World War I (1914–18)

World War I (1914–18) CausesCauses of U.S. EntryMilitary and Diplomatic CourseDomestic CoursePostwar ImpactChanging Interpretations
World War I (1914–18): Causes Although the United States did not enter World War I until 1917, the outbreak of that war in 1914, and its underlying causes and consequences, deeply and immediately affected America's position both at home and abroad. In the debate on neutrality and later on peace aims, much was made of European secret diplomacy, which was rejected on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, of militarism and the escalating arms race before 1914, and of the impact of colonialism. Undoubtedly, all these factors contributed to the origins of the European catastrophe, but they do not explain why the war broke out when it did. This question can only be answered more precisely by looking at the political and military decision‐making processes in the last months, weeks, and days of peace in 1914.

After decades of debate about whether Europe “slithered over the brink” ( David Lloyd George's phrase) owing to general crisis mismanagement among all participant nations or because of the actions of a clearly identifiable group of people, the overwhelming majority consensus has emerged among historians that the primary responsibility rests in Berlin and Vienna, and secondarily perhaps on St. Petersburg. Judging from the documents, it has become clear that the German kaiser and his advisers encouraged Vienna to settle accounts with Serbia following the assassinations of the heir to the Austro‐Hungarian throne, Archduke Ferdinand, and his wife at Sarajevo in Bosnia‐Herzegovina on 28 June 1914.

By issuing a “blank check” to Austria‐Hungary on 5 July 1914, the German government took the first step in escalating a crisis that involved the risk of a world war among the great powers. This risk was high not only because these powers had been arming over the previous years, but also because they had regrouped into two large camps: the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria‐Hungary, Italy) and the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia). And when, after various diplomatic maneuvers, it became clear toward the end of July that such a world war might indeed be imminent, Berlin refused to deescalate although the decision makers there were in the best position to do so.

The Czarist government, as Serbia's protector, also had a role in this development; but it was primarily a reactive one after Vienna had delivered a stiff ultimatum in Belgrade and subsequently began to invade its smaller Balkan neighbor. So, while the main responsibility for the outbreak of war is therefore to be laid at the kaiser's door, the question of why he and his advisers pushed Europe over the brink continues to be a matter of debate. The German historian Fritz Fischer has argued that the kaiser's government saw the Sarajevo crisis as the opportunity for aggressively achieving a Griff nach der Weltmacht (Breakthrough to World Power Status), as the 1961 German version of Fischer's first, and highly controversial, book on the subject was entitled. The American historian Konrad Jarausch and others, by contrast, have asserted that Berlin's and Vienna's initial strategy was more limited. By supporting Austria‐Hungary against the Serbs, the two powers hoped to weaken Slav nationalism and Serb expansionism in the Balkans and thus to restabilize the increasingly precarious position of the ramshackle Austro‐Hungarian empire with its many restive nationalities. According to this interpretation, the assumption was that Russia and its ally, France, would not support Serbia, and that, after a quick localized victory by the central powers in the Balkans, any larger international repercussions could be contained through negotiation following the fait accompli.

It was only when this strategy failed owing to St. Petersburg's resistance that the German military got its way to launch an all‐out offensive, the first target of which would be Russia's ally, France. This was the sole military operations plan, the “Schlieffen Plan,” first developed by Gen. Alfred von Schlieffen, that the kaiser still had available in 1914. The alternative of an eastern attack on Russia had been dropped several years before. Worse, since the German Army was not strong enough to invade France directly through Alsace‐Lorraine, Helmut von Moltke, chief of the General Staff, had further reinforced the right flank of the invasion force with the aim of reaching Paris swiftly from the north. However, this could only be achieved by marching through Belgium, and it was this violation of Belgian neutrality that brought Britain into the conflict, definitely turning it into a world war.

In a further radicalization of his argument, Fischer asserted in his second book, War of Illusions (1973), that the German decision to start a world war had been made at a “War Council” on 8 December 1912, and that Berlin used the next eighteen months to prepare it. However, this view has not been generally accepted by the international community of scholars. Unless new documents supporting Fischer emerge, possibly from the Russian archives, the most plausible argument seems to be the one developed by Jarausch and others of a miscalculated “limited war” that grew out of control.

