We enter the final portion of this class by looking at Texas in World War I. World War I, of course, is the defining event of the 20th century. The war transformed the world order, putting the United States into a world leader position for the first time in its history. And it also had significant effects on Texas. We now enter the modern period of Texas history in which the state began integrating completely into the United States. For centuries, Texas existed somewhat apart from the rest of the United States due to its unique history and culture. It was a Spanish colony born out of Spanish, then Mexican traditions. After independence, it spent some time as an independent nation, then periodically questioned whether it even wanted to join the United States. In the Civil War, its distance from the rest of the South meant Texas also missed much of the suffering and destruction experienced by other members of the Confederacy. Indeed, while most southern states suffered invasion, loss, and destruction, parts of Texas actually thrived during the conflict. Texas also stood apart in other ways. It ranched when other states farmed. For years, it had a frontier too dangerous to cross without armed escort. In the late 1800s, Texas had such an unusually high rate of criminal activity that other states reported on its violence in their newspapers. The state also had a unique type of law enforcement in the Texas Rangers. Texas had its own singular disease in Texas cattle fever. It had the nation's worst natural disaster in the Galbaston hurricane. and it was huge, spanning an enormous range of ecosystems and rivers, mountains, and prairie. Texas therefore had a unique identity and experiences that set it apart from the rest of the country, and that sometimes made it hard for Texans to think outside of Texas. Of course, the people of Texas knew they were citizens of the United States, but the state had a tendency to stay within its borders and try to manage things on its own. And we see this in Texas's insistence in the 1840s that it keep its public lands upon joining the United States. We even see it later in the state's history after the Civil War, even as railroads and industries brought Texas into the United States. Economically, Texans still tended to think of themselves as Texans first. We saw this in the Farmers Alliance movement when it took time for alliancemen to start considering the rest of the country. We also see it on the border with Texas's repeated history of sending expeditions into a foreign country on its own without waiting for permission or approval from the national government. We even see it in the railroad commission which regulates railroad operations within the state. Texas can have such a regulatory body because it is large enough to have railroads that operate exclusively within its borders. But World War I would change the mentality in Texas. If events after the Civil War and the emergence of the new South had increasingly linked Texas to the rest of the nation economically, World War I had the effect of making Texans feel culturally and emotionally integrated into the American national experience. So, in this lecture, we'll examine what the war did to Texas and Texans. But first, we need to consider the war itself. World War I became the first industrial war when it erupted in 1914. The war took all the new inventions and industrial technologies of the late 1800s and put them to work killing. Soldiers faced an array of mass-roduced weapons capable of dealing out death at a constant pace 24 hours a day for months at a time. And when Texans got into this war, they joined a conflict that killed 40 million people. The death toll went so high because armies used the machine gun, each of which brought the force of 60 riflemen from the Civil War into play. Breach loaded hydraulic artillery replaced the old cannon of the 1800s and increased the pace of shelling. New types of shells emerged as well. Some exploded on impact, spraying the area with shrapnel and tearing men apart. Others burst open to release deadly gases that burned and choked. Tanks, aircraft, flamethrowers, and grenades also came into use in this war. And because of the war, parts of France were so badly damaged or so saturated with ordinance, they remain dangerous to this day. These are the French killing fields of 1916. A World War I battle took place in this location in the summer of 1916. And this battle killed or wounded close to a million men in 6 months. It turned these fields into a charal house of trenches, rats, and decomposing bodies. The woods that you see in the background ceased to exist. They were cut down by artillery fire. Today, this area is red zoned and the woods are off limits. France red zones areas that still have unexloded ordinance buried in the soil. And France maintains a government service that collects any shells or grenades discovered through regular farmwork. This is the Western Front of World War I where American soldiers fought in the war in later years. Now the war broke out because of competition between two European countries and that competition turned violent. AustriaHungary and Serbia both wanted to control a part of Europe called the Balkans. Austria insisted that it had annexed a section of the Balkans called Bosnia. In 1908, Serbia challenged this annexation and when Austria would not back down, Serb terrorists attacked Austrians and the Austrian army in Bosnia. In June 1914, Serb terrorists murdered the heir to the AustriaHungary throne, a man named France Ferdinand, after he paid a morale visit to the city of Sarah Yeeo, which is in Bosnia. This assassination triggered a war between Austria, Hungary, and Serbia. But due to alliances and strategies among the European countries, what might have been a small conflict brought all of the major countries of Europe into a war on the part of Austria, Hungary, or Serbia. World War I happened fast. France Ferdinand died on June 28th, 1914. By August 4th, all of the major countries of Europe had entered the war and the conflict took the United States by surprise. At this point in American history, our country had so little involvement with European affairs. Not one European nation felt it necessary to inform the United States about the deteriorating situation. American diplomats in Europe thus found themselves taken by surprise when the war erupted. They called it lightning from a clear sky. The United States initially declared neutrality and spent the first two years of the war selling materials to the waring parties and lending them billions of dollars as well. World War I thus started transitioning the United States into a world leadership position as it made this country increasingly wealthy even as it weakened the major countries of Europe. And World War I soon became a slaughterhouse. As losses mounted, the waring countries took to attacking each other's economy. Britain blockaded German ports, denying neutral access for even food deliveries. And this caused widespread starvation in Germany as the war continued. Germany responded by unleashing a new weapon, the submarine or yubot, against Britain. This meant applying new tactics that address some of the limitations of the submarine. Yubot were tiny and fragile, as this picture indicates. They needed stealth to survive. So when using yubot