(off screen voice) I am the Edison Phonograph.
(newscaster) the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor by air.
[crowd chanting in German]
(President Kennedy) Ask not what your country can do for you...
(newscaster) President Kennedy has been shot.
(Neil Armstrong) One small step for man...
(Martin Luther King Jr.) These truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
[cheering]
(off screen voice) Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
[drumming]
(off screen voice) Left, left. Left, right, left.
[band music]
(narrator) The transforming events of the 20th century touched
every city and small town in America.
Annual celebrations,
which children thrill to but can never fully understand,
mark for another generation the historical reminders.
How the town survived the depression.
How older people who walk among us unnoticed every
day saved democracy in the world.
[soft music]
In every town there are buildings which stand like
silent witnesses to the enormous changes over
these hundred years.
A garage, which started the century as a stable.
(William Goehner) When the Model Ts became available,
we could scratch together a hundred bucks and
get a second-hand Model T.
(narrator) Schools,
which today teach computer skills to every student,
used to teach shop to the boys and typing to the girls.
(Lillian Hall) Your schoolteacher said just learn all you can
about secretarial work.
We can't expect women to get ahead in business.
(narrator) In some places, hometown coffee shops for more than half
the century served whites only.
(Don Newcombe) People's attitudes had to be changed.
All it was was the color of your skin,
for Christ's sakes.
It was the color of your skin that made the difference.
(narrator) Memorials along American main streets commemorate
those who died on the European battlefields of World War I.
(Henry Villard) Such terrible scenes.
You grew up very quickly in surroundings like that.
It is no longer freshman studies.
It was the real world.
(narrator) From almost every hometown train station,
men left for World War II.
(Julia Glut) When your husband becomes an officer,
you're an officer's wife.
You do not show any emotions when they go overseas.
You hold it back, no matter what.
No crying.
And we did that.
It was tough, but we did it.
(narrator) Korea and Vietnam veterans returned to towns
which looked the same,
but they came back to a country which had changed.
(Bob Jones) When I left,
the only people that had long hair lived in San Francisco,
you know, and when I came home,
my banker had long hair.
(narrator) When one New Jersey town held an old class reunion in 1997,
you could see in the attendees the sweep of the entire century.
There were those who remember when the electric light
was new and those who were born after man walked on the moon.
Old and young, they had been together on a journey through
the most common and yet mysterious of passageways
- time.
Unlike previous centuries where leadership was defined
by royalty and other rulers,
the 20th century, more than any other,
was shaped by the will and the actions of the common man.
In the episodes of this series,
we'll examine some of the defining events in
each of 15 different periods.
Our aim is to experience what it was like for the
common man to be alive then.
Politics and technology made this the killing century,
but they also provided extended life and hope.
In this first episode we'll see that as the century began,
there was no place on earth where hope flourished more
than in the United States of America.
(narrator) In 1900 in the countries of central and southern Europe,
tens of millions of people were trapped in miserable lives.
(Andrew Jakomas) They were starving, and things were real tough,
because when my father was a young boy of 12 or 13 years old,
he was sent to a family in Cairo, Egypt
to become a vassel.
That's what they did with their sons.
(Mary Gale) Peasants.
They never got paid.
They never made a living.
They lived in huts.
The Jewish people certainly were poverty stricken.
They didn't have a job.
(Martin Scorsese) My people came from peasants.
My grandparents on both sides of the family came from Sicily.
My mother's side of the family came from
a town called Chianina.
In the small villages, what was there?
Oppression and no food.
(narrator) One place held the promise of a better future.
(Clara Hancox) My mother and father - they heard about America from others,
and they knew that America was heaven.
It was...
Once in America, all problems would be solved.
There would be food.
There would be freedom.
There would be no persecution.
Freedom!
An incredible word for those people.
(Pres. William McKinley) This country is in a state of unexampled prosperity.
We are furnishing profitable employment
to the millions of working men throughout the United States.
(John Milton Cooper) By 1900, the United States leads in every
major industrial product.
I mean we're producing more steel.
We're producing more machined goods, textiles.
The United States has one third of all the
railroad trackage in the world.
For the first time in human history,
people can move over land swiftly, easily, reliably.
(narrator) The average American lived longer,
was better fed and better paid and had greater access to
education than the average citizen anywhere else on earth.
