adam,
your third blog post, although entertaining, had nothing to do with the great war. great golfers yes, great war no. your presumption that bobby jones' success was delayed by the war is in fact just wrong. jones did not qualify for his first US Open until the age of 18 in 1920, two years after the war's end. In fact, Jones was touring the US playing golf throughout the great war in order to raise money, and regularly playing in front of large crowds. Thus, couldn't one argue that the great war in fact accelerated bobby jones' growth as a golfer, as it afforded him opportunity to play in front of people and in higher stress situations? At the time the PGA of America, as a fledgling organization, could not afford these opportunities. The Great War in fact allowed a boy of high school age the ability to travel the country bringing golf to the masses, and enhancing his god given ability.
In relation to Walter Hagen, I do not see the connection between America's wartime prosperity and the showboat that was Hagen. True, he was a symbol of excess, but I think you are using this blog improperly. The manner in which you write about Hagen amounts to grandstanding, and therefore has no place in this blog. This blog takes an educated look at the great war, and the events surrounding it. You may think that by invoking the name of Jay Gatsby you are somehow taking an educated approach to relating the tales of excess surrounding Walter Hagen to America's post war accension. You are, however, sorely mistaken. While we are impressed by his gaudy displays at Britain's finer clubs, make no mistake; these stories have no place in this Great War blog.
This is your first and only warning sir. You are on notice.
-Daniel Solomon, Lord High Executioner
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The Great War, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen
The Great War's impact on the twentieth century stretched beyond political and military realms. We see this, for example, in the way the war changed the game of Golf in Europe and America. One sees this change through the careers of two legends, Robert Tyre Jones and Walter Charles Hagen. When the Great War broke out in the fall of 1914, Bobby Jones was only 12 years old, but he would make his debut in a major only two years later in the 1916 U.S. Amateur at Merion, that famous landamark in American golf where Jones would complete his "Grand Slam" in 1930 and Hogan would win the U.S. Open Championship in 1950. In spite of Jones' superior ability, he would not win a major for another 7 years, when finally in 1923 he won the Open at Inwood on Long Island. There are numerous explanations for the drought, not least of which being Jones' internal battles down the stretch. A perhaps less intriguing explanation is that he had fewer chances to win a major because, at various points during the war, majors were cancelled. Most golf courses in Europe lay fallow during the war, as did some in the United States. The reason is that the war required an enormous output of human labor and material production. There was none left for operating courses. Moreover, the war temporarily exhausted societies' inclination toward leisure and recreation.
But Bobby Jones played on in the optimistic spirit that Pop Keeler, his confidante and personal journalist, helped instill in him and which would propel him to greatness. With a lighter tournament schedule, Jones, along with others including his boyhood friend at East Lake Alexa Sterling, volunteered to play in Red Cross exhibition matches in the U.S. and Europe to raise money for humanitarian relief and provide recreational entertainment. These tournaments were a huge success financially as well as measured by the turnout they generated. These Red Cross matches led to a realization that not all golfing elites were clositered well-to-dos preoccupied with self-aggrandizement, but that some devoted themselves to good causes and recreation for its own sake. There is a relationship between Bobby Jones, the Red Cross Matches, and the recognition of Golf as an egalitarian sport. Jones himself was fortunate to have enjoyed the advantages of a country club lifestyle in his yout and he possessed superior innate intelligence and physical talent. But throughout his life Jones lived by the precepts of modesty, self-restraint and purpose. At the peak of his career in 1930, after he had won the Grand Slam, Jones retreated from the national and international stage to practice law and raise his family. The roles in which Bobby Jones felt most comfortable were those of the father, the devoted husband and the lawyer.
If some golfers answered the call for sacrfiice during the war, there were others who in its aftermath lived to great excess. One such golfer was Walter Charles Hagen, referred to affectionately by his fans as "The Haig." Hagen was a drinker, a showman and a womanizer, and he went to no great lengths to conceal that he was all those things. Hagen was Golf's embodiment of the Jazz Age, the golfer we would most expect to have regular attended Jay Gatsby's parties in West Egg. Hagen's excess, like that of F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, hints at how the war changed economies and societies. In Europe the Great War caused the breaking of armies, the collpase of empires, and the failure of economies. But America's comparatively limited physical involvement in the conflict, the economic gain it reaped from supplying the Allies, and its own domestic entrepreneurship made the United States, by war's end, the world's sole creditor. But America largely chose to live absorbed in its own prosperity, of which Hagen was an unmistakable symbol. By the mid 1920s Hagen was earning, from tournaments and arranged exhibitions, annual sums of six figures, which were unheard of to the likes of Harry Vardon.
