In this captivating and clearly presented work, noted University of Florida historian Zieger (The CIO, 1935-1955) explores the relatively brief role of the U.S. in WWI. America's role was largely born of what Zieger portrays as President Woodrow Wilson's singularly idealistic, overtly Christian and arrogant world view that the U.S.--by virtue of its wealth and moral supremacy--alone could save Western civilization. Determined to use America's clout without involving American lives in a war that didn't threaten the country directly, Wilson very actively played the role of mediator among the warring parties for the first three years of the conflict. He finally asked Congress to declare war against Germany after German U-boats torpedoed neutral U.S. merchant ships. America's entrance into the war, therefore, set the stage for its future foreign relations policy, which until then had been primarily isolationist, and for the emergence of what Zieger calls a "national security state," with an active focus on developing the technology and securing and training the manpower necessary to maintain military readiness even during peacetime. This book also focuses on political battles fought on the home front on behalf of progressive causes in three crucial areas--race, labor and the "woman question." Growing unrest between workers and capitalists--and the growing disparity between wealth and poverty--led to an increase in labor union participation and more than 3,000 strikes, many of them violent. Leaders of the most prominent union, the AFL, pledged loyalty to the Wilson administration in return for the passage of legislation benefiting workers. Ziegler argues that America's stance in WWI was ultimately largely the result of one individual's vision, and that this involvement led to America's emergence as the world leader. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience
Narrated by Mike Chamberlain
Robert H. ZiegerUnabridged — 13 hours, 8 minutes
America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience
Narrated by Mike Chamberlain
Robert H. ZiegerUnabridged — 13 hours, 8 minutes
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Overview
Zieger's engaging narrative provides vivid descriptions of the famous battles and diplomatic maneuvering, while also chronicling America's rise to prominence within the postwar world. On the domestic front, Zieger details how the war forever altered American politics and society by creating the National Security State, generating powerful new instruments of social control, bringing about innovative labor and social welfare programs, and redefining civil liberties and race relations. America's Great War promises to become the definitive history of America and World War I.
Editorial Reviews
A traditional history of WWI, viewed typically as a major tragedy of the 20th century. Although the US didn't enter the war until 1917, Zieger (History/Univ. of Florida) reminds readers that American neutrality was never impartial. Businessmen and the educated elite tended to be Anglophiles, stirred up by floods of English propaganda accusing the Germans of outrageous acts, many fictional. The Germans helped by committing genuine outrages (burning the Louvain library, sinking the Lusitania, executing Edith Cavell), as well as by blunders reminiscent of the Keystone Cops (clumsy attempts at sabotage, the harebrained Zimmerman telegram). When the U-boat campaign finally goaded the US into war, initial response was less than spectacular. In contrast to the avalanche of American production that swamped the Nazis and Japanese, the Yanks fought in 1917—18 with artillery, transport, planes, and helmets supplied by their allies. American finance contributed more to victory than American troops. The war's depressing aftermath has been chronicled many times, but Zieger retells the story well. The Versailles Treaty was vindictive, he acknowledges, but no more so than other treaties forced on prostrate enemies. He also asserts that President Wilson's naïveté has been exaggerated. Wilson knew the Allies' vengeful demands made nonsense of his idealistic Fourteen Points but believed their acquiescence to a League of Nations justified all compromises. (Ironically, the US Senate failed to approve the League.) The war provided great benefits to American labor, women, and blacks, Zieger points out. Peace cancelled most benefits, but the good times planted seeds that bore fruitlater:blacks began their migration to northern cities; women got the vote; labor savored its first experience of a friendly government. Nothing new here, but the author knows his subject, and his lucid prose is a pleasure to read.
Three qualities have always characterized Robert Zieger's work: thorough familiarity with the pertinent literature; balanced and thoughtful analysis; and a graceful writing style. Each of these are evident in this volume.
Zieger's discussion of the war's effects on the labor, civil rights, and feminist movements is superb. For those interested in the importance of the Great War in American History, this is a fine book.
