The one hundred year anniversary of the start of the First World War is almost here. As that melancholy date approaches, you've been trying to educate yourself more about this war that they called the Great War. It changed the world in ways that are still clearly influencing humanity today and even though the United States was only involved in the closing months of the conflict, WW I has left a lasting effect on this country as well.
In 1980 "Over Here" allowed David M. Kennedy to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It is an excellent look at every aspect of American culture and how it has been shaped by the war which Americans tried so hard to avoid. The title of the book is a play on the 1917 song "Over There" about the Great War. The song was so popular that the phrase has been reused every time American servicemen have been deployed overseas in any of the countless conflicts that have erupted over the last century. "Over There." As in, "We will pray and hope and wait for our boys to come back from whatever it is they have to do over there where the fighting is being done." The first 40 pages of the book constitute one of the best synopses of The Great War that you have ever read, but Kennedy's scholarly focus is not on the military conflict itself, the European theater of war. Instead he turns his focus on how the war changed all of us over here.
Kennedy begins his exploration of American culture as it was changed by the war by reminding us of the truth that Wilson (who had only won election by Teddy Roosevelt's splitting of the Republican party's vote by running against President Taft, his chosen successor) had recently been reelected with a campaign slogan bragging that "He kept us out of the war!" In the fall of 1915, President Wilson did an about face and began to push for intervention into the European conflict. His liberal political supporters felt as if their champion had just yanked the rug out from under them.
Despite the years of debating over whether the nation should prepare for it or not, it suddenly became clear that war was coming. Wilson's liberal base had spent years preaching for America to focus on her domestic needs rather than preparing for war, but now their government began cracking down on any voice of dissension. The ominous Espionage Act of 1917 (which is still in effect) made pacifism akin to treason. As the nation built up a massive army and trained millions of men to ship overseas to the infamous meat grinder of the Western Front, she also cracked down hard on anyone who question the headlong charge towards the bloodiest conflict to that point in human history. Kennedy puts it this way on page 41, "Americans went to war in 1917 not only against Germans in the fields of France but against each other at home. They entered on a deadly serious contest to determine the consequences of the crisis for the character of American economic, social, and political life."
On page 35, Kennedy speaks to the predicament many have found themselves in when faced with participation in the American experiment. "Here was the classic liberal dilemma: whether to oppose a distasteful policy and work against it whatver the pain, or to swallow the bitter pill, seek somehow to make it palatable, retain one's "effectiveness," and push for good policies to temper or counter-balance the bad." Most chose the later option. The few who did not find themselves either in jail or otherwise ostracized from society, suddenly found their businesses closed, their mail censored or destroyed, their printing presses shut down. Wilson was the first Democrat to show that his party too could become reactionary and militant, both at home and abroad.
The Great War also changed the way America perceived the waves of immigrants that had always sustained and formed her population. Before the war, the Americanization of immigrants was a way to help the immigrants themselves, to help them integrate by giving them the tools they would need to do well in their new country. The war changed that altruistic motivation. Now the Americanization of immigrants was seen as a way to homogenize all Americans and protect the government from any foreign dissidents or spies. The xenophobia spread like wildfire. When the beloved former president Teddy Roosevelt was calling for the execution of a sitting US Senator for his anti-militarization actions, when clergymen were calling for all German people to be shot or hanged before they could receive forgiveness from God, when President Wilson claimed that anyone who hyphenated their nationality (Italian-American, Polish-American, etc) was "ready to plunge a dagger into the vitals of the Republic," it is not surprising that gangs of vigilantes soon roamed the streets of America. Lynchings of labor leaders, of pacifists, and of ethnic Germans were not exactly common, but they did happen with shocking regularity during the war. And when they did, Americans were in such a nationalist fervor, the perpetrators were most often summarily acquitted.
Ironically, the clampdown on liberal pacifists, activists, and labor leaders had a huge political impact on the legacy of the Wilson administration. It left the president all alone when he needed allies after the Armistice and he aimed to reshape the world to secure peace in our time. Many of his natural allies were either in jail or had been effectively intimidated into silence by his very administration. The United States, with a newly conservative Congress voted to not join the very League of Nations its president had invented.