(John Milton Cooper) This is the great land of opportunity.
No matter how low you may be born,
no matter how humble you may be, you can rise to the top.
The sky is the limit.
(narrator) On the eve of the new century,
the sense of boundless possibilities also ignited
an explosion of technological innovations that would
have profound impact on 20th century life.
Thomas Edison's electric light bulb and phonograph,
Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.
Tens of thousands of tinkerers across America were trying
to invent the future.
Among them were two bicycle mechanics in Dayton, Ohio.
(Mabel Griep) Orville and Wilbur,
they as young boys were interested in flying.
They would sit on a porch and watch the birds.
And the neighbors all around us say,
"Well, I don't know they think they're going to do.
"Why they will never make an airplane."
Mabel Griep and her sister Lorene lived next door
to the Wright brothers.
(Lorine Hyer) Well, my father found out some way that they were
going to try to have a trial flight.
So we got in the surrey,
and we drove out to Huffman Prairie.
(Mabel Griep) I can hear dad turn more than once and say,
"Look, are you all paying attention to this?
"Now listen to me.
"You're going to remember this 'til your last day."
When that plane took off the ground,
people were speechless.
It was spectacular.
It was unbelievable.
(narrator) One of the oldest dreams in human imagination had come true.
Sustained flight in a powered airplane.
(Thomas P. Hughes) The United States was without any question the most
inventive nation in the world in that period.
It is comparable in its creativity to the
Renaissance in Italy, for example,
to the period of Elizabeth in English history,
the Shakespearian period.
Americans appreciated the new.
They assumed that change was the natural course of history.
(narrator) And on America's roads the European novelty was
about to be reinvented.
(Eileen Burns) The first time we saw a car when I was a kid -
well, they have this for people out of this world.
(narrator) In 1900 there was only 8,000 cars and less than ten miles
of concrete road in the entire country.
The car was fast seducing Americans.
(Thomas P. Hughes) The automobile gave people a sense of
the control of their own destiny.
That is, the behind the wheel,
out on the road,
you decided where you were going,
what you were doing.
You had a machine at your control.
But early cars were fantastically expensive.
The Artzberger,
made in Pittsburgh and the Pierce-Arrow were really toys
for the rich people until one manufacturer
in Detroit saw it differently -
Henry Ford.
He saw the automobile as a way to alieve one of the burden
of working in nature at the sweat of one's brow.
He was motivated by the desire to put the automobile into the hands,
first farmers,
and then generally into the hands of
the ordinary people in the population.
He wanted to produce many, many, many automobiles in a short, short time.
Ford has this vision of smooth flow using an assembly line.
These components were coming from up here.
These components were on an endless lift.
These components were coming on a belt,
and everything is in motion, and I think the image of
a number of streams flowing into a river captures
the assembly line concept.
(narrator) Henry Ford's model T was introduced in 1908
at the price of $825.
(Thomas P. Hughes) I think it would have been considered un-American in
his eyes to produce an automobile for rich people.
That's what foreigners do.
Americans generally were committed to the
proposition that every man and every woman should
enjoy material abundance.
That was the American spirit.
That's America.
(narrator) It was the promise of material abundance and
freedom which drew more than 13 million
impoverished Europeans to America between 1900 and 1914.
They came from the Austro-Hungarian empire,
from Russia, and from Italy.
It was the greatest free migration in all of human history.
My mother's mother Dominica,
who's afraid to travel on boat,
and the only way they got her on a boat was her brother tricked her.
He went on the boat with her and said he was going with her,
and at the last minute she turned away,
and he left.
(Clara Hancox) My mother came by herself through Siberia.
She got to the coast and got on a boat.
They were just sitting on the deck.
Hoards of people huddled over their possessions,
which consisted of old pillows with feathers and
a few pieces of silverware tucked in there and stuff like that,
like candlesticks,
and sleeping on the deck with one another,
next to one another to keep oneself warm.
It took weeks and weeks and weeks.
It took ages.
(Alfred Levitt) When I crossed the ocean,
I never saw such waves in my life.
I never knew an ocean existed.
Approaching the New York harbor,
the Statue of Liberty was there, and it gave me a free feeling,
a feeling of liberty, a feeling of a new nation,
a feeling of a new hope for a beautiful life.