Zieger's deft historical synthesis of American society during WW I makes this volume informative for scholars and teachers, interesting for general readers, and especially useful for students. A superb synthesis, for all levels.
The writing is lively, specific, and clear, but what impresses me most about this volume is its fairness. Zieger demonstrates that the strongest arguments from apparently clashing interpretations can be brought together to make a balanced, persuasive synthesis.
Skillfully blending sources—new and old, primary and secondary, print and electronic—as well as innovative methodologies and insights from an impressive variety of historical sub-disciplines, Zieger transforms what seem, at first glance, familiar stories into fascinating and challenging reinterpretations.
A thought-provoking work on the American experience during The Great War. This is an important work that adds to our understanding of the consequences of the First World War for the American people.
Robert Zieger, the distinguished historian of labor, has produced in America's Great War a superb overview of the national experience in World War I. He adds to diplomatic, political, and military history a close examination of the war's impact on women, minorities, and workers. He provides a lucid and fair-minded examination of how America helped the Allies win the war and lose the peace, and incisively analyzes Woodrow Wilson, the conflicted, obsessive self-defeating president around whom the entire war turned. Taking advantage of the latest scholarship, while weaving it skillfully into his own powerful narrative, Zieger has made this the best introduction yet to America's role in the defining event of the 20th Century.
World War I was the seminal cataclysm of the twentieth century. Professor Zieger's lucid volume is a discerning and provocative exploration of its consequences for the American people.
This is a thoughtful, accessible and well-crafted analysis of the Great War's meaning and its impact on American society. Based on a scrupulous sifting of recent scholarship, Zieger's synthetic study brings to life both the geo-political significance of the war and its influence in reshaping the day-to-day lives of ordinary Americans.
This well-crafted book takes the measure of America's experience in World War I both at home and on the European battlefield, gauging the lofty hopes with which so many Americans entered the fray and plumbingthe tragic legacy of the war with equal care. The work of a historian who combines uncommon skill with a deeply humane vision, America's Great War provides readers the best single-volume introduction to its subject now in print.
This is an insightful examination of the American experience during World War I.
Prize-winning historian Robert H. Zieger has written another exemplary book—this one a judicious and insightful examination of the American experience during the Great War. In this eminently readable, thoughtful, and well-reseached work, he has produced a masterful synthesis that instructs, challenges, fascinates. A model of scholarly analysis, Zieger's study will engage the interest of specialists, students, and general readers alike.
Robert Zieger's fascinating reexamination of America's World War I experience is deeply informed, gracefully and accessibly written, exceptionally insightful, and extraordinarily well balanced. It provides a masterful and much needed synthesis incorporating the best of recent research and interpretive rethinking. And, as intended, it will leave readers not only with a better understanding of what happened and why but also with a heightened sense of its historical importance, tragic implications, and enduring interest. It deserves a wide readership and extensive usage.
Overall, he more than meets his goal of providing a comprehensive and thought-provoking account of America's Great War experience for students and general readers.
Anyone looking for a first-rate book on the United States and World War I will derive great pleasure and insight from Robert Zieger's America's Great War. This is a concise, balanced, thoughtful, and well-written account of domestic, military, and diplomatic aspects of a war that has greatly influenced American life and institutions in the ensuing 80 years.
Brimming with sharp judgments and keen insights, Zieger's is the best book yet on the American experience in World War I. Zieger skillfully places the war in historical perspective, showing how the events of 1917-18 shaped the century to come. But he also conveys a sense of how the unfolding drama of war, with all its uncertainties, appeared to Americans at the time.
This is a concise, balanced, well written account of domestic, military and diplomatic aspects of the war which has greatly influenced American life in the ensuing eight decades. Zieger's book should be of interest to university students as well as general readers.
Zieger's deft historical synthesis of American society during WW I makes this volume informative for scholars and teachers, interesting for general readers, and especially useful for students. A superb synthesis, for all levels.