While diplomatic historians and political scientists have dominated the debate on the outbreak of World War I, social historians have more recently begun to examine the attitude of the “masses” in that summer of 1914. The older view has been that there was great enthusiasm all‐round and that millions in all participant countries flocked to the colors expecting to achieve victory no later than Christmas 1914. No doubt there was strong popular support, reinforced by initial serious misconceptions about the nature of modern industrialized warfare. But there have been recent challenges to this view, and it appears that divisions of contemporary opinion were deeper and more widespread than previously believed. French social historians have shown that news of the mobilization was received in some parts of the country with tears and consternation rather than joy and parades. In Germany, too, feeling was more polarized than had been assumed. Thus, there were peace demonstrations in major cities to warn Austria‐Hungary against starting a war with Serbia. And when the German mobilization was finally proclaimed, the reaction of large sections of the population was decidedly lukewarm. As one young trade unionist wrote after watching cheerful crowds around him near Hamburg's main railroad station on 1 August 1914: “Am I mad or is it the others?”

Considering the unprecedented slaughter that began shortly thereafter in the trenches of the western front as well as in the east, this was certainly a good question, and further research may well open up new perspectives on the mentalities of the men and women in 1914 and on the socioeconomic and political upheavals that followed, which ultimately also involved the United States as a participant.

Bibliography

Fritz Fischer , Germany: War Aims in the First World War, 1967.
Konrad Jarausch , The Enigmatic Chancellor, 1972.
Volker R. Berghahn , Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, 1973.
Fritz Fischer , War of Illusions, 1973.
James Joll , The Origins of the First World War, 1984.
John W. Langdon , July 1914, The Long Debate 1918–1990, 1991.
Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. , Austria‐Hungary and the Origins of the First World War, 1991.

Volker R. Berghahn

World War I (1914–18): Causes Of U.S. Entry Like the origins of World War I itself, the causes of U.S. entry on 6 April 1917 have been much debated. The 1930s emphasis on economic motivations—the desire of American munitions makers and financiers to protect their stake in Allied victory—has been superseded by two new interpretations. One, a broad view enunciated first by historians William Appleman Williams and N. Gordon Levin, emphasizes the desire of President Woodrow Wilson and many among America's economic and foreign policy elites to ensure a liberal, capitalist world order in contrast to reactionary militarism and colonialism or widespread revolution and communism. The other reflects a greater focus on Wilson's decision making and is put forward by Arthur S. Link, Ernest May, Robert H. Ferrell, and Thomas J. Knock. They emphasize variously the strategic situation of the United States as the leading neutral industrial and financial power; and the influence upon Wilson of the German submarine warfare, the predominantly pro‐British attitude of American elites, and the president's own appropriation of the leadership of the liberal movement toward a just and lasting peace based upon a league of nations.

In 1914, Wilson proclaimed U.S. neutrality in keeping with American tradition. He was also aware of the great divisions over the war: although perhaps a bare majority of Americans favored Britain, nearly as many were hostile to the Allies because of ethnic loyalties or suspicions of Britain, the world's most powerful empire and financial center, or hostility toward czarist Russia with its autocracy and pogroms.

Both Germany and Britain violated U.S. neutral maritime rights, as Wilson strictly defined them, but German submarine warfare seemed more ruthless, particularly with the sinking of the Lusitania, a British passenger liner, in 1915. American trade with the Allies tripled to $3 billion a year between 1914 and 1916 and helped economic recovery in the United States. Pro‐British elites and the urban press increasingly emphasized German immorality—the invasion of neutral Belgium and alleged atrocities there and later the barbarity of sub marine warfare. Seeking to avoid being drawn into the war but also insisting on Americans' right to aid the Allies, Wilson held Germany to “strict accountability” for its submarine warfare, and for a while caused Berlin to restrict its U‐boats.

After his reelection in 1916, Wilson offered to mediate a peace; but both sides refused. Berlin then decided on unrestricted submarine warfare, beginning 1 February 1917, to starve Britain into terms. Wilson severed diplomatic relations on 3 February. American public opinion was also inflamed by the Zimmermann note, in which Germany sought a military alliance with Mexico against the United States. When submarines sank three American merchant ships, Wilson abandoned temporary armed neutrality and decided to take the United States into the war, in part because his strict accountability policy had failed and in part because he wanted the United States to help shape a treaty for peace.

In his powerful war message of 2 April 1917, Wilson condemned the German submarine campaign as “warfare against mankind,” and urged Americans to fight, in his famous phrase, to make the world “safe for democracy.” By a vote of 82–6 in the Senate (4 April) and 373–50 in the House (6 April), Congress adopted a resolution declaring that a state of war existed between the United States and Germany.
[See also Germany, U.S. Military Involvement in.]

Bibliography

William Appleman Williams , The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959.
Ernest R. May , The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917, 1959.
Arthur S. Link , Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916–1917, 1965.
N. Gordon Levin, Jr. , Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution, 1968.
Ross Gregory , The Origins of American Intervention in the First World War, 1971.
Robert H. Ferrell , Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921, 1985.
Thomas J. Knock , To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, 1992.

