742 ★ CHAPTER 19 Safe for Democracy: The United States and WWI
administration offered support to Venustiano Carranza, a leader more devoted
to economic modernization. In 1916, the war spilled over into the United
States when several hundred men loyal to Francisco “Pancho” Villa, the leader
of another peasant force, raided Columbus, New Mexico, a few miles north
of the border, leading to the death of seventeen Americans. With Carran-
za’s approval, Wilson ordered 10,000 troops under the command of General
John J. Pershing on an expedition into Mexico that unsuccessfully sought to
arrest Villa. Chaos in Mexico continued— within the next few years, Zapata,
Carranza, and Villa all fell victim to assassination. Mexico was a warning
that it might be more difficult than Wilson assumed to use American might
to reorder the internal affairs of other nations, or to apply moral certainty to
foreign policy.
AMERICA AND THE GREAT WAR
In June 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir
to the throne of the Austro- Hungarian empire, in Sarajevo. (Today, Sarajevo is
the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.) This deed set in motion a chain of events
that plunged Europe into the most devastating war the world had ever seen. In
the years before 1914, European nations had engaged in a scramble to obtain
colonial possessions overseas and had constructed a shifting series of alliances
seeking military domination within Europe. In the aftermath of the assassi-
nation, Austria- Hungary, the major power in eastern Europe, declared war on
Serbia. Within a little more than a month, because of the European powers’
interlocking military alliances, Britain, France, Russia, and Japan (the Allies)
found themselves at war with the Central Powers— Germany, Austria- Hungary,
and the Ottoman empire, whose holdings included modern- day Turkey and
much of the Middle East.
German forces quickly overran Belgium and part of northern France. The
war then settled into a prolonged stalemate, with bloody, indecisive battles
succeeding one another. New military technologies— submarines, airplanes,
machine guns, tanks, and poison gas— produced unprecedented slaughter. In
one five- month battle at Verdun, in 1916, 600,000 French and German soldiers
perished— nearly as many deaths as in the entire American Civil War. By the
time the war ended, an estimated 10 million soldiers, and uncounted millions
of civilians, had perished.
The Great War, or World War I as it came to be called, dealt a severe blow to
the optimism and self- confidence of Western civilization. For decades, philoso-
phers, reformers, and politicians had hailed the triumph of reason and human
progress. Despite increasingly bitter rivalries between European powers,