Zieger's deft historical synthesis of American society during WW I makes this volume informative for scholars and teachers, interesting for general readers, and especially useful for students. A superb synthesis, for all levels.
This is an insightful examination of the American experience during World War I.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940176363432 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 10/13/2020 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
A World at War
1914-1915
The United States was the unacknowledged specter that hovered over the courts and chancelleries of Europe during the fateful summer of 1914. The French, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German, and British statesmen who led their countries into war following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28 in Sarajevo made many errors, but their most serious miscalculation lay in their neglect of the American factor. Their virtually unanimous belief that the conflict would be short and decisive soon proved grotesquely wrong. They were equally mistaken in their failure to take notice of the United States as they weighed their options. To be sure, American diplomats and military leaders had played no role in the establishment of the alliance system that had dominated European affairs since the 1890s, and it was equally true that the minuscule American army, 3,000 miles away, could not affect the balance of military power. But it quickly became apparent that modern war was as much an economic contest as it was a diplomatic or military affair. Thus, with the world's most productive and rapidly developing economy, the United States, hitherto on the periphery of European diplomatic life, soon moved to the center.
Early Days
At the start of hostilities, official American opinion was confused and uncertain with respect to the legal and economic implications of the war, but in the fall of 1914, the U.S. government made critical decisions that directed its course over the next three years.Americans, President Woodrow Wilson urged, were to be "neutral in thought as well as in action," a sentiment that the people endorsed overwhelmingly. But what did "neutrality" mean in the context of global conflict? Did it mean that the United States must cut off all trade, or at least all trade in munitions and in the raw materials used in making arms and munitions, with all belligerents? Did it mean that the American government must abide by belligerents' definitions of what constituted contraband, or war-related trade, and thus submit to their efforts to control trade with their enemies? Was the American government bound to accept whatever methods of trade control a belligerent might impose, or did it have the right, indeed the obligation, to judge independently what forms of economic restriction it would recognize and what forms it would reject? If Americans did pursue trade, whether in munitions or food and other nonmilitary supplies, was it appropriate for American bankers to extend the usual kinds of short-term credits and loans that were standard practice in large-scale international transactions? Was it appropriate for private American citizens to extend unsecured loans to belligerents?
These were serious practical matters that demanded quick decisions as events so rapidly unfolded in the latter half of 1914. Implicit in these questions and yet larger than any of them was this broader one: would the United States break with its traditions and attempt to exert positive influence in the war-transformed world arena? Hardly articulated during the first months of the war, this question emerged forcefully as the savagery that gripped Europe threatened to discredit and perhaps to destroy Western world hegemony.
In 1914, the American government was not prepared to deal comprehensively with these questions. Events happened so rapidly that judicious deliberation was difficult. The assassination of the Austrian heir-apparent triggered an escalating crisis that within five weeks put vast armies in motion. The war itself, at least on the Western Front, where American attention was riveted, changed its character with equal speed. Within a matter of weeks, it was transformed from a war of motion to a bloody stalemate. If America was not a factor in the decision for war, and if the war would be short and decisive, as virtually all experts on both sides of the Atlantic believed, rulings and decisions on the part of the American government on practical matters of legal status and economic circumstance would be academic, and broader questions of the national role would never arise. But once the rival armies had fought to a standstill, these matters moved inexorably to the forefront.
For a few weeks in August and September, it did appear that military decision, at least in the west, would be swift and decisive. Powerful German armies smashed into neutral Belgium and swept into France. A small British force sent to Belgium was pushed relentlessly back. French armies along the Alsace-Lorraine border were decimated, suffering unimaginable losses. By the end of August, only three weeks after hostilities had begun, the Germans were hammering at the approaches to Paris. Nineteen fourteen, it seemed, was a reprise of the events of 1870, when Germany had crushed France in a war whose active phase lasted a mere ten weeks.