(Clara Hancox) There's something wonderful about being an immigrant.
There's something so deliciously naïve and happy about
being an immigrant who has escaped from something.
My father would say from time to time,
no matter how bad things were, at least we're free.
(narrator) In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania it was said
prosperity was measured by the thickness of
the soot in the air.
(Stanley Brozek) Oh, man.
One of them furnaces let loose,
the whole sky was full of red dust.
Full of red dust.
If you had your wash out, you had your laundry out,
it was too bad.
You had to run outside and pull that laundry in.
It would be covered in red dust.
You would see them coal mines lit up from Greensburg
all the way to Uniontown.
It was wonderful to see it.
(narrator) Relentless production in Pittsburgh steel mills,
foundries, and coal mines attracted an enormous
number of immigrants and poor whites and blacks
from the rural south.
It was their labor which fed the furnace of industrial America.
(Andy Jakomas) You had to pick everything up.
You had to move everything by hand.
No lunch breaks of any kind.
You worked, and you had a sandwich in your hand.
If you had to go to the restroom,
boom, back right away.
The timed you.
When you get home at night, you couldn't lift your arms up.
I remember this.
Oh, I remember this distinctly.
My father would come home, and he's say to my mother,
"Rub my arms a little bit" because they were picking up...
There was no...
Huh, it was all mule work.
(Frank Bolden) I had two uncles that worked in the mill.
It was dangerous.
No safety precautions were in the mills.
You could walk in the mill and see people with one arm,
one leg.
You had an accident in the mills almost every two days,
but nobody did anything about it.
(narrator) There was no compensation
for the injuries and death on the job,
and it was almost impossible for workers in the early
part of the century to organize.
They'd try to start a union, and, of course,
they had the coal and iron police they
were called in those days.
And they would bust a lot of heads and a lot of murders
were committed, and a lot of, oh,
a lot of things that you dare didn't say too much.
If you worked in a mill,
if your boss said something to you,
that was it. That was the law.
(narrator) Industrial work involves six days a week,
12-16 hours a day.
The daily wage - barely two dollars.
Children, too, were made to work,
two million of them across America,
some as young as four.
(E.L. Doctorow) "They did not complain as adults tended to do.
"Employers liked to think of them as happy ills."
(narrator) E. L. Doctorow wrote about child labor in his novel of life
in the early century, Ragtime.
"There were more agile than adults,
"but they tended in the latter hours of the day
"to lose a degree of efficiency.
"In the canneries and the mills - these were the hours they
"were most likely to lose their fingers or have their
"hands mangled or their legs crushed.
"In the mines, they worked as sorters of coal and
sometimes were smothered in the coal chutes."
(narrator) As a child in the early part of the century,
Polly Newman worked 13-hour days in a New York garment sweatshop,
the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
(off screen voice) We had a corner on the floor that resembled a kindergarten.
You were not allowed to sing.
We weren't allowed to talk to each other.
The door was locked to keep us in.
(narrator) The locked doors would prove to be fatal.
On March 25, 1911, fire broke out in the factory.
With an exit door locked on the ninth floor,
many workers jumped to their death.
(Mary Gale) I was 11,
and I remember all of a sudden all of this New York
went crazy because the kids were running around with
the newspapers, hollering extra,
that all these people had died in that fire.
(narrator) 146 workers died.
There were no sprinklers inside the factory then.
There had never been a fire drill.
The tragedy outraged a public that had become
increasingly aware of both the underside of a
prosperous nation and the need for reform.
(John Milton Cooper) The great reform movement of this period was
called progressivism.
It's a belief in progress.
It's a belief that we can make things better,
that you can have a more just, more democratic society.
(narrator) At the vanguard of social reform in this particular
period were progressive women concerned about
their own inferior status.
(Lucy Haessler) When I was a girl,
a woman didn't have rights to custody of their children.
They didn't have the right to own property.
A woman teacher didn't have the right to marry.
She didn't have the right to live alone.
She had to board with a family.
And if she started dating or she went out at night,
she was fired.
(narrator) For progressives such as Frances Garrison Villard,
suffrage, the vote for women,
was the key to emancipation.
(Henry Villard) Grandmother was a very strong militant suffragette.
As a boy, I was more inclined to laugh at them and dismiss them.