Hagen was a phenomenal talent and a showman, but he also commanded the admiration and affection of golfing patrons in America and Europe. This was in part because Hagen was always a source for a quick laugh. When one fan noticed Hagen walking to the tee in the morning with a cocktail, he is said to have remarked, "you don't expect me to walk out there alone, do you?" Fans also came to appreciate Hagen's efforts to do away with the elitist and exclusive traditions of the game, such as the age-old prohibition against admitting professional golfers into clubhouses. Prior to the mid 1920s, tournament officials at Europe's elite clubs took pleasure in denying Hagen access to their clubhouses and scoffed at his showmanship. So Hagen drove up to clubhouses in gaudy limousines, had his entourages serve him chilled drinks on the eighteenth green after a round, and regularly held court in local pubs. Hagen seemed to be saying that professional golfers were entertainers for the people who took interest in them. Hagen, like Jones, did much to elevate the status and respect of professional golfers in the public's eye. This was evident, for example, at the 1920 U.S. Open at Inverness Club in Toledo, where Ted Ray, Harry Vardon's sidekick, became the first professional admitted to a clubhouse. Shortly thereafter, admission of touring professionals to clubhouses became common practice in both Europe and America.
But Bobby Jones played on in the optimistic spirit that Pop Keeler, his confidante and personal journalist, helped instill in him and which would propel him to greatness. With a lighter tournament schedule, Jones, along with others including his boyhood friend at East Lake Alexa Sterling, volunteered to play in Red Cross exhibition matches in the U.S. and Europe to raise money for humanitarian relief and provide recreational entertainment. These tournaments were a huge success financially as well as measured by the turnout they generated. These Red Cross matches led to a realization that not all golfing elites were clositered well-to-dos preoccupied with self-aggrandizement, but that some devoted themselves to good causes and recreation for its own sake. There is a relationship between Bobby Jones, the Red Cross Matches, and the recognition of Golf as an egalitarian sport. Jones himself was fortunate to have enjoyed the advantages of a country club lifestyle in his yout and he possessed superior innate intelligence and physical talent. But throughout his life Jones lived by the precepts of modesty, self-restraint and purpose. At the peak of his career in 1930, after he had won the Grand Slam, Jones retreated from the national and international stage to practice law and raise his family. The roles in which Bobby Jones felt most comfortable were those of the father, the devoted husband and the lawyer.
If some golfers answered the call for sacrfiice during the war, there were others who in its aftermath lived to great excess. One such golfer was Walter Charles Hagen, referred to affectionately by his fans as "The Haig." Hagen was a drinker, a showman and a womanizer, and he went to no great lengths to conceal that he was all those things. Hagen was Golf's embodiment of the Jazz Age, the golfer we would most expect to have regular attended Jay Gatsby's parties in West Egg. Hagen's excess, like that of F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, hints at how the war changed economies and societies. In Europe the Great War caused the breaking of armies, the collpase of empires, and the failure of economies. But America's comparatively limited physical involvement in the conflict, the economic gain it reaped from supplying the Allies, and its own domestic entrepreneurship made the United States, by war's end, the world's sole creditor. But America largely chose to live absorbed in its own prosperity, of which Hagen was an unmistakable symbol. By the mid 1920s Hagen was earning, from tournaments and arranged exhibitions, annual sums of six figures, which were unheard of to the likes of Harry Vardon.
