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Oct. 22, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
35:04
Timeless Lectures - Learn History with Dennis Prager - Part 5
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Here, thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
and to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
Hello, my friends.
This is Dennis Prager, and this is a history hour.
Periodically, I devote an hour to a major new work of history.
Because if we don't know what happened before us, we can't understand the world.
And you know my love of clarity, and only history affords us any clarity about why we got to where we are.
Plus, there's nothing more enthralling.
It's like the greatest ongoing soap opera ever written.
And that is the works of history.
Now, I happen to have, apparently, I have finally admitted I have a bias on behalf of British historians because they disproportionately are the historians whom I end up interviewing.
And we have another example here by the name of Charles Emerson, which has two M's, incidentally, who is actually, according to his bio, you are actually Sir Australian, but I detected no Australian accent.
Have you given that up?
I'm afraid the Australian accent comes back when I go to Australia, but living in the other kingdom for the last 30-odd years, it seems to have faded away.
That is it.
It does come back when you go back to Australia.
Oh, absolutely.
The Australian accent, a bit like the Irish accent, is a very sympathetic accent.
And I think what I mean by that is that when you speak to somebody who does have a strong Australian accent, you sort of lapse into it.
You lapse into it.
Oh, you know, that's interesting because when I'm in the South in the United States for more than a week, that's what happens to me.
And I'm not even from the South originally, but it's infectious.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Charles Emerson is a British historian, and he is a senior research fellow at Chatham House, which is the Royal Institute for International Affairs.
Now, let me tell you folks the book he's just written, and you'll understand, I think, why I am enthralled by the subject and by the book.
The book is titled 1913.
Yes, the book is about one year.
Now, why is 1913 important?
Because in 1914, by far the most important event of the 20th century took place, and that is the beginning of World War I, which, as I've established in previous history hours, was the source of everything horrible that happened.
Communism, fascism, Nazism, all came as a result of World War I. So this man, Charles Emerson, did a very interesting thing and asked the question, well, what was the world like the year before?
And I think that's terrific.
And so what he does is his book is he goes around the world, as it were, Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, Washington, D.C., St. Petersburg.
That is the one in Russia.
Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Peking, Constantinople.
What?
Jerusalem.
What was it like the year before the war?
So let me, it's sort of a travelogue and answers attempts to answer that question.
And I guess the biggest one that I would like to begin with is, in 1913, how many people had a premonition that the world was going to explode in a year?
Well, that is a very interesting question.
I mean, now that we look back on it from a distance of 100 years, we tend to assume that everyone in 1913 was conscious of what was going to happen the following year.
And of course, that's absolutely not the case.
There were a few people who thought that there could be war.
There were people who thought that if there was to be a European war, it would end up having global ramifications.
It would be a very bloody conflict.
But there were equally many people who thought that if there was a war, it would be brief.
And there were many other people who, of course, were preoccupied with the kind of things that people generally are preoccupied with, which is making money, building a family, and planning one's future without the prospect of war hanging over their futures.
So there were people who thought that something bad was in the air, that something bad might happen, something even cataclysmic.
But there were very, very few who predicted exactly what happened in its scale and certainly not in its consequences.
Right, because World War II was easily predictable and people did predict it.
Well, before the Second World War, of course, there was a period of rising tensions.
There were several false alarms.
There was a sense of inevitability to the Second World War breaking out in 1939.
Before the First World War, bear in mind, there'd been basically pretty much a century of European peace.
So people were fairly, well, there were wars in other parts of the world.
But the idea of Europe itself falling apart into a big European conflict was something which was pretty out of the memory of most Europeans.
So for them in particular, it seemed a possibility, but also a somewhat sort of fantastical idea.
Right.
I'm curious, what did the average European, if there's such a thing as an average anything, but what did most, let's put it this way, what did most Europeans think about other Europeans?
We live in a world today with the European Union and such a strong sense of being European.
Did a Brit think that he had a lot in common with a German?
Well, it would depend very much on their class.
I mean, I think one of the received views that we have of the world, of Europe, before the First World War, is this idea of rising nationalism.
And certainly you can see examples of rising nationalism, popular nationalism.
But if you were a middle-class Brit, for example, in 1913, you'd be far more likely to travel to Germany, to France, to Italy than would have been the case for your counterpart 50 years previously.
If you were a working-class Brit, then you were far more likely to be engaged in socialist internationalism.
If you're an aristocrat, of course, then you would be probably related to the Danes, to Russians, to members of the German aristocracy.