But 1914 was not 1870 after all. Allied resistance stiffened. Attenuated German supply lines could not keep pace with the advancing troops. Russian advances in the east drew German divisions away from the Western Front. Allied counterattacks drove the Germans back. In September and early October, the exhausted armies dug in across northern France, establishing parallel lines of trenches, neither side able to force a breakthrough. By November, although it was not always clear to rival generals still dreaming of a decisive stroke, the war of movement had ended and a war of attrition had begun.
Americans were fascinated and appalled by these terrible events. Expressions of gratitude for the existence of the Atlantic Ocean and of self-congratulation for America's traditional stance of noninvolvement in European affairs were almost universal. One Chicago newspaper offered "a hearty vote of thanks to Columbus for having discovered America," and a leading magazine reassured its readers that "We are in no peril of being drawn into the European quarrel." Even though international law and custom did not bar neutral nations or their citizens from selling arms or loaning money to belligerents, support for a ban on trade in munitions was widespread. The Department of State went so far as to rule that "loans by American bankers to any foreign nation which is at war are inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality."
In a short decisive war, the American response would have been of little significance. But once the battle lines had stabilized, as they did before the end of September, American resources and American policies suddenly loomed as of great consequence. A "war of attrition" meant keeping relentless pressure on the enemy, pounding his positions with high-explosive shells, probing endlessly for weaknesses, and then hurling huge masses of men forward. The Western Front—the zigzagging line of trenches that soon stretched from the Swiss border to the English Channel—sucked in hundreds of thousands of combat troops; vast numbers of laborers and construction workers, many of them recruited from Britain's and France's Asian and African possessions; and great numbers of horses, some for heavy hauling, others as a ready cavalry reserve poised to exploit an infantry-led breakthrough.
British arsenals and munitions works, designed to supply the needs of its small professional army, were quickly overwhelmed. In addition, the task of feeding millions of men and hundreds of thousands of horses was gigantic. The typical 17,000-man British division—of which there were more than forty on the Western Front by mid-1916—required the contents of twenty railroad cars each day to supply food and fodder for its men and horses. Allied purchasing agents swarmed into Canada, Australia, and the United States to line up consignments of meat, flour, cotton, and other staples and to negotiate contracts for the manufacture of arms and munitions. Calais, Boulogne, and other Channel ports were soon clogged with vast quantities of food, fodder, and war materiel.
North America quickly became a critical war zone, at least in an economic sense. Not only did its farmers and ranchers lead the world in grain and livestock production, but Canada and the United States had the great advantage of being only 3,000 miles away. Moreover, ties of consanguinity, language, and culture connected both the Dominion of Canada and the United States to Great Britain. The loyalty and economic cooperation of Canada, still formally a part of the British Empire, was not in doubt. Early in October, the first contingent of troops arrived in Britain. Eventually, 600,000 Canadians (from a population of eight million) served in the armed forces. Sixty thousand died in France. From the start, Saskatchewan wheat, Quebec lumber, and Ontario steel could be integrated into Allied needs, and by 1917, Canadian firms were producing more than a quarter of the shells that British guns fired in France.
But what of America? Could the Allies count on having the enormous productive capabilities of the United States available to them, and if so, under what terms and with what consequences? The economic power of the United States was beyond question. It led the world in production of steel, coal, wheat, and petroleum products. In the nineteenth century, the United States had been largely a supplier of bulk agricultural commodities and raw materials for Europe, but since the 1890s, a maturing American economy had begun to challenge its rivals in production of and trade in finished goods. American manufacturers of industrial machinery and a wide range of consumer goods increasingly encroached on British markets. In 1913, the United States accounted for 11 percent of world trade, and for the first time, the value of manufactured goods surged ahead of the value of agricultural products in America's exports.
True, the United States was still overall a "debtor nation." In the nineteenth century, Americans had relied heavily on European, and especially British, capital for the construction of its industrial and transportation infrastructure, and Americans still owed vast sums to foreign creditors. But the gap was closing, and since the late 1890s, the United States had enjoyed a favorable balance of trade and was steadily paying down its international obligations. By 1914 such financial houses as J. P. Morgan and Company held billions of dollars in investments abroad. Given the country's enormous agricultural, mineral, and industrial resources and its industrious and productive population, most observers believed that it was only a matter of time until the United States far surpassed its European counterparts, especially now that the bloody stalemate in France was consuming their resources at an astonishing rate. To what extent, if any, would the Allies—for it was only they who could hope to gain access to American goods and funds—be able to connect this American economy to their war effort?
