Excerpt from Volume II of “STILL CASTING SHADOWS: A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History - Volume 2, 1914-2006” by B. Clay Shannon © 2006
1914: Big Business and a Big War
“The splendor of the new age soon faded into the Frankenstein of 1914 and the worst war in history.”— from “Grasping for the Wind—the Search for Meaning in the 20th Century” by John W. Whitehead
“The world has got itself so jumbled up that the bays are all promontories, the mountains are all valleys, and earthquakes are necessary for our happiness. We have disasters for breakfast; mined ships for luncheon; burned cities for dinner; trenches in our dreams, and bombarded towns for small talk.”— Walter Hines Page
“I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.”— from “Howard’s End” by E.M. Forster
“It’s not the monuments that teaches us history. It’s the ruins.”—Carl Hammarén
“Giving up smoking is easy…I’ve done it hundreds of times.”— Mark Twain
• Ford’s Assembly Line
• Elizabeth Huddleston divorces Charles Davidson
• Elizabeth Huddleston and James Branstuder marry
• The “Great War” / World War I
• Deborah (Richardson) Shannon dies
• John Muir dies
Although specialization in factory work had been implemented prior to this, Henry Ford and his Motor Company started up the first mechanized assembly line this year. Using this new manufacturing paradigm and mechanism, a completed automobile could be put together in three hours.
Ford’s first assembly line began operation on January 14th. The era of independent craftsmen producing customized goods, each one unique and imbued with its maker’s personality, gave way to the automated, one-size-fits all, dehumanizing, demoralizing, cog-in-a-wheel, you-can-be-replaced-you-know world of machine-driven manufacturing.
* * *
Lizzie Huddleston gave credence to the credo “Third time’s a charm” with her marriage to James Branstuder on April 23rd in Carrollton, Missouri. Her first short-lived marriage to Harry Kollenborn had produced their son Albert. Lizzie’s second marriage, also of short duration, to Charles Davidson, had produced Charles Edgar, known as “Buck.” Lizzie was twenty-six when she commenced married life for the third time with Jim Branstuder.
As when she married Harry Kollenborn in 1906, both Lizzie and her new husband were residents of the town of DeWitt, Missouri, in Carroll County. But the Branstuders would soon move to Brunswick, a few miles east in neighboring Chariton County.
In order to marry Jim, Lizzie had to first divorce her middle husband, Charles E. Davidson. This she did in the nick of time: The day before she married Jim, she obtained her divorce from Charles, who did not even show up for the proceedings. The Circuit Court’s records say:
April Term 1914. Wednesday April 22nd 1914 Eighth day of Term
Elizabeth L. Davidson Plaintiff
vs.
Charles E. Davidson Defendant
Comes the plaintiff by her Attorney and although the defendant Charles E. Davidson has been legally notified of the commencement of this suit, of its object and nature by an order of publication, made issued and published in the Republican Record, a weekly newspaper for four weeks, the last insertion thereof being at least thirty days prior to the first day of this term of this court, comes not, but wholly makes default and this cause is submitted to the court upon plaintiffs petition and proofs, the Court finds that the plaintiff is the innocent and injured party and that she is entitled to divorce and relief prayed in her petition. It is therefore ordered, adjudged and decreed by the Court that the plaintiff be divorced from the defendant Charles E. Davidson and be forever freed from the obligations of said marriage, it is further ordered and adjudged by the Court that the plaintiff have and retain the care custody and control of Charles Edgar Davidson the minor child, born of said marriage.
The Branstuders’ union held—they remained married for forty-five years, up until Lizzie’s death in 1959. All three children the Branstuders had together were daughters: Ruie (born 1918), Juanita (born 1920), and Lula Mae (born 1922).
Lizzie’s aunt Anna Lee Huddleston apparently ended up marrying Lizzie’s father-in-law Squire Branstuder. Circumstantial evidence for this can be deduced from the August 27th, 1965 Chillicothe Constitution Tribune which reported, “Anna Lee Branstuder, Hale,…entered the hospital.” And also: “Mrs. Squire Branstuder, Hale, [has] been released from the hospital.” Both Chillicothe and Hale are in the vicinity of Carrollton, DeWitt, and Brunswick, the towns where the Kollenborns/Davidsons/Branstuders had lived.
* * *
Deborah (Richardson) Shannon, widow of Robert Shannon and mother of Will, died on July 21st in Canada, one week before the official beginning of “The Great War.” Deborah and Robert had become estranged sometime after their move to California in 1891. As Deborah lived with their daughter Marian in California (and is buried in Dinuba in that state), she must have been visiting her other children in Canada at the time that she died.