I didn't see any reason why they should have a vote.
I would say I believe it's still a man's world.
I would continue so for some time to come.
(narrator) Some suffragettes were mounting a violent campaign.
In Britain, one of them was willing to die for the cause.
In June of 1913,
Emily Davison threw herself in front of the king's horse
at the popular Epsom Derby.
She died with the inscription,
"Votes for Women" sewn into her coat.
That kind of sacrifice inspired American suffragettes
to intensify their campaign.
The right to vote would also prove elusive for
America's nine million blacks.
Black men could vote in theory,
but in fact most were barred by white intimidation,
poll taxes, and literacy tests.
85% of black Americans lived in poverty in
the southern United States,
segregated from whites by so-called Jim Crow laws,
laws upheld by the Supreme Court that all but
wiped out the freedom and equality
once promised by emancipation.
(John Milton Cooper) It is the complete denial of the American dream.
They cannot go to the same schools with whites.
They can't drink from the same drinking fountains.
They cannot sit in the same part of a street car
or in the same cars on a railroad.
It's a horrible time.
White politicians compete with each other in the
south for being more, at least verbally,
violent toward African-Americans and in many cases are
encouraging or at least abetting actual violence.
(George Kimbley) They were lynching blacks.
There was hardly a week that two or three blacks didn't get lynched
or burned at the stake.
I don't know whether you heard that or not.
You ever hear of any black people getting burned at the stake.
Well, that's what happened.
I lived in those days.
(narrator) The most prominent black leader with the turn of the century,
Booker T. Washington,
accepted the notion of separateness.
He asked blacks to better themselves through work
and vocational training.
From whites he asked for help, not equality.
(John Milton Cooper) Booker T. Washington was born a slave.
Called his autobiography, "Up from Slavery."
This is a man who has pulled himself up
by his own bootstraps.
And he takes the perspective that it would be foolish
to challenge what's being done to them too soon and too openly.
(narrator) But there would be a challenge.
In 1905, the black intellectual,
W. E. B. Du Bois urged a new struggle for full political
and social equality.
Entrenched resistance to such change would make civil rights,
as Du Bois predicted,
the major social issue in American life for
the rest of the century.
At the turn of the century,
there were 76 million people in America.
The majority of them lived on farms or in small towns
where they relied on gaslight and horsepower.
(Lorine Hyer) Every morning, the milkman came,
and the cream at the top would rise,
and if you got there early,
you could take a lick of the cream before your mother
found out what you were doing.
(Frank Truxall) It was a great period of the front porch.
In the evenings after dinner,
the family would assemble on the front streets.
Some of the times the neighbors would pass,
and we exchanged bows.
We played games:
I Spy and Run Sheep Run and Lemonade What Was Your Trade.
(E.L. Doctorow) "Tennis rackets were hefty and the racket face elliptical.
"Women were stouter then.
"They visited the fleet carrying white parasols.
"Everyone wore white in summer.
"That was the style.
That was the way people lived."
(narrator) But the rhythm of American life was quickening in the
early years of the century as more and more people
headed for the cities with the bright lights
and the myriad of opportunities.
(Albert Glotzer) I was four years old when I came to Chicago.
It was a real magical thing to see the streetcars
moving up and down
and the street filled with people all the time,
and great activities going on.
I recall looking at it with wonder.
(narrator) The cities, New York City more than most,
were centers for the latest engineering
and technological marvels.
(David McCullough) The skyscraper is born in that time,
completely new building form and completely new idea that
a city could grow up instead of out.
(Alfred Levitt) It's an amazing sight to me.
I saw the Flat Iron Building.
I saw the Woolworth Tower.
It is a very stunning view how a building can pierce the sky.
(narrator) And underground there was a new way to travel.
In New York City,
the subway was inaugurated in 1904.
One could ride the subway to the outskirts of the city
where the power of science and technology was
harnessed for pursuit of a good time.
Tens of thousands of New Yorkers went every day and night
to Coney Island.
When I came there,
my brothers immediately treated me to a hot dog.
Nathan's.
I done run into the water.
I tasted all over me the salt of the sea.
I was baptized by nature.
There was a kind of freedom that I never dreamt.
That I could have.
(narrator) That sense of freedom was also spread by the
availability of ideas.