In view of America's economic importance, the problematic nature of initial U.S. responses to the conflict soon became apparent. In August, Department of State disapproval of American loans and credits to belligerents seemed commonsensical, but by October, such a self-denying declaration seemed perverse as well as a departure from previous international custom and practice. If the war were to last months or years, a ban on such financial arrangements would mean a catastrophic reduction in trade with America's chief prewar trading partners. Moreover, even before August, the U.S. economy was suffering its worst depression since the dreadful 1890s. Initially, the outbreak of fighting in Europe disrupted trade and financial markets, worsening an already bad situation. As orders for materials, foodstuffs, and weapons began to pour in, however, Americans increasingly came to couple their horror at the European catastrophe with appreciation of the opportunities for profit and longer-range economic benefits that the war now offered. Now, in October, when American bankers asked Wilson's administration for clarification of its attitude toward loans, they got a different answer: short-term loans and credits by American financial institutions to belligerents in connection with trade were acceptable. The administration made a careful distinction between these kinds of "normal" credit arrangements and public subscription loans, of which it continued to disapprove, but even so, declares historian Paul Koistinen, this shift in policy "fundamentally alter[ed] financial relations with the Allies."
In theory, of course, American firms and American financiers were also free to trade—and to finance that trade—with the Central Powers. Also in theory, Germany's powerful high seas fleet could challenge traditional British naval supremacy and could keep open the trading routes and thus tap into the American market. But in fact, trade and trade-related financial relations with "belligerents" meant in effect trade with the Allies alone. When war started, the Royal Navy acted quickly to bottle up the German fleet in the Baltic and North Seas, and within weeks, British ships had rounded up German merchantmen or driven them into port. The British acted with equal dispatch to deprive their enemies of neutral shipping as well, patrolling the North Sea and English Channel and laying minefields that forced merchant ships to come under British interdiction if they were en route not only to German ports but to those of the Netherlands and the neutral Scandinavian countries as well. Recognizing that even its powerful navy could not impose a traditional "close" blockade directly outside German ports, Britain relied on interdiction of merchant shipping on the high seas and lengthened the list of goods defined as contraband.
The British maritime actions raised important questions for the United States. Resting broadly on traditionally sanctioned wartime practices, these measures also asserted new rights for a belligerent naval power to monitor and interdict trade with its enemy. Britain's mining operations in effect enabled it to control all shipping bound for Germany and northern Europe. Moreover, as early as November, the British expanded the contraband list, soon including a wide range of "civilian" goods, including eventually food, using the dubious argument that the German economy was so controlled by the military that these goods now qualified as war matériel.
From the start, President Wilson and his advisers regarded these measures as problematic but negotiable. The massive mining of the North Sea approaches to Germany was, admittedly, an innovation, but it affected American shipping only marginally, since the English Channel route, by which U.S. goods normally went to Europe, remained open under British guidance. Enforcement of a remote blockade broke with established practice and evoked American objections. The Department of State attempted to gain British adherence to established international law with reference to search, seizure, and interdiction of shipping bound for Germany or for neutral countries within the German ambit. At the same time, Department of State Counselor Robert Lansing acknowledged that modern warfare called into question many of the assumptions on which international law was based, as codified in the 1856 Declaration of London. Eventually, after much haggling, the United States accepted the broad outlines of British policies while reserving the right to protest specific actions.