So while there is rising nationalism in Europe at this time, there's also this broader idea of Europe with a capital E. And I think that's something which we very easily forget.
When I studied international relations, when I read that you were a fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, I was a fellow at the Columbia University School of International Affairs.
So all of this has touched me.
So I remember learning about this and studying this and the sense of nationalism that pervaded Europe at the time.
I also remember learning when I studied under Brzezinski, because I was at the Russian Institute, and he had a very interesting theory that in Europe, everybody hates the country that boards it and likes the country that's one removed.
So the Poles hated the Germans but loved the French.
That was the example, and he was Polish.
So do you have any sense of that?
Were there intra-European hatreds before the war?
Well, I mean, of course, there were intra-European hatreds, and some of them dated back an awfully long time.
I mean, you know, the British and the French have, in theory, not gone on with one another for centuries.
But by 1913, of course, they were, in fact, allies.
The British and the Germans, actually, were many people thought were more likely to be friendly than the British and the French.
And of course, there were intra-European hatreds as well.
But there was also this very powerful idea of internationalism, of technology drawing communities together, drawing society together, of globalization, of the interweaving of the economic fortunes of European countries and indeed countries of the wider world.
And also this idea of socialist internationalism as well.
So yes, there were rising tensions.
Yes, there were, yes, there was nationalism.
And yes, there were these, of course, age-old intra-European hatreds.
But there was also this notion that there was something better than that, something more global than that, and perhaps the world was moving towards more of a global society.
I have to believe that very few Germans or very few French or very few Brits, if asked, are you first Brit or first European?
Are you first French or first European?
Are you first German or first European would have ever answered I'm European first?
I wouldn't be so sure.
I wouldn't be so sure.
Oh, well, no, no, I'm not trying to sell the idea.
That's fascinating to me because I'll tell you tell you why.
Because we're all taught that the great lesson, even if incorrect, that was learned as a result of World War I in Europe was to hate nationalism.
But you might be saying, well, they weren't as nationalistic as we thought to begin with.
Is that fair?
Well, what I'd say is that there was certainly a great deal of nationalism in Europe, but one could also, if one was looking for Europeanism, one could find that too.
And I think that there isn't really a single narrative.
All right, very good.
Let me just reintroduce your book.
1913, What the World Was Like Before That.
Charles Emerson, this is a history hour.
Hello, everybody.
Dennis Prager here.
This is a history hour.
My three dedicated hours, aside from this, are all dedicated to a certain time.
Third hour Tuesday, second hour Wednesday, second hour Friday.
But the history hour is rotating, and we don't know when it'll come up, but here we have it.
And I have the British historian Charles Emerson of the Royal Institute for International Affairs in the UK.
His book is 1913.
That's why I love it.
It's the year before World War I. In search of the world before the Great War, it's everything.
It's politics, it's travelogue.
It's what was life really like the year before the world exploded.
And what I got from you in our first segment was that, yes, there was nationalism, but there was a tremendous amount of internationalism.
And that's important because I like nationalism when it has good values.
I hate nationalism when it has bad values.
So it depends what values nationalism is accompanied with.
But I think that the Europeans, if I hear you correctly, may have overreacted in their antipathy toward nationalism as a result of World War I. Is that something you would share?
Well, I think there's always a distinction to be drawn between patriotism and nationalism.
But of course, the question is who draws the line between patriotism and nationalism.
I think what I'm keen to point out is that besides nationalism in Europe, you also have rather remarkable things such as, for example, by far the most performed composer in Paris in 1913 is Beethoven.
Can you imagine that 20, 30 years later?
It's unthinkable.
Really?
Why?
Because he was German?
Absolutely.
The most popular French composer, Sassan, was I think he was performed at about 250 or something like that concerts in Beethoven in 700.
Well, of course, but Beethoven's a greater composer.
I agree, absolutely.
Beethoven's a greater composer.
But I guess my point is that it's interesting to note that the idea that everything was fossilizing into into nationalism and into individual nations is, I think, an incorrect one.
It's incorrect culturally, but of course it's also incorrect economically.
I wouldn't say, having said that, I wouldn't say that the world or that Europe somehow overreacted against nationalism after the First World War or after the Second World War.
I think there always has to be a combination between pride in where one's from, but also an open-mindedness to engage with those who come from somewhere else.
And I think that's, you know, that's a story for me.
All right, and that's that's an I don't want to take us away from your book.
That's another discussion.