In the early part of the century,
some 9,000 public libraries in the country dispensed
information freely and democratically.
One man said to me, "Alfred, do you know that
there's a library on 42nd Street?"
I says, "I do, but I know was never there."
He says, "That's where you belong.
You'll get all the literature in the world,"
and it doesn't cost you a dime."
I read an immense number of books,
because I wanted to understand the American people's minds.
I wanted to be completely American and forget all of my past.
Immigrants themselves bringing new languages and
customs were making the culture of the city just
that much more diverse.
The immigrant nourishment this nation has always had,
the incoming people has been an extremely important
part of our vitality, our ingenuity.
It's like aerating the stream of life here.
(narrator) Early in this century, one in three residents of
major American cites had been born somewhere else.
New York had twice as many Irish as Dublin,
and Chicago had more Poles than Warsaw.
We had Polish people.
We had Irish people.
We had Jewish people, and we had Italian people.
And they were all friendly,
and we were all in the same boat.
None of us had any money.
(Martin Scorsese) My grandparents - the only place they could get rooms
literally was on Elizabeth Street,
which is where my mother was born.
The apartment was two-and-a-half room,
three rooms, and maybe 14 people were living in it.
And at night it'd look like, you know,
a hospital ward with all these beds and all these
people sleeping in these different beds.
(Clara Hancox) There were no bathrooms.
There were toilets.
They were in the hallway.
But my mother and father thought that this was wonderful
because in the old country the toilets were in the backyard,
and the fact that in the kitchen we had not only running water
so that you didn't have to go to the well for water
but we had hot water...
My mother, every week that she did the wash,
she said how wonderful, how wonderful,
we have hot water.
(narrator) Steadily rising income and declining work hours meant
that for the first time, even working class people
could go out in search of entertainment.
Five cents bought a ticket to the
newest entertainment phenomenon, moving pictures.
(off screen voice) We were so taken with the nickel shows.
Two of us would beg to be admitted by sitting on one seat.
(narrator) The earliest movies introduced simultaneously in France
and the United States in the 1890s were simple tableau
of anything that moved,
either make believe or what was called actuality.
In 1903 came the first American film that actually told a story,
"The Great Train Robbery", a western filmed in New Jersey.
Its huge success made it clear that fiction was
what the audience wanted most.
There was comedy,
and then there was the Perils of Pauline,
which was a serial that went on
every Saturday afternoon.
Every week she was in a situation..
A lot of kids.
It wasn't the movie to them.
It was actuality.
(narrator) Beginning in 1910, Americans were also seeing
newsreels from around the world.
It's coming as a great force for mass entertainment
and for mass culture.
There is this sense of possibility,
the sense of openness,
the sense of widening the horizons.
What it does is it opens the world.
(narrator) In Havana harbor on February 15, 1898,
a mysterious explosion sank an American cruiser,
the USS Maine.
266 officers and sailors were killed.
Cuba was a Spanish colony 90 miles from Florida.
Although there was no evidence of Spanish involvement,
cries of revenge against Spain swept across America.
But President William McKinley,
who would lead American into the 20th century,
was reluctant to go to war.
(Stanley Karnow) President McKinley is a silver-tongued orator,
a very popular,
sweet man but a very indecisive man.
They used to say that McKinley's mind is like an unmade bed.
You have to make it up for him before he can use it.
(narrator) Much more eager for war and foreign adventure in
general was McKinley's young Assistant Secretary of the Navy,
Theodore Roosevelt.
(Stanley Karnow) Theodore Roosevelt was a great believer in outdoorism,
a great believer in activity.
He was vigorous, you know.
You could imagine him sort of taking cold showers all the time.
He carried all of this in character into his politics.
He was a great believer in American power,
in American imperialism, a great believer in war.
War is one of the highest forms of human endeavor, he wrote.
(narrator) With Roosevelt and others lobbying intensely for it,
Congress declared war on Spain in April of 1898.
Roosevelt left his job in Washington to
join the campaign in Cuba.
Theodore Roosevelt organizes his own cowboy buddies from
the west into the Rough Riders and goes to Brooks Brothers
and gets a uniform made and gets out a big saber and
goes down there and storms San Juan Hill.
(narrator) It took the United States less than three months to defeat
Spain in what one American official called
a splendid little war.
