America and the Great War: A Library of Congress Illustrated History

579 Pages·2017·93.41 MB·English

by  Margaret E. Wagner

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Library of Congress Illustrated Timeline of the Civil War
The Library of Congress World War II Companion (co-author) The Library of
Congress Civil War Desk Reference (co-author) The American Civil War: 365
Days
World War II: 365 Days
Maxfield Parrish and the Illustrators of the Golden Age
For my treasured siblings, John, Janet, and Bobbie and for those Americans of
the WWI era who kept struggling to build a more just and democratic country in
a time of unprecedented military conflict and radical social change
CONTENTS
Introduction
Prologue: 1912–July 1914: A New Age and a New President
Chapter 1: August 1914–December 1915: America, Exemplar of Peace
Chapter 2: January 1916–January 1917: “He Kept Us out of War”
Chapter 3: February–December 1917: “The Yanks Are Coming”
Chapter 4: 1918: For Victory and Lasting Peace
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix: World War I Collections at the Library of Congress
Notes
Bibliography
Image Information
Index
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
PROLOGUE
1912 – JULY 1914
A NEW AGE AND A NEW
PRESIDENT
We must . . . satisfy the thought and conscience of a people deeply stirred by the conviction that they have
come to a critical turning point in their moral and political development . . . Plainly, it is a new age.
—Woodrow Wilson, August 7, 1912
We’ve got to start to make this world over.
—Thomas Edison, 1912
One hundred and thirty-six years old in the summer of 1912, the proud, bustling,
and resource-rich United States of America was an increasingly bold and
influential presence on the world stage, though it had not yet joined the ranks of
major world powers. While it had triumphed over a declining Spain in the 1898
Spanish-American War, its military forces remained comparatively small,
reflecting the country’s inherent distrust of standing armies. Large professional
armed forces, most Americans believed, were a principal cause of the bloody
wars that had stained centuries of European history. Commerce, industry,
agriculture, and representative democracy: These were the chief sources of
American strength and the proper conduits for extending American influence
abroad.
As the United States looked toward the fall 1912 presidential election,
confidence in the country’s future was strong. Yet that confidence was tempered
by widespread concern over a host of societal problems—and by questions
arising from one of the great turning points in the development of the American
nation. In January and February 1912, New Mexico and Arizona had been
admitted to the Union, completing the “lower forty-eight” states and bringing to
a formal close some three hundred years of Euro-American expansion across the
continent. “The frontier has gone,” historian Frederick Jackson Turner had
proclaimed at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, “and with its going has
closed the first period in American history.”1
The new period that was commencing as the frontier formally closed found