Hagen was a phenomenal talent and a showman, but he also commanded the admiration and affection of golfing patrons in America and Europe. This was in part because Hagen was always a source for a quick laugh. When one fan noticed Hagen walking to the tee in the morning with a cocktail, he is said to have remarked, "you don't expect me to walk out there alone, do you?" Fans also came to appreciate Hagen's efforts to do away with the elitist and exclusive traditions of the game, such as the age-old prohibition against admitting professional golfers into clubhouses. Prior to the mid 1920s, tournament officials at Europe's elite clubs took pleasure in denying Hagen access to their clubhouses and scoffed at his showmanship. So Hagen drove up to clubhouses in gaudy limousines, had his entourages serve him chilled drinks on the eighteenth green after a round, and regularly held court in local pubs. Hagen seemed to be saying that professional golfers were entertainers for the people who took interest in them. Hagen, like Jones, did much to elevate the status and respect of professional golfers in the public's eye. This was evident, for example, at the 1920 U.S. Open at Inverness Club in Toledo, where Ted Ray, Harry Vardon's sidekick, became the first professional admitted to a clubhouse. Shortly thereafter, admission of touring professionals to clubhouses became common practice in both Europe and America.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Von Kluck's Turn
Von Kluck commanded the German 1rst Army, which in the German line of attack through Belgium in August-September 1914 was the outermost army on the right flank. If you were to imagine that the Germans were imagining themselves to be playing a game of "crack the whip," Von Kluck plays the role of the whip. The skaters to his immediate left commanding the Second and Third Armies were Generals Von Bulow and Von Hausen respectively. Von Kluck, Von Bulow and Von Hausen constitute one of the great trios of generalship in military history. As another author will discuss in greater detail below, this trio was to, upon having passed through Belgium, sweep south, southwest directly towards Paris. The last man on the right was to "brush the English channel with his sleeve." The idea was to use the coast as a seal on the right flank so as to prevent the Right Wing from being outflanked. However, in an episode of trickery, General Lanrezac, commanding the French Fifth Army, drew Von Kluck's army in the critical days of the Plan Southeast towards the Aisne. Von Kluck mistakenly believed that he could outflank Lanrezac and, together with the 2nd and 3rd armies, mount an atatck on Paris in a south-easterly direction. The problem, however, was that the Germans, further and further from their supply lines and more exhausted with each day of the march, never caught Lanrezac who had dropped in toward Paris, where Major Gallieni and General Joffre had been orchestrating defensive preparations. The result was that the French Armies and the German Right Wing now stood more directly opposed to one another and prepared for a decisive action than the Schlieffen Plan had envisioned. This decisive battle would be The Battle of the Marne, which, as all the world knows, ended in a German retreat to its eventual fortified positions on the heights of the Aisne.
November 1916
To readers of the blog,
November 1916 portended, symbolically at least, a loss of the fighting spirit in the Allied armies. Lord Kitchener, one of the few who foresaw that the war would go on at the outset and who had done so much to raise Britain's troop levels during the war, perished off the Baltic Sea at the hands of German U-boat warfare. Also, in November 1916 the inter-Allied commanders met as Chantilly as they had the previous December to plan yet another offensive on the Western Front. They hadn't evidently learnt the lessons that the Battle of the Somme should have taught them; namely, that German defensive strategy, chiefly in the form of "defense in depth," which Von Lossberg had introduced in the aftermath of the early campaigns of the Somme, combined with technological inability to coordinate mass artileery barrage and infantry charges would render any offensive along the front futile and exacting in the tool it took on human life. The offensives to which November 1916 led, those of the British at Arras and Vimy Ridge, the French along the heights of the Aisne at the Chemin Des Dames, were failures in the end. The German artillery and reserves the offensives could not overcome; the geography and weather they could not bear. The failure of the French offesnive around the Chemin Des Dames, once the playground of Louis XV's daughter, led in no small part to the mutinies in the French army during 1917.
November 1916 portended, symbolically at least, a loss of the fighting spirit in the Allied armies. Lord Kitchener, one of the few who foresaw that the war would go on at the outset and who had done so much to raise Britain's troop levels during the war, perished off the Baltic Sea at the hands of German U-boat warfare. Also, in November 1916 the inter-Allied commanders met as Chantilly as they had the previous December to plan yet another offensive on the Western Front. They hadn't evidently learnt the lessons that the Battle of the Somme should have taught them; namely, that German defensive strategy, chiefly in the form of "defense in depth," which Von Lossberg had introduced in the aftermath of the early campaigns of the Somme, combined with technological inability to coordinate mass artileery barrage and infantry charges would render any offensive along the front futile and exacting in the tool it took on human life. The offensives to which November 1916 led, those of the British at Arras and Vimy Ridge, the French along the heights of the Aisne at the Chemin Des Dames, were failures in the end. The German artillery and reserves the offensives could not overcome; the geography and weather they could not bear. The failure of the French offesnive around the Chemin Des Dames, once the playground of Louis XV's daughter, led in no small part to the mutinies in the French army during 1917.
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