The spoils of war for the United States were the
Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam,
and the Philippines.
The United States was now an empire.
At the Pan-American exposition in Buffalo,
New York in September 1901, President McKinley was
killed by an assassin with no particular cause beyond
his own dissatisfaction.
Theodore Roosevelt, by then Vice President,
became America's leader.
He's really the first President who sees the United States as a global power.
America's century begins really with Roosevelt.
Theodore Roosevelt was an imperialist.
He actually gloried in the term,
and he wanted the United States to be a real empire,
exercising great power in the same ways that
the great European empires did.
(narrator) Roosevelt's design included linking the Pacific and
Atlantic Oceans by building a canal through the Isthmus
of Panama in northern Colombia.
Such a canal would greatly facilitate shipping and
ensure America's strategic hold on the region.
But when the Colombians refused to cooperate,
Roosevelt encouraged the Panamanians to revolt
against their Colombian rulers.
Within a couple of days, we recognized the new
independent Republic of Panama, and within another few days,
we had concluded a treaty with them.
Roosevelt said when other people dithered and
when other people debated, I acted.
I took action.
(narrator) Construction of the era's engineering
wonder began in 1904.
Alfred Bingham visited the canal site as a child.
I can remember riding along in this car on
the bottom of the canal.
A lot of big machinery and a lot of trains going up and down,
taking the diggings out.
And there were marvelous bit structures
such as that were to be the locks.
The building of the canal itself was the greatest
engineering feat that had ever been done up to that time,
and it's all of the great power and technology and
energy of this age harnessed there.
There's a wonderful photo of Theodore Roosevelt at one
of the controls of one of these gigantic steam shovels
that they used to dig out the ditch.
The Panama Canal is a wonderful expression not only of him
but in many ways of America of that time.
(narrator) In mid-August of 1914, Americans celebrated the
opening of the Panama Canal,
a triumph of both technology and man's will over nature.
An engineering feat as impressive as the pyramids,
the canal would also become the symbol of America's entrance
into the international arena at a time when
the world was becoming more dangerous.
That same week,
the great powers of Europe were headed for a violent encounter
that none of them could even imagine,
promoted by German ambition.
Early in the century,
Germany had emerged as the industrial power in Europe,
rivaling Britain and already mightier than France,
the Austro-Hungarian empire and Russia.
But as Europe's youngest empire,
Germany wielded little political
(Joachin Von Elbe) Germany is really a great power and a leader of nations and
wanted at least to be equal to others,
not to be considered less important than
other powers like England.
(narrator) Under Kaiser Wilhelm, Germany was training the
best land army in the world, five million men,
and had begun building a powerful navy.
(Jay Winter) To build that navy required nerve because
it was a direct challenge to Britain,
and that conflict between Britain and Germany is
at the heart of international affairs before 1914.
(narrator) Britain responded by launching the most
powerful warship on earth, the Dreadnought.
It was a revolution in naval warfare.
It was an all-big gunship, big 12-inch guns.
Also, the Dreadnought had the latest
technological equipment on it.
It had electrical equipment, for example.
Once the British had a Dreadnought,
the Germans had to have a Dreadnought, etc., etc.
(narrator) The tensions fed by an arms race and rivalry among
the major European powers finally came to a head
in June of 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire,
was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo.
There was no reason why the assassination of Franz Ferdinand,
who signaled the collision of fundamental interests.
It was a matter of choice.
And that choice was made in Vienna and in Berlin to
make it more than an assassination.
(narrator) In late July with German's support,
the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war on Serbia,
and within days all the great powers of Europe bound
by their various alliances were at war with each other.
(Henry Villard) I was at a camp,
a boys camp in New Hampshire in 1914 when war was declared,
and it was a shock to a very peaceful world.
But nobody took it too seriously.
War was bad, of course,
but it was also something that would be temporary and
would not have a far-reaching effect.
(narrator) But this war would be more catastrophic than any
which had gone before, one in which technology,
engine of progress,
would be used in the slaughter of millions,
a war that would sow greater hatred and
result in far greater consequences than anyone
could imagine in that summer of 1914.
What was optimistically called the war to end all wars
would draw America into an increasingly complex
and dangerous world.
That's on the next episode of The Century,
America's Time.
I'm Peter Jennings.
Thank you for joining us.