* * *
The global conflict which began in 1914 and didn’t end until 1918 was first called “The Great War,” but got a name change in the 1940s when another world conflict broke out. The hostilities raging at that time throughout the4 Still Casting Shadows world was christened World War II (and what was formerly called the “The Great War” took on the more grandiose title of “World War I”).
Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria had been warned to stay out of Bosnia, whose Serbian population was seeking independence. On June 28th, an assassination attempt was averted. A bomb was thrown into the Archduke’s car. Ferdinand himself threw it right back out again before it exploded. Later on the same day, however, a Serbian student named Gavio Princip was successful in his plot to assassinate the Archduke—along with his wife, the Duchess. The first bullet hit Ferdinand’s wife Sophie in the abdomen; the second struck Francis in the jugular. They both died of their wounds.
The First World War began on July 3rd when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, although the Serbia government apparently did not sponsor or condone the murder of the Archduke and Archduchess.
This declaration of war opened a Pandora’s box, as it then became apparent that many countries had concluded secret pacts with one another to come to each other’s defense in case of war. It was as though a row of dominoes had been toppled by way of chain reaction: One declaration of war led to another, until practically the entire world was involved, at least tangentially. And of course, even the “neutral” nations were not left unaffected. Banding together on one side were chiefly Britain, France, Russia, and China. The other side included Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy. Others would enter the melee later, such as the U.S. with the former.
In the view of many, the Victorian era ended with the advent of this terrible bloodbath. This global cataclysm, although not as costly in terms of lives lost, was even more a watershed event than the Second World War. It brought a greater break with the past, gravely altering people’s view of the world and its future.
At the time of the war, it would have been difficult to imagine a more devastating one. Ten million died in battle, and twenty million more died of hunger and disease related to the war. Historian Howard Zinn wrote: “No one since that day has been able to show that the war brought any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life.” In the Battle of the Marne alone, one million soldiers were brutally slaughtered: 500,000 Germans; 500,000 French and British. To an even more dramatic extent than in most battles, there were no winners—only losers.
To provide an idea of just how devastating and world-changing this war was, all one has to do is consult history books that expound on the era and put the conflict in context. Before the war, most people thought world conditions1914 5 were improving, and that the future looked bright. Prior to the war, people and nations felt secure enough, and trusted each other enough, that passports were not required when traveling from country to country. The war was a terrifyingly traumatic event for the world. Mankind, society, and civilization have not been the same since.
As just one example of just how far-reaching and fundamental this jolt to the world was (see the Introduction for more on this), note this translation of an excerpt from the German history book Kursbuch Geschichte (History textbook) by Dr. Wolfgang Jager, which is taken from the compilation “History Lessons,” by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward:
Artillery and machine guns, battle cruisers and submarines, as well as the first tanks and bombers led to an extermination of people and materials, which exceeded anything previously imagined. Poison gas, first employed in 1915, was one of the especially dreadful battle means employed. It signified the great downfall of the values of civilization in the consciousness of contemporaries. The First World War bore the traits of a total war from the beginning. The war-waging nations mobilized every member of their societies for the war at the front and on the “homefront,” which led to a shaky separation between the military and the civil sphere. In the course of the war almost the entire civilian population, male and female, was involved in the war, both in the armaments factories and in the “normal” work positions, where women replaced men who were drafted into the military. “The present war,” noted the French ambassador in St. Petersburg on August 20, 1914, “does not belong to those that can be ended by a political treaty […]; it is a war of life and death, in which every fighting nation puts its national existence at stake.” The First World War meant the breakdown of the system of states, but not simply because all great powers were part of it, as a hundred years before in the Napoleonic Wars. Rather all the states and peoples involved felt and experienced it as an existential struggle for survival. As varied as they were in the details, the war goals on both sides aimed at a destruction of the former international order…Therefore, the only war aim that mattered was the complete subjugation of the enemy nation…Actually this war patriotism developed a tremendous power of integration, which concealed the tensions within populations and consequently deepened the chasms between the nations. Not since the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries had the population been drawn in such measure into the occurrences of war as both fighters and sufferers—and that meant mobilization, nationalization, fanaticism, in completely new dimensions.
In addition to the millions of human lives, eight million horses were killed on the battlefields of the “Great War.”
* * *
The damming of Hetch Hetchy may have played a role. Even the beginning of the great conflict in old Europe may have had an adverse affect on the man’s health. Perhaps needing to get away and meditate in solitude, John Muir wandered the Mojave Desert. He contracted pneumonia. John was not a “young laddie” anymore. Muir died December 24th at the age of seventy-six.