As was the case with the U.S. response to the economic challenges and opportunities that emerged in the early months of the war, its response to questions of naval and maritime issues was at once pro forma and fraught with long-range implications. At the time, given the supremacy of the Royal Navy, it seemed to American officials that the only maritime issues that would arise would be those involving Britain and its Allies. The Central Powers were thought to be relatively self-sufficient and moreover were not in a position to attempt to regulate or harass U.S. trade. Because Britain was by far America's largest prewar trading partner, and because the United States had a long and complex history of thrashing out maritime issues with the British, American officials saw nothing untoward about acceding to British regulations and leaving disputed matters to subsequent negotiations or the decisions of international tribunals. In a short war in which maritime issues were not expected to be central, American leaders asked themselves, why not accommodate the British? Why alienate America's most important trading partner in defense of abstract legal rights that were likely to have little practical effect?
However, on February 4, 1915, these issues took on a new dimension when the German government declared that the waters surrounding Great Britain constituted a war zone and announced its determination to retaliate against increasingly restrictive British measures by using the submarine, or U-boat (for unterseeboot). At the outset of the war, submarines had been a marginal weapon that was used primarily for harassment and intelligence gathering. These fragile vessels were not thought capable of sustained combat, but early in the conflict, German U-boats sank several heavily armored British battle cruisers, a feat that suggested that this new weapon might be an answer to the British blockade. Able to slip through British minefields and patrols to reach the open waters around Britain, submarines could attack merchant shipping, thus answering the British blockade of Germany with an attack on the Allies' lifeline.
Although it was not apparent at first, because German naval command instructed U-boat commanders to observe traditional practices of search and seizure, the entry of the submarine as a major weapon held profound implications for Americans with respect to both economic and legal issues. Strictly speaking, so long as Germany held to traditional rules of maritime interdiction, attacks on British merchant shipping could actually benefit American producers, since, of course, sinkings would increase demand for American goods. But it quickly became apparent that the submarine could not in fact observe traditional rules without jeopardizing its own safety. U-boats, it is true, did sometimes wait until the passengers and crew of a merchant vessel had boarded lifeboats before sinking it. But on the ocean surface, the submarine was extremely vulnerable to ramming and gunfire. Nor could German commanders easily distinguish which vessels bound for Southampton or Liverpool were in fact British, because captains routinely disguised the identity of their merchant ships by flying the flags of the United States or other neutral countries. Clearly, if submarines were to challenge British maritime supremacy, they would have to abandon traditional practices and fire their deadly torpedoes without warning. Although the Germans disclaimed an intention to attack neutral shipping per se, they warned American and other shippers that, in view of the British practice of flying false flags, no merchant ship in the war zone could consider itself free of risk. The British, declared German officials, had redefined traditional wartime maritime practices and had imposed an unprecedented blockade on Germany, claiming that new technology and new circumstances required the redefinition of neutral shipping rights. If neutral countries were not prepared to challenge these British innovations, they could not object when Germany did essentially the same thing.
Americans View the War
During this early phase of the war, Americans exhibited a wide range of attitudes and a broad sense of detachment from events in Europe. The facts of the war—the enormous destruction, the hideous casualty rates, the presumed consequences to the world of the victory or defeat of the Allied or Central Powers—were so monumental that few Americans could fail to acknowledge the war's importance. Still, the historic American stance of aloofness from European events and the simple fact that the war had no direct physical impact on America encouraged ambivalence and detachment. Even lurid British reports of German mistreatment of Belgian civilians and wanton destruction of libraries and churches elicited as much gratitude for American noninvolvement as they did outrage at the behavior of the Kaiser's troops.
The fact that millions of Americans had significant ties to one or another of the warring nations complicated public response to the war. More than one-third of the Euro-American population of the country was either foreignborn or had at least one parent who had been. Some retained citizenship in their natal land, and many cared deeply about the fate of their mother country. Historical memory of the French role in the American Revolution prompted pro-Allied feelings, as did a sense of common culture and common institutions with Great Britain. But then there were the ten million German Americans, many with family members in the Fatherland and many of whom openly supported the Fatherland's cause. Millions of Americans of Irish descent regarded Britain as the tyrant and, indirectly, Germany as the possible means of national liberation. Sicilians, Piedmontese, and others from the Italian peninsula often had only a vague sense of Italian national identity but followed the war news intently after Italy joined the Allies in April 1915.
