America and the Great War: A Library of Congress Illustrated History
384
America and the Great War: A Library of Congress Illustrated History
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Overview
"A uniquely colorful chronicle of this dramatic and convulsive chapter in American--and world--history. It's an epic tale, and here it is wondrously well told." --David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of FREEDOM FROM FEAR
From August 1914 through March 1917, Americans were increasingly horrified at the unprecedented destruction of the First World War. While sending massive assistance to the conflict's victims, most Americans opposed direct involvement. Their country was immersed in its own internal struggles, including attempts to curb the power of business monopolies, reform labor practices, secure proper treatment for millions of recent immigrants, and expand American democracy.
Yet from the first, the war deeply affected American emotions and the nation's commercial, financial, and political interests. The menace from German U-boats and failure of U.S. attempts at mediation finally led to a declaration of war, signed by President Wilson on April 6, 1917.
America and the Great War commemorates the centennial of that turning point in American history. Chronicling the United States in neutrality and in conflict, it presents events and arguments, political and military battles, bitter tragedies and epic achievements that marked U.S. involvement in the first modern war. Drawing on the matchless resources of the Library of Congress, the book includes many eyewitness accounts and more than 250 color and black-and-white images, many never before published.
With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David M. Kennedy, America and the Great War brings to life the tempestuous era from which the United States emerged as a major world power.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620409831 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/30/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 201 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
David M. Kennedy is the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control and a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College. Kennedy has received two Webber Seavey awards from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, two Innovations in American Government awards from the Kennedy School of Government, and a Herman Goldstein Problem-Oriented Policing Award. His work has been used as a model or source for safety and drug intervention initiatives by the Clinton and Bush administrations, and by the Bureau of Justice. Kennedy lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Read an Excerpt
America and the Great War
A Library of Congress Illustrated History
By Margaret E. Wagner
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2017 Library of CongressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62040-983-1
INTRODUCTION
A century ago, on the evening of April 2, 1917, a solemn and subdued President Woodrow Wilson stood before a hushed joint session of Congress and asked that the United States declare war against the German Empire. "It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war," he said. But he believed that Germany's recent declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare grossly violated international law and intolerably insulted national honor. America must now "abandon the peace which she has treasured," he concluded. "God helping her," he declared, "she can do no other." Over the protests of fifty-six dissenting voices, four days later — for only the fourth time in the history of the Republic — Congress issued a declaration of war.
Fear has ever been war's dread comrade, but what was then called the Great War had already unleashed unimaginably monstrous havoc across Europe and beyond. Since the fighting had erupted in the summer of 1914, the great slaughter-engines of modern industrial warfare had felled millions and maimed millions more. The machine gun in particular — "concentrated essence of infantry" — had conferred spectacularly lethal advantages on defensive positions, congealing the fighting fronts into static killing grounds that consumed men like chaff in a bonfire. Millions more would fall before an exhausted Germany and its no-less-enfeebled Austro-Hungarian ally surrendered in November 1918.
Small wonder, then, that Wilson had urged the European combatants to embrace a "peace without victory" and struggled for more than two years to maintain American neutrality. But it was in vain. Forsaking the isolationist principles that had guided American statecraft for more than a century, the United States now plunged headlong into the Great War.
Few aspects of that plunge were more surprising, and few have more persistently fascinated historians, than the frenzied alacrity with which countless Americans swiftly jettisoned the venerable wisdom of their Founders as they girded for combat in the Old World that their Revolution had repudiated and from which so many of their forebears had fled.
To be sure, not all hearkened readily to the bugler's call. After two decades of massive immigration, one in every three Americans in 1917 had either been born abroad or had at least one foreign-born parent. Some four million had roots in Ireland, where rage against British rule had exploded into open rebellion in 1916; another ten million of them traced their ancestry to either Germany or Austria-Hungary. The enthusiasm of the Irish for a war alongside Britain or of the others for taking up arms against the lands of their fathers could scarcely be taken for granted. Understandably unsure of their loyalties, Wilson's government proved regrettably ruthless in compelling their compliance with the war effort.
And yet legions of Americans worked themselves into near-manias of martial exuberance. They cheered lustily when the Committee on Public Information's "Four-Minute Men" preached the war's merits from stage and street-corner. They flocked to films like The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. They booed the music of German composers like Beethoven and Wagner, renamed sauerkraut "liberty cabbage" and hamburger "liberty steak." They shamed their neighbors into buying war bonds, and clucked approvingly when antiwar protestors like Eugene Victor Debs were imprisoned under the Espionage Act of 1917. An Illinois jury in 1918 took less than an hour to acquit eleven defendants accused of brutally lynching a supposed German sympathizer. The Washington Post hailed the whole sorry episode as "a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country. "
Amidst the hysteria, the nation proceeded methodically to mobilize for war. The freewheeling, laissez-faire economy that had chafed under the modest attempts of progressive reformers to tame it in the pre-war years now felt the much heavier hand of wartime government controls. The War Production Board sought to orchestrate myriad sectors of the sprawling industrial apparatus necessary for the prosecution of modern warfare. The fledgling Federal Reserve System, born in 1913, spread its wings over the entire nation's credit system. Women served in countless new capacities, facilitating the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, granting women at long last the right to vote.
The Selective Service System, called into being in the month following Wilson's War Address, eventually pressed about four million men into uniform (another 337,000, or one in 12 inductees, unlawfully evaded service). Half of them made it to France, and about half that number saw combat, mostly in the war's closing days in the battles of St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. Segregation kept all black soldiers in separate units. Two black divisions (under white officers) saw action in France, but most black troops were relegated to service tasks like stevedoring. Some 53,000 troops in the American Expeditionary Force perished on the battlefield, and a somewhat larger number died from accidents and disease, notably the worldwide influenza epidemic that scourged the globe in 1918.
His own countrymen rejected the peace treaty that Wilson valiantly championed until crippled by a stroke in 1919. But his vision of a world bound together by bonds of mutual interest and shared membership in an array of multilateral institutions helped mightily to inspire the revolution in international affairs to which the United States helped give birth at the end of the next world war, in 1945.
America and the Great War draws on the incomparably rich holdings of the Library of Congress to offer a uniquely colorful chronicle of this dramatic and convulsive chapter in American — and world — history. It's an epic tale, and here it is wondrously well told.
— David M. Kennedy Stanford University
(Continues...)
Excerpted from America and the Great War by Margaret E. Wagner. Copyright © 2017 Library of Congress. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction, ix,Prologue: 1912–July 1914: A New Age and a New President, 1,
Chapter 1: August 1914–December 1915: America, Exemplar of Peace, 33,
Chapter 2: January 1916–January 1917: "He Kept Us out of War", 87,
Chapter 3: February– December 1917: "The Yanks Are Coming", 149,
Chapter 4: 1918: For Victory and Lasting Peace, 213,
Epilogue, 279,
Acknowledgments, 295,
Appendix: World War I Collections at the Library of Congress, 297,
Notes, 303,
Bibliography, 348,
Image Information, 359,
Index, 361,