The War brought about a financial revolution in the US as well. The very instruments of financial recovery FDR would use to rescue the US from the Great Depression twenty years later were built on the framework of governmental organizations built to handle America's response to WWI. The federal income tax and the Federal Reserve Bank were established. Bureaucracies were created to regulate and manage the nation's industries and resources. Just as the Civil War had permanently raised the minimum tax base the nation would henceforth collect, so too did WW I, and so too would WWII only thirty years later. For the first time though, America drew its revenue not from customs or excise taxes (which hurt the poorest citizens disproportionately) but from graduated taxes that shifted the burden onto the wealthiest classes. After a generation of politicians bragging about busting trusts and breaking up monopolies, Big Business had a rebirth during the Great War. The war was incredibly profitable for them. Gone were the days of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Movement.
The United States was the only major power left mostly untouched by the war. There had been no, "invasion, no destruction of farms and factories, no heavy loss of life, no malnutrition nor educational deficits, no heavy taxation." In fact, the United States positioned itself to usurp England's place as the banking and shipping hub of the world economy. After the Great War America, for the first time in its history, found itself in an undeniable position of global authority. A mere fifty years after the Civil War, the United States had come a long way from fighting to maintain it very union. Great Britain had not quite been dethroned, the Second World War would see to that, but the balance of power and influence had begun an inexorable and unstoppable shift towards American shores.
America began to assert herself on the national stage during the war. Like a young adult taking her first steps into adulthood by insisting on her independence from her parents, America refused to send her soldiers into European armies to be used as replacements for badly depleted units. It was during WWI that America first began to relax those old Revolutionary mistrusts of European entanglements. But even so, the President and Secretary of War insisted that American soldiers would fight side by side and under American command, or they would not fight at all. The US eventually trained a 4 million man army and 2 million of those men were already in Europe serving exclusively under the American flag by the abrupt ending of the conflict.
The Great War was so stupendous in its scope, so destructive of the whole global political framework, that it provided the United States with a unique opportunity to advance its place in the international framework at whirlwind pace, a pace that no other nation in history has been allowed to evolve.
The greatest impact the war had on American society was cultural, it was in the lives of everyday citizens. After a century of struggle to achieve suffrage, women finally laid claim to their right to vote in 1920. Wilson's rhetoric that the war was being fought for democracy made denying suffrage for half his population blatantly hypocritical. The First World War gave the American suffrage movement (and others around the globe) the push it need to finally achieve victory.
For decades (arguably for generations) African Americans had hoped to break into the labor markets of the factories of the American North and Midwest. With the European immigrant stream dried up by the European war and the draft in the US drawing away able-bodied white laborers, black Americans finally had their chance. They seized their opportunity, not just to get good paying manufacturing jobs, but to escape the world of Jim Crow and segregation. An exodus of almost biblical scale soon brought tens of thousands of black families out of the Deep South and into industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis.
America suffered no great political or military rebellion as a result of its part in the war. It was all over too soon after we joined. But we did see a revolution in the way Americans thought. This revolution is reflected in the words of the authors who fought in the Great War. "Disillusionment" is the word commonly associated with this generation, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton. Yes, there was disillusionment, but it was more than just disillusionment with romantic ideals or the inherent nobility of warfare. They rebelled, not necessarily against war in general, but against the Old Guard American ruling class that sent them to fight in this particular war. For the first time, young American men and women were actively and fearlessly questioning the established wisdom of the men who lead their country. Those authors and artist used the horror of their experience and their moral high ground of having been a part of something so awful, something that they were asked to do, to allow themselves to give voice to a generation that would question authority and shape the very iconoclasm that would come to characterize the American identity thereafter.
Today, Americans have become used to the idea that we will refuse to allow ourselves to be changed by terrorist attacks, we feel a need to maintain a sense of resilience that keeps our core values intact. But it's important to recall that there was a time when we did allow great events to change us. Whoever we were before the Great War, we are not that country anymore. For better or worse, we have not been that country for one hundred years now. It's good to stop occasionally and remember where you came from.
On to the next book!
P.S. The Allied Expeditionary Force was not entirely ready for the realm of modern warfare when it headed "over there." The AEF was shipped to Europe in British ships, and it advanced on the battlefield under the cover of French artillery. In fact, you were surprised to learn in this book that the widespread use of European arms in the First World War is why the American military operates using the metric system to this very day. Fascinating.
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