Time Traveler to 1913

In My Humble Opinion
1

OK, so I wrote my 50,000 word novel for NaNoWriMo on the subject of a time traveller who appears in 1933 to help FDR and friends win WWII. A good time was had by all.

So, what if a time-traveller showed up in American in 1913 or so? WWI is going to happen, no fair telling Annie Oakie to pop Kaiser Bill during the Wild West Show in Berlin. What sort of technical, social and cultural stuff was going on in that time frame?

Remember, all I know about WWI is what I got from The Red Badge of Courage and the Mr. McGoo version of Moby Dick. Still some thoughts come to mind.

-The US needs an aeroplane industry.
-The US Army needs quite a few ‘software’ reforms.
-Inventing the tank early is unrealistic.
-Blood plasma ought to be easy.
-Mass production of ships, ditto.
-Highways?
Your thoughts? Looking back, would the US letting Europe destroy itself be a moral option?

2

Paul, you can’t do better than Robert K. Massie’s Dreadnought, a superb account of the British and German militarization that culminated in the Great War.

As a fun read, you might like Jack Finney’s novel From Time to Tlme. Its theme is similar to yours. It’s the sequel to Finney’s perennial best seller Time and Again. In it, Si Morley, the hero of the earlier book, travels to 1912 and tries to stop WWI.

3

Thank you, let me put that on my Amazon list.

4

:: makes mental note to get these books from the library ::

:: opens library website, types ::

:: request done ::

I’m thinking that the best thing may be for the US to stay out of the Great War. From my viewpoint, I’m not entirely sure what the sides were fighting about; there doesn’t seem to be as much of the kind of good/evil dichotomy that the Second World War had.

I wonder whether the best thing for the time traveler to do, if he or she was a historical activist, would be to lay groundwork to lessen the blow of the Great Depression? You know, reduce the hysteria of the Red Scare, reduce the extravagance of the late twenties and deflate the stock bubble slowly, etc? That might reduce the level of xenophobia, and later provide greater refuge for people fleeing the Nazis and less support for similar causes.

Could just one time traveler make those kinds of social changes?

Recommended books:
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
Only Yesterday: an Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen. This book is very interesting because it was written in the early 1930s.

5

Read Alfred Bester’s “Hobson’s Choice.”

6

In 1912, the traveler could invite the Kaiser on a camping trip to the Katmai area. End of problem.

7

Just leave the spare change behind

8

If I had any sway with the US government to do any of those things, I would instead use that influence to keep the US out of the war and use every diplomatic and economic tool available to keep Britain out of the war as well. WWI would then have a very good chance of ending on terms favorable to Germany… which means no Hitler and no WWII. WWI was the greatest tragedy ever inflicted on the world.

9

But the war ending on good terms for Germany means it would end on bad terms for everyone else (Except the U.S. and Britain if we could be kept out). You might end up with a Hitler anyway.

10

Paul, you should definitely read Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower, which is a history of several major cultural events in the years prior to WWI.

As for dramatically changing America’s WWI experience, I’d go with anti-submarine technology. The German submarine attacks were the reason America entered the war and were a major threat to Britain. I don’t know if later technology like sonar and depth charges were possible in 1917, but if they had been, America might have restricted itself to an active convoy defense system like it did in 1940 rather than directly declaring war on Germany. Or alternately, Germany might have called off the submarine offensive if effective deterrants had existed.

11

Well, I would say you are 4 years out from an Epidemic that will kill 675,000 Americans – more than die in WWI, WWII, Koera and Vietnam combined. Not to mention 20-60 Million world-wide.

To me mitigating that would be far more important than anything you can do re America and WWI -like basic santitation and quartine techniques at the first sign or even a 4 year ahead point in the right direction – if you are going to figure out plasma how about an influenza vaccine and save the World (more so then even preventing WWI)

12

Bring back a copy of Rhode’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb (with limited-edition hologram cover) and a hunk of Pu-238, and mail them to the British War Office. In seven months, if there are no noticable changes to the timeline, mail copies to the U.S., Russia, France, and Japan, in that order, at six month intervals.

Alternately, trying to help the pre-Revolution Russians win the war in the east—some key technological gifts and/or military advisors might help—could have interesting effects. Lenin and company might have a harder time taking power if the Tsar’s armored divisions roll in to plunder Berlin.

Or, just kill Lenin and Co. Maybe you could frame them for the grisly murder of a Linz customs officer and his family, and hanged. :wink:

13

Maybe I’m being whooshed, but The Red Badge of Courage was about the Civil War, not WWI. Also, I’ve not seen the Mc. McGoo version of Moby Dick, but I can’t imagine how or why he’d reset it during WWI…? :confused:

Ditto – great book.

14

While you are there, could you buy a couple hundred acres of barren land in Malibu and Beverly Hills with a stipulation that it be given to DMark sometime in 2007?
Oh, and maybe 20 acres on the Las Vegas Strip while you are at it. I think I have enough on my Visa card to cover the cost at prices back then.

My suggestion would to be add some humorous sidelines like that throughout the book…invest in films by that unknown guy, Charlie Chaplin, who starts making films in December of that year…maybe buy some stock in the Ford Motor Company that starts using mass production that year…invent the hula hoop, skateboard, surfboard and a few other interesting things…once you have made your millions, you can then lunch with the President and give him an earful.

Oh, and I am not quite sure how this would effect world events, but maybe sending a hit-man to kill a 24 year old guy named Adolf who is probably painting somewhere in Europe.