What did you learn to your surprise, if anything, in the research for the book?
Well, I mean, I started off writing this book very, very keen to describe the world before the First World War without the war being viewed as something that was inevitable, something that was absolutely bound to happen.
I'm giving very much the stories of those alive in 1913 full weight, giving them their voice back, if you like.
And I found you know, I find lots of gems and anecdotes through my through my searches.
But what I found very, very interesting was, particularly in China, was this idea that in 1913 there was really a potential turning point in China, one which has been rather forgotten in the rest of the world, but one which is very important to the history of China.
And that is the Chinese Revolution and the possibility in 1913 that maybe China is moving towards a fragile democratic republic.
I was in Shanghai a couple of weeks ago, and I went to the memorial to a gentleman called Song Jia Ren, who is the leader of the party that had just won the elections in China in 1912, 1913, and who was sadly assassinated in March of that year.
And it is strange to think that there was a Chinese, 30-year-old Chinese gentleman in 1913 who potentially was the first democratic prime minister of China.
And imagine how different the world might have been if he had survived and China had grown up into this promise of being a democratic.
Well, you know, that's really worthy of another book in case you're looking for a suggestion.
And I'll tell you what we're talking about.
No, no, no, no.
I don't mean that particular assassination.
I mean the terrible ability of one person to change history for the worse.
And I'm thinking of the assassins in Serbia that created World War I. I'm thinking of Lee Harvey Oswald.
I'm thinking, and John Kennedy, I'm thinking of this assassin you just mentioned in China.
It's very disconcerting how much horror one person can create.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think it is possible for one person, one evil person, to change the direction of history somewhat.
And for one event which one might think of as being a relatively minor event, I mean, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, you know, he's not even a head of state.
And yet, through a combination of fears, ambitions of other players, misunderstandings, misperceptions, this single event over a period of weeks after the assassination itself, of course, explodes into a European war, which is really a global war.
So I think it's certainly true never to underestimate the power of individual events and indeed individual people in individual events to change what otherwise seems to be the natural course of history.
So let's go exactly into your book, 1913.
And you have it, what you do, and you went to all these cities.
This is quite a task you undertook.
London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Washington, New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Winnipeg, Buenos Aires, Algiers, Bombay, Tehran, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Peking, Tokyo, London.
And what it was like.
If one can generalize, at least let's talk in the Western world.
Were people optimistic in the very beginning of the 20th century?
I think people were tremendously optimistic in most parts of certainly the Western world at the beginning of the 20th century.
They believed in science.
They believed in something called progress.
They believed that their tomorrows would be better than their yesterdays.
I think that was really a belief across the West.
Well, of course, in some places it was felt more strongly than others.
I think you could say it's pretty much the credo of the United States at that time.
But also in Canada, Winnipeg is a city which I don't think many people think of as being a city of the future today.
But in 1913, it was a very fast-growing Canadian city.
And there was a gentleman who wrote an article in a Winnipeg paper that year with the line, thank God for now.
And I think that was a feeling in many parts of the world.
Thank God for now in Winnipeg.
Yeah, were you in Winnipeg?
I've been to Winnipeg a few times.
Were you there in the winter?
I was there in the winter, yeah.
You're a very hearty soul.
We'll be back in a moment.
The book, 1913, In Search of the World Before the Great War.
Charles Emerson, the British historian, is my guest.
We will return.
The book is up at dennisprager.com.
Hello, my friends.
Dennis Prager here, and this is a history hour.
Where I devote the hour to interviewing the author of a major new work of history.
In this case, it is 1913, In Search of the World Before the Great War.
Charles Emerson, British historian, is the writer.
And it's just, I think, self-recommending because you are curious, as I am, what was the world like right before hell broke loose.
And he goes from city to city around the world to say what it was like.
I can't do every city with you.
Obviously, I can't do every city with you.
But I am curious, particularly about a few.
Berlin.
What was it like in Berlin in 1913?
Well, Berlin was a city, a bit like its emperor, with an inferiority complex in 1913.
It wasn't as old, as grand as Paris or as Vienna.
It wasn't quite as central to world affairs as London.
There was a very famous German businessman called Walter Rattenau who said that, yes, Berlin was described as being a parvenue amongst world cities, but he said in Germany you ought to understand that parvenu means self-made man.
So this was a city and a country with a bit of a chip on its shoulder, if you will.
But it was the center of a tremendously important and thriving economy.
Remember that in 1913, Germany had only existed as a single state for a matter of decades.