against Britain, Germany announced that it had created a war zone around Britain and that yubot would be operating in this area. They would torpedo and sink British and French vessels, but neutrals were warned that mistakes might happen. When Britain tried to evade the Germans by putting British flags on neutral ships and using passenger ships to carry military cargo, Germany announced a new tactic in 1915. Germany initiated unrestricted submarine warfare in which its hubot would torpedo and sink any ship they found sailing in the war zone, passenger, neutral, military, or whatever. The German government printed warnings in US newspapers telling people of the danger involved in sailing into the war zone, even on a passenger vessel. The United States denounced unrestricted submarine warfare. This country also threatened war after Germany's tactic led to a tragedy. In May 1915, Lucatania, a large ocean liner traveling from New York to Britain, sank quickly after being struck by a torpedo off the British coast. Over a thousand people died, including 128 Americans. Lucatania went down so fast most of her passengers could not escape. Woodrow Wilson threatened war if Germany continued this type of attack and Germany backed down. This brought the United States two more years of neutrality. The US entered the war in April 1917 after Britain released the Zimmerman telegram. The Zimmerman telegram from Germany to Mexico offered Mexico a deal. In return for invading the United States, Mexico would receive help from Germany, regaining territory lost to the United States in the 1800s, including Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Britain intercepted this top secret communication in March, and released it to the United States. Now, Germany had reached out to Mexico as part of a desperate gamble. The fighting in 1916 had proved particularly brutal. Battles in France had cost both sides over a million casualties, leaving them in shock. Germany believed it had a chance to win the war in 1917, given the losses France and Britain had absorbed in 1916. However, to do so, it needed to return to unrestricted submarine warfare. Recall that this strategy had German yubot torpedoing and sinking at will, hitting passenger, neutral, and military targets. In 1915, unrestricted submarine warfare had nearly provoked the United States into war, and Germany expected a similar response from this country in 1917. That's where Mexico came into the picture. If Mexico would invade the US, that might distract this country away from Europe and the Ubot and buy time for Germany to win the war. Then Germany could send financial assistance to Mexico to help that country with its US invasion and maybe help it recover some states. Germany and Mexico had been trade partners for some time and they had an established relationship. On April 2nd, 1917, in response to the Zimmerman telegram, the US declared war on Germany. The Zimmerman telegram hit Texas hard as the state had been experiencing violence on the border with Mexico for several decades. Border conflict had been ongoing since the late 1800s with Mexicans and Americans crossing into each other's countries and attacking. Tensions grew exponentially when railroads came into South Texas in the early 1900s, bringing investors who wanted to install commercial agriculture and raising land values to the point they drove small Tahhano ranchers into bankruptcy. This led to hard feelings and anger as displaced Hispanics had to watch new farming and commercial operations take over lands they had owned for centuries. It also led to more fluidity on the border as some tahhanos relocated into Mexico. When revolution broke out in Mexico in 1910 and that country began deposing presidents and changing governments regularly, the character of the border grew even more complex. A conflict between the US and various political factions in Mexico broke out along the length of the US Mexican border between 1910 and 1919. and hostility between the US and Mexico was exacerbated by the American invasion and occupation of Veraracruz in 1914. The political chaos in Mexico also brought revolutionaries and refugees to northern Mexico and then into South Texas where they added their voices and experiences to those of displaced tahhanos and the individuals who came to the United States simply to work. So in Texas by 1915 some noted that the feeling in the valley started to turn tense and ominous. There was a lot of anger against Mexico against Anglo and against the Texas Rangers and it seethed in the area. In early 1915, Basilio Ramos, a Mexican citizen educated here in the United States, was apprehended in Macallen trying to recruit people for an uprising against this country. He carried a document that outlined something called the plan of San Diego. This plan wanted to start an independence movement in the five US states that bordered Mexico, Texas included. These states might be annexed to Mexico at some point, but as an independent nation, they would offer equality to African-Americans and return Native American lands. The plan also called for the killing of every Anglo man in these states. Subsequent documents asserted the hatred of quote races which close the doors to schools, hotels, theaters, and all public establishments to the Mexican black and yellow and divides the railroads and all public meeting places into areas where the savage white skins meet and constitute a superior class. Learning of this plan, Anglo on the border, especially the Texas Rangers who patrolled that region, turned violent towards Hispanics. They began killing indiscriminately, murdering so many individuals, people ceased keeping track of the body count or even taking time to bury the dead. And this famous picture shows a group of rangers with the bodies of men they have just killed. During the summer of 1915, insurgents from Mexico, calling themselves sedicios, began raiding across the Texas border, burning and attacking ranches and ranch houses, killing and executing in their own right. These raiders at one point attacked even the King Ranch in an organized assault involving riflemen. The battle between them and ranch defenders went on for two days. The border then turned into a bloody place of action and reaction with murder becoming commonplace. Border issues in neighboring states got severe enough to require the US army and an invasion of Mexico in 1916. So by the time the Zimmerman telegram emerged in 1917, the US Mexico border had been an angry violent region for several years. And the telegram with its promises of even more violence to come proved to be the last straw for the United States. This country declared war against Germany as I said on April 2nd, 1917. Now, of importance, Mexico did not give a single thought to accepting Germany's offer. That was never on the table. Now, to fight the war, the United States needed to build an army, train its military for modern warfare, transport and supply this army, and integrate new technologies like aircraft into its armed forces. This required the construction of new training bases, airfields, and shipyards. And Texas played an enormous role in helping the United States create the military and transportation systems it needed to fight World War I. And next, we'll consider how involvement in World War I affected this state.