In the early days of 1918, less than a year after having entered the war, Woodrow Wilson addressed the United States Congress and delivered them the Fourteen Points, his framework for what a post-war settlement would look like. Points one through thirteen are a blend of general arguments for free trade, transparent peace agreements, and paradoxical recommendations for the sovereignty of other nations, all couched in the sort of milquetoast political language that implies meaning and gravitas while ultimately saying very little. The fourteenth point called for the formation of a “general association of nations…under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike,” a League of Nations, if you will, and it proved to be Wilson’s non-negotiable. The Fourteen Points would serve as the framework for the armistice between Germany and the Allies, which agreement was reached on 11 November 1918.
The Great Influenza began wave number three in January 1919. It continued through the spring with a virulence that John Barry describes as “lethal by any standard except the second wave.” Like any sensible world traveler, the virus ventured to new destinations like Japan and Australia, but also made return trips to desirable – which is to say crowded – locations like Paris and the surrounding area. The crowds in Paris were a bit larger at that time thanks to the presence of world leaders and their attendant retinue discussing the lotta ins, lotta outs, and lotta what-have-yous of settling the war. Wilson was there, and John Barry suggests that there is some historical evidence that the Spanish Flu may have infected him at an unfortunately inopportune juncture:
On April 3, 1919, during the Versailles Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson collapsed. His sudden weakness and severe confusion halfway through that conference—widely commented upon—very possibly contributed to his abandoning his principles. The result was the disastrous peace treaty, which would later contribute to the start of World War II. Some historians have attributed Wilson’s confusion to a minor stroke. In fact, he had a 103 degree temperature, intense coughing fits, diarrhea and other serious symptoms. A stroke explains none of the symptoms. Influenza, which was then widespread in Paris and killed a young aide to Wilson, explains all of them—including his confusion. Experts would later agree that many patients afflicted by the pandemic influenza had cognitive or psychological symptoms. As an authoritative 1927 medical review concluded, “There is no doubt that the neuropsychiatric effects of influenza are profound...hardly second to its effect on the respiratory system.”
Whatever the cause for the abrupt shift in Wilson’s fortitude, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, their respective nations having already agreed to the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement and the two men themselves agreeing to a supplemental agreement two months prior, pounced, setting the table for the various British and French mandates in Mesopotamia and the Levant which would last for thirty years and set the table for the modern Middle East. Let me just check Google to see how that turned out…
The weeks leading up to Armistice Day in Germany were fraught with revolutionary foment as citizens, who for years had been told that they were on the precipice of victory, realized that the opposite was in fact true. Spurred on by the successful overthrow of the Tsar the year prior, some areas of Germany set up soviet-style councils and, in the case of Bavaria, ousted the King and declared themselves a socialist republic. In an effort to appease the leftists the Kaiser was exiled to Holland, a government under Friedrich Ebert was installed, and the so-called Weimar Republic was born. The postwar economy of the Republic was a shambles, with hyperinflation the norm after the short-sighted Treaty of Versailles and resentment from the middle class setting the table for increasing radicalization and the takeover of the government by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Let me just check Google to see how that turned out…
Germany’s discord crept into neighboring Switzerland. Like much of Europe, the Swiss people had been divided during the war into three groups: businesspeople, farmers, and workers. The first two groups saw their wealth expand significantly between 1914 and 1918, the third saw the opposite. With market conditions shifting as the war neared its end, the workers began striking with greater frequency. On 7 November 1918, Swiss troops were mobilized and marched into Zurich, inflaming the tension. Three days later, troops descended on the Münsterplatz to break up a protest and injured four civilians. One soldier died. A general strike of some 250,000 workers took place on 12 November 1918 and the legislature convened for talks, voting two days later to pass several initiatives designed to mollify the strikers. The strike had already been called off when three protestors were shot and killed by soldiers in Grenchen while they were tearing up railroad tracks. Among the concessions obtained by the strikers was a 48-hour work week and increased participation by the worker’s unions in the decision-making process at the Federal level. This commitment to the welfare of the working class was sadly fleeting and Switzerland’s financial laws increasingly allowed it to become a tax haven and financial repository for wealthy people around the world, setting the table for the current capitalist system. Let me just check Google to see how that turned out…
In Russia, civil war raged between Reds and Whites for four years, with Lenin’s Bolsheviks finally claiming victory in 1921. The formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics followed in 1922, its constitution as a “dictatorship of the proletariat” adopted in 1924. Lenin died that year and a power struggle emerged between the head of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a Georgian revolutionary named Ioseb Dzhughashvili who, since the 1913 publication of an article entitled “Marxism and the National Question,” had been known by the pseudonym Stalin. Trotsky, among thousands of other officials, was purged from Stalin’s government and fled to Mexico, where he was killed by an agent of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, in 1940. Stalin undertook a complete reform of Lenin’s model and transformed it into a totalitarian regime the likes of which the world had not seen and hasn’t seen since. A propaganda machine as shameless as it was effective sprang up and fed a cult of personality which belied and exacerbated the utter terror of life for many. Collectivization of agriculture began in 1928 and led to the death by starvation of millions. Many thousands more were sent to gulags or simply shot. Surely there must have been some good news, right? Let me just check Google and see how that turned out…
The Spanish Flu wrapped up its savage world tour in the spring of 1920. There is no way to know the true scale of its destruction on the human population, but it was bad enough to generate statistical comparisons from scholars that blow the mind such as this from John Barry:
Influenza killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century; it killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years.