And yet in that very short space of time, it had been.
Too bad.
That's all I could say.
Too bad.
I wish they had remained disunited.
Well, there's certainly an argument before that.
There's certainly an argument for that.
And of course, to some degree, Germany wasn't yet completely united because they were, of course, Germans outside of the German Empire.
So it was a fairly uncertain construct in some respects, but it had become economically very, very powerful.
And of course, led by Kaiser Wilhelm, who by turns wants to play the peacemaker and yet was also very fond of big ships.
I find that phrase that you used so interesting that before World War I, Germans had a chip on their shoulder.
Because we all know after the Treaty of Versailles and the defeat in World War I, they certainly had a chip on their shoulder.
They actually had more of a tree on their shoulder.
But it's very interesting that there was a sense of anger or a sense of victimhood even prior to World War I, you're saying.
Well, a sense of victimhood coupled with a sense of fear.
I mean, there was on the one hand, this notion that Germany has done extraordinary things over the last four decades.
It has become a great economic power.
But we're hemmed in on all sides.
We've got the French breathing down an ex on one side.
We've got the Russians on the other side.
And remember, in 1913, people thought that Russia was really going places economically, political instability aside, tremendous growth in Russia.
So the Germans feel that maybe when is their moment going to come?
And there are certainly some Germans who think, many Germans perhaps, who think in terms of the need to break out from this position in the center of Europe.
But that remains really a sort of geopolitical parlor game.
Do people really think that's going to translate into war?
Or is it just something?
Is it just something that is it just an idea that people play?
So of all your Western cities in 1913 covered in your book, would you say they were the least happy and least optimistic people?
No, I wouldn't say that they were necessarily the least optimistic.
I'd actually say probably the least optimistic were those in those in Paris, because in Paris in 1913, there's still this idea that France is, of course, the center of the cultural world.
But if you look at the population statistics, for example, which the French were very, very want to do in 1913, their population had basically flatlined over the previous generation or two, whereas Germany's had bounded ahead, Britain's had bounded ahead, even Italy's had bounded ahead.
So in France, I think, in Paris in particular, I think there was a sense even more of living on past glories.
Wow.
Wow.
All right.
Well, those are some of the revelations in the book.
1913 is the name of the book, because that's the year covered.
In Search of the World Before the Great War.
The author is Charles Emerson.
That's double M. And the book is up at DennisPrager.com.
This is a history hour, and we continue.
This is a history hour.
An hour periodically dedicated to my favorite subject in the world, history.
Because that's how you know what's happening and why it happened.
My guest is, and we cover new books of history.
1913 is the book.
Charles Emerson, double M is the author.
He's a Brit.
Actually, he's an Australian Brit.
Yes, that would be the...
Is there such a thing as an Australian Brit?
Well, I think there is.
All right.
Well, there you go.
You at least represent one.
He is a senior research fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs.
The book again, 1913.
What the world was like the year before hell broke loose.
So what was my city, Los Angeles, like?
Well, I must say, Los Angeles in California was a true city for boosters in 1913.
We were talking before about cities which very much believed in the future.
Well, American cities were particularly strong in that regard.
But I'd say Los Angeles, probably above all, was a city where people believed that the sun would always shine, the city would always expand, and it would grow forever richer.
And it was a city in 1913 where there was lots of land speculation, as there was in many American cities, some of which had begun to turn sour.
But in 1913, Los Angeles hadn't yet turned into the dream factory that it was to become in the 30s and 40s, and of course up until the present day.
So it hadn't yet quite become the capital of the motion pictures industry.
That was still back east, really.
But they had started to make movies in California and in Los Angeles.
Well, I'm just trying to picture it at that time.
Was New York the most dynamic city at the time?
Well, New York was certainly the biggest city in North America.
And yes, I'd say it was probably the most dynamic city of North America.
Certainly when people think about or thought about modernity, America in 1913, they would tend to think about the skyscrapers of New York City above all else as being symbols of American modernity.
Of course, the Woolworth Building opened in 1913.
When you think of people, after all the writing and studying of this that you did, when you think of people then and people now, or at least let me put it this way, when I think of it, one of the big differences, and I don't think I'm alone, I think most people would say that in 1913 versus 100 years later, people in the West, at least, were considerably more religious.
Is that fair to say?
I think that probably is fair to say.
Certainly, religious observance tended to be higher across the Western world.
Yes, I think that is correct.
And you can see it in the number of churches as well.
