The Century: America's Time - The Beginning: Seeds of Change

Part one of a 15-part series of documentaries produced by the American Broadcasting Company on the 20th century and the rise of the United States as a superpower.

This episode introduces both the series and the twentieth century and documents some of the major themes of the turn-of-the-century. Events such as immigration, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison's inventions, the advent of the automobile, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, suffrage, segregation, the silver screen, American imperialism and the Titanic are examined and survivors give first-hand accounts of life in the early years of the century.

(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!

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.