Millions of former residents of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires had experienced little but deprivation and discrimination in their countries of origin. Jews from the Russian empire detested the czar, and Poles and Czechs hoped for an end to imperial rule and the creation of new national states. These broad categorizations masked powerful crosscurrents of difference, dissent, and perspective. It was possible to love German culture while hating German authoritarianism and militarism, to cherish English literature while abhorring English snobbery and arrogance, to be Irish without wishing for British humiliation. Millions of so-called hyphenated Americans experienced the tragedy of the Great War less in terms of national aspirations and hatreds than in familial and personal loyalties and concern for relatives and loved ones still in Europe. In an era before public opinion polling, those interested in the attitudes of America's foreign-born residents carefully scrutinized the extensive foreign-language press and paid close heed to politicians representing distinctive enclaves of ethnic voters such as the Czechs of rural Nebraska, the Poles of Chicago, the Germans of Milwaukee and St. Louis, the Irish of Boston, and Jews, from diverse European countries, of New York City.
Among "Americans" too the response to the war was divided and divisive. During the two decades before the war, the United States and Great Britain had resolved many of their earlier diplomatic disagreements and entered into an informal but increasingly solid pattern of mutual agreement and support in world affairs. For many in government and journalism, and for those involved in academic, religious, and cultural pursuits among the eastern seaboard and in large cities in other parts of the country, sympathy for England was automatic and immediate. In the heartland of the Middle West, however, isolationism and suspicion of John Bull remained fierce. What of southerners, black and white? In the tenant shacks and the crossroads hamlets, even in the courthouses and legislative chambers, was this conflict anything but a distant, disagreeable rumor? People on the West Coast tended to be more worried about the so-called Yellow Peril supposedly posed by marauding (or simply migrating) Asians than about the fighting in Europe.
Political convictions also colored Americans' response to war. Those involved in the movements for women's rights, workers' rights, clean government, regulation of trusts, and general social improvement, viewed war as the enemy of reform. For these men and women, Europe's descent into barbarism involved not merely death and physical destruction on a massive scale; it marked a halt to the moral progress and social reform that they believed had characterized the past half century. But for others no less eager to improve national life, war, with all its horror, helped to instill a sense of order, discipline, and patriotism, qualities, they felt, sadly lacking in the hedonistic, polyglot, and chaotic America of the 1910s. These men and women envied Europeans for the opportunity they now had to rediscover the manly virtues of courage and honor that often seemed absent in the mechanized and effete modern world.
Early in the war, these crosscurrents of ethnic, political, and regional debate seemed to converge on two central points. Americans wanted to continue to profit from the war, and they wanted to remain out of the fighting. Whatever the sentiments of national feeling or hatred, Americans pursued eagerly the employment and profits associated with the war trade. And all but the most Anglophile or militaristic would have been appalled at the notion that their sons and husbands and neighbors might be sent across the Atlantic to join the carnage.
After a period of uncertainty at the very outset of hostilities, the American economy, buoyed by the war trade, boomed through 1915 and into 1916. Exports rose from just over $2 billion annually in 1913 to almost $6 billion in 1916. Allied orders for food, munitions, and other supplies quickly sopped up British and French capital invested in the United States and turned America almost overnight into a creditor country. Reliant initially on the liquidation of their securities in the United States for the financing of imports from America, the Allies in the summer of 1915 began efforts to borrow money directly from U.S. investors. The price of cotton—a crucial indicator of domestic health for a Democratic president reliant on southern votes and congressional leadership—soared between the onset of fighting and the 1916 presidential election. Producers of petroleum products, copper, nitrates, and other commodities prospered, and employment in the metal trades, arms factories, and food processing, mining, and transport sectors surged. Americans might deplore the killing and worry about distant relatives, but few wished for an end to the good times that war was bringing. Nor did the Wilson administration, whatever the ambivalence the president and his advisers might feel, want to forgo this prosperity or attempt to lead the public toward a conception of wartime policy that tried to combine prosperity and avoidance of the war trade. President Wilson was keenly aware of the fate of the previous Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, whose administration was shattered by the depression of the 1890s.
