

Although there was some improvement in economic conditions by 1786, the structural problems of the economy remained: the thirteen states were relying on large quantities of imported goods, and the revenue from exports had fallen from its pre-Revolution levels.

Ultimately, the solution to the economic problems would be the solution to the political problems. The government created by the “Articles of Confederation” was not up to the task of creating the stable environment needed for economic growth. Britain and France controlled much of the trading in and around the Americas and across the Atlantic.

The call for a new Constitution, written in 1787 and ratified in 1789, would create a political climate which promoted entrepreneurship. The political question was an economic question. The result would be a more unified economy, founded on a more unified form of government, as Ron Chernow notes:

With the possible exception of James Madison, nobody had exerted more influence than Hamilton in bringing about the convention or a greater influence afterward in securing passage of its sterling product. His behavior at the convention itself was another matter. It would long seem contradictory — and, to Jeffersonians, downright suspicious — that Hamilton could support a document that he had contested at such length. In fact, the Constitution represented a glorious compromise for every signer. This flexibility has always been honored as a sign of political maturity, whereas Hamilton’s concessions have often been given a conspiratorial twist. For the rest of his life, Hamilton remained utterly true to his pledge that he would do everything in his power to see the Constitution successfully implemented. He never wavered either in public or in private. And there was a great deal in the document that was compatible with ideas about government that he had expressed since 1780. His reservations had less to do with the powers of the new government than with the tenure of the people exercising them. In the end, nobody would do more than Alexander Hamilton to infuse life into this parchment and make it the working mandate of the American government.

The new Constitution provided for a national currency, which reduced the confusion of using everything from Spanish dollars to pre-Revolutionary local coinage to the flood of paper currency generated by the individual states: one standard coin and currency had a unifying effect on the economy.

Likewise, the new government stipulated, in the Constitution, that there be no internal taxes or tariffs on interstate commerce. This energized trade.

After the end of the Revolutionary War, the U.S. showed great economic potential, but also faced great economic obstacles. Many of those obstacles would be removed by the new Constitution.

The United States economy was on a more solid footing after the ratification in 1789. To be sure, there were new obstacles to be overcome. The British began to interfere more with American trans-Atlantic trade precisely because the U.S. economy was doing better. This was one factor leading to the war of 1812.

When the Depression Became the Great Depression: Going from Bad to Worse

The reader will know that the stock market crash of October 1929 is associated with the Great Depression. But how is it associated? Was it the cause of the Great Depression? Or was it a symptom of what was already going to happen — a sort of leading indicator?

For a century, economists and historians have debated those questions, without arriving at conclusive answers. They’ve also asked these kinds of questions: When did the Great Depression end? If the stock market crash caused it, was it the only cause? If the stock market crash didn’t cause it, what might have been the cause or causes? Could the Great Depression have been avoided?

While few definitive explanations have emerged, some hypotheses seem generally to be more plausible than others, e.g., it is now widely accepted that the stock market crash did not cause the Great Depression, but rather was a reflection of a nervousness or an awareness of some troubling economic trend in the making. The stock market functions primarily as a barometer of investor psychology. Stock prices go up when people have optimistic expectations. Stock prices go down when people have grim forebodings.

Another generally endorsed hypothesis is that, whatever the cause or causes of the Great Depression may have been, the depression didn’t have to be great. It could have been merely an ordinary depression, not a great one.

The Depression went from being merely a depression to being the Great Depression because of government intervention in the economy. Economies organically seek equilibrium. An event or situation, like a depression, which takes an economy out of equilibrium, will trigger the economy to rearrange itself in order to work its way back to equilibrium. When governments take action to fix ailing economies, these actions, despite their good intentions, get in the way of the natural process of returning to equilibrium.

The reader will be aware of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, a mixture of massive government spending, massive tax increases, and massive increases in government debt. While intended as a way to help the economy, FDR’s New Deal prevented the economy’s mechanisms from automatically compensating for any deviations from equilibrium and from thereby bringing the economy back to balance, as historian Ben Shapiro writes:

According to Professors Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian of UCLA’s Department of Economics, FDR’s policies prolonged the depression by at least seven years.

FDR tried and abandoned different strategies in quick succession. But all of his strategies shared a common element: the assumption that the government should intervene in the economy, rather than stand back and let the economy sort itself out. At one point Roosevelt persuaded many manufacturing companies to give their workers an outrageous 25% raise; in return, those companies were given permission to raise their prices substantially. Here was the core of the problem: the government should have no say in how much people are paid; it should have no say in which prices manufacturers charge for their products. The catastrophic results of FDR’s wage and prices controls were predictable, as Shapiro explains:

Not surprisingly, wages were 25 percent above market level, but unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been. Demand stalled because of artificial boosts in prices.

Professor Ohanian clarifies why wage and price controls lead only to more problems:

High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns, as we’ve seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market's self-correcting forces.

Likewise, Professor Cole describes how the economy’s self-correcting mechanisms are stymied when the government tries to correct the problems:

President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services. So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.

What drove FDR’s economic decision-making? Henry Morgenthau was one of FDR’s close personal friends; Morgenthau became friends with Roosevelt long before either of them entered politics, and twenty years before Roosevelt became president. Not only was Morgenthau Roosevelt’s friend until the latter died in 1945, he was also appointed by Roosevelt to a series of government positions, culminating in his appointment as Secretary of the Treasury by Roosevelt. He remained in that post for over a decade during Roosevelt’s presidency.

Despite good political and personal relationships with Roosevelt, Morgenthau described FDR as essentially uninformed about economics. During one of his political campaigns, FDR bragged about his education, saying “I took economics courses in college for four years.” The registrar at Harvard, however, revealed this to be untrue.

Accounts provided by a number of Roosevelt’s friends and appointees confirm that he often chose arbitrary numbers and used them to set economic policy, as Ben Shapiro reports:

FDR’s own economic ignorance is legendary. According to historian Amity Shlaes, FDR used to tinker with the price of gold arbitrarily. At one point, he raised the price of gold by 21 cents because he said it was a “lucky number, because it’s three times seven.” Henry Morgenthau, part of FDR’s brain trust, said later, “If anybody knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened.”

It remains plausible that there were few or no coherent systematic underpinnings for FDR’s economic policies, and that those policies did more harm than good, preventing what would have been a small depression from self-correcting. The New Deal policies made a short-term depression into the Great Depression, causing it to last longer and have more extreme impacts than it otherwise would have had, as Shapiro describes:

FDR’s policies greatly lengthened the Depression and made it far worse than it otherwise had to be.

It may be taken as an axiom that government actions in the economy — regulating, taxing, creating a national debt — prevent the economy’s own organic self-correcting mechanisms from doing what they do best: keeping the economy at a prosperous equilibrium point.