I mean, if you and synagogues, if you look at Winnipeg, for example, so a relatively small city in 1913, there are literally dozens of churches, several synagogues in the city.
Similarly, if you look at New York or Detroit or other cities, certainly religion played a role as being a center of public life, absolutely.
I know this is a bit off the charted course here.
What would you say were the biggest reasons just off the top of your head for the decline of religion in the West after World War I?
Wow, that's a pretty big question.
I tend to ask those, and I often regret it later, but go ahead.
Well, I think part of it relates to the First War and then, of course, the Second War.
I think that people saw the horrors that humanity was capable of.
They found it difficult to believe in progress as a result.
They found it difficult to believe in God as a result.
I think that's certainly part of it.
I think what you also have to bear in mind is that, of course, you've got a tremendous increase in urbanization throughout the first decades of the 20th century.
And I think, whereas in a small town, a religious institution can really be the absolute, the glue that holds the community together, that's much, much more difficult in big cities.
When we think of Britain, we Americans, for example, and I think we everybody, I don't think just Americans, the narrative is the greatest or a great, I don't know, the greatest is silly, a great generation of young Brits marched triumphantly off to war, only to be mowed down like insects, as it were.
And I hate to use that analogy, because everyone is a precious human, but that's the analogy people might use.
And that devastated a generation of Brits.
Is that a fair narrative?
I think it's absolutely a fair narrative.
I think when people think about the consequences of the First World War, they're obviously the political consequences, the collapse of empires, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and these are tremendously important.
But there's also a more deep-seated psychological process of destruction which occurs during the First World War.
And that's through, I think, all of European societies, and indeed to some degree, American society, too.
So, yes, I think it's true, but it's not just Britain.
And the victims of the First World War were not only those who died in the trenches, but the societies and the beliefs, the belief structure, the self-belief, if you like, which many in the Western world did have before the First World War.
And never been recaptured in many of these countries like yours.
Well, I think the Second World War certainly rekindled the idea that Britain was great things.
And I certainly think Britain is still absolutely capable of great things.
But certainly things would never be quite the same.
One could never turn back the clock to that moment of supreme self-confidence in which Europe lived in 1913.
Yep, that's correct.
And that's exactly the name of the book, 1913.
What was the world like before that terrible, terrible war?
The author is Charles Emerson.
Our final segment of this edition of A History Hour is coming up.
I'm Dennis Prager.
This is the final segment of this edition of A History Hour.
The hour I devote periodically to a major new work of history.
In this case, the book is 1913.
That's exactly what it's about.
Subtitle is In Search of the World Before the Great War.
A fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, is the author Charles Emerson.
That's double M. The book is up at dennisprager.com.
He surveys the world before the year before the horror of World War I began.
So let me ask you another giant question.
Is there such a thing, or should the word, in effect, be abandoned of historical inevitability?
In other words, obviously World War I, I don't think, was inevitable.
Fair enough.
But for example, had there not been a World War I, in your opinion, would Russia have developed in a better way?
Absolutely.
I mean, I think that historical inevitability is there's never really inevitability until something actually happens, in my view.
But if one thinks about what the world might have been like if the First World War had not happened, I think if you look at how Russia was in 1913, potentially moving away from social revolution, not towards it, I think that had there not been the war, the displications of the war, there would not have been the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
They would not have been the rise of communism.
There might have been lots of other kinds of revolutions in Russia.
There would have been lots of other kinds of instability.
But I don't think we would have seen a successful Bolshevik revolution.
We wouldn't have seen the Soviet Union.
Right, agreed.
But was Russia moving in a positive direction?
Well, many people in 1913 thought that Russia was.
Of course, a few years previously there had been the first Russian Revolution in 1905.
Russia had been defeated by this Asian upstart power, Japan, in 1904, 1905, which came as a shock to many in the Western world, the notion that a major Western power could be defeated by an Asian power.
But by 1913, Russia seemed to be really overcoming this.
The country was in the midst of an explosion of industrialization.
Crop yields were high.
Prices were quite high.
The peasantry seemed to be.
All right, let me ask you a final question.
Yes.
With all these countries you visited and wrote about for 1913, if you were transported back to 1913, where would you have liked to live just for the joy of life?
just for the joy of life, I think I might have still wanted to live in, in Paris.
But for almost anything else, I think I probably would have wanted to live in the United States.
How interesting.
Charles Emerson, thank you so much.
You have kept up the good reputation of British historians on the Dennis Prager Show.
Thank you very much indeed, Dennis.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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