Americans were equally insistent on remaining out of the fighting. The more Americans learned of the scope and nature of the warfare in Europe, the more determined they were to stand clear. To be sure, preparedness advocates, led by military and naval leaders, seized upon the European war to advance plans for expanding and reequipping the armed forces. Civic and patriotic organizations promoting this cause flourished. But this militarizing sentiment was rarely connected to the notion of sending Americans to fight in Europe. Army war plans, for example, concentrated on repelling an amphibious assault on East Coast cities or on responding to a joint attack by Britain and Japan, allied by virtue of a 1902 treaty, through Canada and along the West Coast. Even supporters of military enhancement stressed its positive domestic effects such as the establishment (in the words of one newspaper) of "wholesome discipline over the country's youth." Even as Congress cautiously considered measures to expand the army and the navy, virtually no one contemplated the actual dispatch of American troops to Europe.
The task of the president then was to devise policies that would at once ensure continued economic gain and also keep America out of the war. Wilson personally embraced both goals, but at the same time, he viewed America's role—and thus his own role—as not being confined to a clever combination of profit and avoidance. Wilson had brought to the presidency an expansive conception both of the role of the president and of the destiny of America, although in a distinguished scholarly career, he had rarely focused his attention to matters of foreign policy. At the same time, however, his intense religious feeling involved an ardent, demanding conception of American mission. He believed that America had a special dispensation, that it represented mankind's most advanced and enlightened achievement. It stood both within and apart from Western civilization, embodying the best of Western values and aspirations while remaining free from the venalities and corruptions of Europe. In seeking and achieving the presidency, Wilson had assumed that his principal task was the revitalization of American democracy and opportunity, the translation of its unique characteristics of Christian individualism and civic liberty into a new idiom that recognized the vast economic and social transformations of the post-Civil War era. As president, he pursued this mission energetically through reforms in the nation's tariff, regulatory, and banking structures and through his own eloquent calls for rededication and reform.
The European war posed a powerful, unanticipated challenge to Wilson's conception of America as an exemplar of political and moral virtue. A thoughtful student of the nation's past, he had recognized that a protracted continent-wide European war would have profound consequences for the United States, as the Napoleonic wars had had in the early nineteenth century. Wilson believed that as an emerging economic power and as the moral leader of the West, the United States would inevitably play a central role. Indeed, as the horror of the Great War intensified, he became increasingly convinced that as leader of the United States, he must use the growing importance of American resources to exert American leadership by negotiating an end to the killing. He felt this position should be used to help create a new international order, one based on reason and free intercourse and open and democratic relationships among nations. Suffusing these views was a very real, very deeply felt religious sensibility that, however arrogant or presumptuous it might seem to skeptics, actively and practically shaped the assumptions on which the president based his responses to the war.
Millions of Americans shared his belief in their country's special and even providential role in the world. But these ideas dictated no specific course of action. Many corporate leaders, for example, saw the war as an opportunity to expand American economic influence as European capital, needed to finance the war, retreated from undeveloped lands. Indeed, some spokesmen for America's economic elite waxed poetic in envisioning the opportunities, both economic and moral, that the war-bred breakdown in the world order promised. Thus, Willard Straight, an articulate and well-positioned advocate of aggressive U.S. efforts to take advantage of the war, believed that the expansion of American finance capitalism at the expense of European colonial powers could usher in a new golden age for the world. American enterprise, he insisted, was crucial in "helping China, for the better establishment of trade relations with South America ... for international cooperation with backward countries ... for more enlightenment at home and for higher commercial morality abroad." Straight, along with other influential supporters of former President Theodore Roosevelt, believed that trade with the Allies and exploitation of investment opportunities in underdeveloped lands offered the promise of nothing less than "a new political economy."
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