Current estimates suggest that the influenza pandemic claimed anywhere between 50 and 100 million lives, this at a time when the world’s population was less than two billion. The strain of the influenza virus itself, H1N1, is still with us today and is the source of occasional minor outbreaks. It seems pretty obvious in hindsight that the combination of The War and The Flu helped inspire a global “fuck it” ethos that, combined with numerous technological advancements, led to an unrestrained orgy of prosperity and creation that would come to be known as the Roaring Twenties. Let me just check Google to see how that turned out…
I’ll tell you who had absolutely nothing to do with the frenzied spirit of the Twenties: Dean Nilson. After the war, Dean returned to Haskell County, Kansas and lived there for the rest of his life. He raised a family, he farmed, he went to the Methodist church, and he hung out at the Odd Fellow Hall. Newspaper accounts suggest that he seems to have taken to photography and videography. A 9 September 1943 column in the Tonganoxie Mirror headlined “Freeman Family Reunion” notes that, after a “bountiful chicken dinner” in the basement of the Friends Church, the crowd “assembled at the parental home where pictures were taken and Dean Nilson of Sublette, Kansas showed several moving pictures of the family, that he had taken previously, also other pictures.” More than twenty years later, the Garden City Telegram of 4 February 1966 notes that Dean showed pictures of the Rose Parade at the Odd Fellow Hall under the delightfully accurate headline “Sublette Man Shows Film Here.” He died on 18 November 1967 at the Sublette Community Hospital “after a lengthy illness,” his death the final one noted in the records of the International Order of Odd Fellows Lodge 561 in Santa Fe, Kansas, the very same order to which Dr. Loring Miner belonged until his death in September 1935.
Princesse de Polignac continued her epic run of patronage, commissioning masterpieces like the Organ Concerto of Francis Poulenc, the Symphony no. 2 of Kurt Weill, and Manuel de Falla’s puppet opera El retablo de maese Pedro. She supported the careers of some of the very greatest artists of the first half of the twentieth century, Nadia Boulanger, Clara Haskil, and Vladimir Horowitz among them. Her charitable efforts were even more significant. She was one of several donors recruited by Marie Curie to assist in converting limousines into mobile radiology labs which were used at the front during World War I. Along with Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose position in the Vanderbilt family tree is too confusing for me to process even though I’m responsible for the work of deranged and chaotic madness which you’re now approaching the conclusion of, the Princesse contributed to the construction of the Foch Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in Europe. Among several public housing projects in which she was involved, the coolest was the barge Louise-Catherine, which the Salvation Army had converted by famed architect Le Corbusier into a shelter for the homeless during the winter months and a summer camp for the children of Paris during the summers. Sadly, during a particularly bad stretch of heavy rain in 2018, the Louise-Catherine sank into the Seine. Princesse de Polignac died in 1943, but the foundation which bears her name continues to this day in its devotion to the arts and sciences.