15

Automobiles: The affordable ($525-$700) Ford Model “T”, first produced in 1910, was the top selling car in the United States in 1913. The engine was started with a hand crank, and ran at a top speed of 45 m.p.h., although most city was driving was done at 25 m.p.h. or below. More here.

Demographics: The U.S. immigrant population reach an all-time high in 1910, at 14.7 percent of the whole. Italians, Poles, and other slavs were the immigrant population groups that peaked in the early 20th century.

The average household size was 4.5 people in 1910 (2.5 in 2000).

In 1913, women could vote in the states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, and Kansas. Illinois granted women a new form of partial suffrage in 1913 by allowing them to vote only in presidential elections, the next being in 1916.

Education: In 1910, 23.8% of the population had less than 5 years of elementary school, while only 13.5% had high school completion or higher; only 2.7% had four or more years of college.

Economy: The 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913 to legalize the income tax, which had been effectively prohibited by the Supreme Court in the 1895. The first income taxes were primarily on the wealthy.

The average hourly wage in manufacturing jobs was 21¢ in 1913.

Sports: Baseball was the only major professional sport. All games were played in the daytime. Football and basketball were played mostly by college teams.

Motion pictures: Movies were still considered a low art for the masses. Feature-length motion pictures had just been introduced in America in 1912, and by September 1913 only 12 had been produced there. Most movie programs were still made up of several short subjects, often alternating with live vaudeville acts and sing-along slides. The programs changed weekly, and so people usually went to the movies weekly. Popular stars included “Broncho Billy” Anderson and Mary Pickford, although the “star system” was still in its infancy. The first cliffhanger serial, The Adventures of Kathlyn, was released in 1913.

Telephones: Fewer than 1 in 4 households had a telephone in 1913. Virtually all calls were handled by operators. Long distance calls were prohibitively expensive; transcontinental calls were not possible. The telegraph was the preferred method of fast messaging over long distances.

Radio: Commercial radio stations did not come about until 1920. In 1913, the “wireless” was mainly used to send telegraphic messages in Morse code, not voice or music. After Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912 restricting private radio stations to wavelengths of 200 meters or shorter, which were considered useless, the number of radio hobbyists in the U.S. is estimated to have dropped by as much as 88%.

16

It’s not about changing the course of history but in terms of a time traveller arriving back in pre-WW1 America you could read the latter stages of Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love. Whatever you think of the plotline – or RAH’s writing style – this has a lot of observations on contemporary US culture. He was born in 1907 and grew up during this period but wrote the book in the early seventies.

You will also get Heinlein’s views on whether America should have entered The Great War :dubious:

17

There was a few days in 1913 Vienna when Hitler was living in a men’s hostel while Stalin was in town on Party business. You could safely go and assassinate these two nobodies and save tens of millions of lives; if you don’t subscribe to the “if it wasn’t this asshole some other asshole would come along anyway” view of history.

If you wanted to prevent more than one world war, you could shoot Franz Ferdinand (although he didn’t spend much time in Vienna); so that WW1 couldn’t be sparked by Balkan separatists. The Czar wasn’t going to mobilize on behalf of some kooky American. The downside for you is that Austria-Hungary used the garrotte as capital punishment.

Me, I’d safely shoot Hitler & Stalin (with maybe a side trip to Chile in 1915 to strangle baby Pinochet), but I’d still want to pitch the idea for the container revolution to the American shipping & railroad boys so I could get in on the conversion of European blood into American fat.

America became an economic combatant in WW1 long before we declared war. We started selling boatloads of stuff right away, making buttloads of money, and chose sides not on moral grounds, but based on market accessibility. Hamburg was bottled up, but Liverpool was only blocked by a few pesky u-boats, so the Allied cause coincidentally became the righteous one. Winston Churchill would later write that if the US had stayed out, both sides would have given up after the Somme/Verdun. He wrote this in the 1930’s, to argue that our contribution only made the post-war chaos & rise of the Bolsheviks & Nazis inevitable, so our isolationism was an unfair turning away from the mess we’d created. (IWCHO)

18

Highways? What fer? Ain’t nobody much usin’ them gas buggies yet. A good team’ll still pull most anything outa the ruts.

19

The biggest challenge your time traveller is going to face, at least in 1913, is the strong public opinion that a war in Europe was not worth the blood of a single American soldier. The sentiment was not universal – Teddy Rooselvelt was a vocal early proponent of the preparedness movement – but for the first two years of the European war Congress blocked all attempts to increase the peacetime army and arm American merchant vessels. It’s not for nothing that Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”

By this time, though, public sentiment was already slowly starting to open up to a possible American intervention. The sinking of the Lusitania in May of 1915 shocked a lot of people and showed that a neutral could not count on being completely insulated from the war. When the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in Feb of 1917, American neutrality rights were directly challenged. And the capper was the Zimmermann Note, a diplomatic telegram from Germany to Mexico proposing a Mexican invasion of the US in the event of American intervention. Unfortunately for the Germans, the British intercepted it and leaked it to the Americans. Unquestionably one of the greatest bonehead moments in international diplomacy.

But enough history lesson. It seems to me that the most promising way to get the US involved earlier and stronger in World War I is to have a respected, articulate internationalist in the White House who could persuade the American people that they couldn’t afford to sit this one out. So set your time machine back another year to 1912, and convince Taft that he’d have more time for playing golf and eating pork chops if he didn’t run for reelection.

20

People would still be talking about the sinking of the Titanic that happened in April (I believe) of 1912. Grand Central Station opened the first week of February in NYC-- just a couple of days after Rosa Parks was born.

People in the country still had kerosene lamps, drank well water and used outdoor toilets.