Werner Reinhart continued his own epic run of patronage. Generous to the point of absurdity, he went to fairly extreme lengths to improve the financial and, in some cases, intimate circumstances of his circle. He did all the normal stuff you’d think a patron would, providing a monthly stipend to the composer and conductor Othmar Schoeck beginning in 1916, paying for three years of studying abroad for the young composer Albert Moeschinger. But in several instances, he went above and beyond the standard issue patronage of his or any other day. Reinhart arranged the premiere performance of Anton Webern’s Variations for Orchestra in 1943, investing “all the financial and diplomatic means at his disposal” to facilitate Webern being present for a rare joyous occasion during the war years. Webern was one of many composers denounced by the Nazis as producing “degenerate art,” and his music was banned from publication and performance shortly after the Anschluss. His career was derailed and ultimately never recovered from the war’s effects during his lifetime. In September 1945, having returned home to Allied-occupied Austria, he stepped on to the front porch to smoke a cigar and was killed by a US Army cook who was there to arrest Webern’s son-in-law, a former member of the SS. For all the misery the Nazis caused him professionally, Webern’s relationship with the Nazi ideology, such as that ideology can actually be understood, is difficult to ascertain. Reinhart also provided financial support for the exiled German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who fled Germany to Switzerland early in 1945 at the behest of Albert Speer himself. Furtwängler’s relationship to the Nazis is the subject of endless speculation and debate. At the end of the day, two things are pretty well known to be true: he benefitted professionally from his proximity to the Nazis via his post as the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and he stood by, assisted, and protected numerous Jewish colleagues at the same time. He was, in other words, a human being. At any rate, Reinhart helped Ernest Ansermet arrange for Furtwängler and his family to live in Clarens. Reinhart supported the legendary conductor Hermann Scherchen, whose towering musical career didn’t pay enough to cover the alimony payments to his five wives. No relationship, however, better explains Reinhart’s slightly insane commitment to patronage than his support of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who came to Switzerland after the end of the war in the midst of a long creative dry spell. After bouncing from place to place for the better part of two years, Rilke took up residence in the Château de Muzot, a fortified 13th-century manor house which Reinhart purchased in 1921 for the sole purpose of Rilke residing there rent free. After nearly a decade of sporadic work and frequent delays, Rilke completed his two greatest masterpieces, Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, the former the culmination of ten years of effort, the latter a collection of fifty-five sonnets completed in three weeks, a period Rilke himself described as a "savage creative storm." Reinhart died in 1951, but the arts and culture scene in Winterthur remains forever vibrant.
At some point in the middle part of the 20th century, The Devil went suit shopping, my guess being at Joseph A. Bank because how else to explain those prices for what are allegedly real suits and sport coats other than a clandestine arrangement with the Lord of Darkness? Presumably because He was dressed for the job He wants, The Devil worked his way to the top of several fields, likely the ones you’re already thinking about. Gone was the foppish dandy and in His place was the corporatized destroyer. He was the head of a prestigious law firm, the CEO of a massive multinational conglomerate, and in at least one instance, the proprietor of an antique shop, that most depraved of all human endeavors. As the years passed, The Devil became decreasingly interested in cleverly scheming His way into the conquest of human souls and often just resorted to His penchant for evil in its purest forms, including outright possession. The Exorcist is certainly a high point in the realm of devil stuff, but the possession angle crept into real life, too. In one case, things got out of hand and He ended up involving Himself in a bizarre lawsuit (see I AM THE BEAST SIX SIX SIX OF THE LORD OF HOSTS IN EDMOND FRANK MACGILLIVRAY JR NOW. I AM THE BEAST SIX SIX SIX OF THE LORD OF HOSTS IEFMJN. I AM THE BEAST SIX SIX SIX OF THE LORD OF HOSTS. I AM THE BEAST SIX SIX SIX OTLOHIEFMJN. I AM THE BEAST vs. Michigan State Police). He had a particularly strong decade in the 1970s, getting namedropped in “Bohemian Rhapsody” and being hidden in “Stairway to Heaven” if you play it backwards, though at decade’s end He lost a famous fiddle duel down in Georgia and got called a son of a bitch for his troubles. As Western society continues to become more secular The Devil recedes further from collective consciousness, His role now being played by real-life figures such as Mankind’s Own Capacity For Evil or Wall Street Banker.
Wow, just read this and had to share it with some folks I think will enjoy it as much as I do. Thanks for uploading!
Thank you so much for your kind words! It means a lot to me, for real. 🫶🏼