John Whiteclay Chambers II

World War I (1914–18): Military and Diplomatic Course “The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism run stark mad.” Col. Edward House, President Woodrow Wilson's closest adviser, did not exaggerate when he wrote these words. The Europe he described in the spring of 1914 was divided into two armed camps: the Triple Entente (Russia, France, and Great Britain) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria‐Hungary, and Italy). An unprecedented arms race was underway that coincided with revolutionary advances in the technology of warfare. Magazine‐loading rifles, belt‐fed machine guns, and improved artillery dramatically increased the firepower of armies. Relying on an expanding network of railways, the general staffs of the major European powers devised elaborate mobilization and offensive schemes. The smallest details were covered, including the preparation of exact railway timetables and even the registration of farmers' horses for possible use. Universal conscription fostered militarism. Governments identified and registered able‐bodied males of military age. Approximately 4 million men were in uniform when the war started in August 1914; that number had risen to a staggering 20 million by the end of the month.

Europe's military elite, accepting Carl von Clausewitz's military principles of “the decisive force, at the decisive place, at the decisive time,” were committed to an offensive strategy designed to climax in one or two great decisive battles. Clausewitz's ideas on war may also have influenced society. The historian John Keegan argues that Europe had been transformed into a warrior society by the acceptance of Clausewitz's maxims that war was a continuation of political activity and that “war is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.”

A month after House's letter, the assassination on 28 June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro‐Hungarian throne, precipitated a general European crisis that quickly became unmanageable. The Austrians, given unequivocal support by their ally, Germany, blamed Serbia for the archduke's death and decided to crush Serbia's challenge to the fragile Austro‐Hungarian empire. Vienna's determination to go to war triggered a general conflict. The illusion that modern industrialized wars would be short made this decision easier. Few believed the Polish banker and economist, Ivan S. Bloch, the author of The Future of War in Its Economic and Political Relations: Is War Now Impossible? (1898), who argued that modern military technology had made unlimited war mutually destructive for the participants.

Germany's “Schlieffen Plan,” designed to achieve victory over France within six weeks by a gigantic flanking movement through neutral Belgium, came to grief during the First Battle of the Marne (5–9 September). An ominous portent was that the French, Germans, and British had suffered over half a million casualties in three weeks of fighting. Meanwhile, the Russian offensive in East Prussia was checked and thrown back, with an entire Russian army destroyed at Tannenberg (26–30 August).

Following the opening battles, the armies in the west dug in. An almost continuous line of parallel defensive systems was constructed from the North Sea to Switzerland. Protected by barbed wire, usually 50 or more feet deep, these earthworks were frequently built in depth. The front resembled a spiderweb, consisting of thousands of miles of connecting and parallel trenches. Trench warfare also existed to some extent of other fronts—in some areas of Russia, Italy, the Balkans, and Palestine—though nowhere did it become as prominent as in France and Flanders.

Europe's military leaders sought to return to a war of maneuver by rupturing the enemy's front. To restore the offensive, new weapons such as tanks and chemical warfare were eventually introduced. High‐explosive shells, recoilless carriages, optical sights, improved communications, and cannon ranges of 20 or more miles made indirect artillery bombardment the dominant force of the battlefield. The application of massive and increasingly sophisticated artillery fire proved to be the most effective means of reducing fortifications. But the western defenses, bolstered by dramatic advances in firepower, were so strong and thickly defended that it was possible to break into them but not through them prior to 1918. When breakthroughs were successful, there remained limitations to the advance. The 1916–18 version of the tank lacked the speed and reliability to maintain the momentum of an attack over battle‐torn ground before defenders dug in again. Nor could the heavy guns be moved forward rapidly to support a continued advance of the infantry.

The 1930s view, which lingers still among many, is that the generals of the western front were inept and their approaches to winning the war futile. “A war of attrition was substituted for a war of intelligence,” is the way that Lloyd George, British prime minister and a leading critic of attempts to win the war on the western front, put it. The historian Tim Travers has emphasized that many commanders had difficulty abandoning their nineteenth‐century vision of warfare, which emphasized the élan of the individual soldier over the new weapons technology. But recent studies of the evolution of tactics by Paddy Griffith and Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson have demonstrated that the western front during the last half of the war was not tactically stagnant. The Germans are often considered the most innovative with their elastic defense‐in‐depth and stormtrooper tactics of infiltration. But the British, with more offensive experience than the enemy in 1916–17, also perfected all‐arms assaults and advanced techniques of trench raiding prior to the tactical successes of the Germans in the spring of 1918.

Germany, relying on strong support from Austria‐Hungary, concentrated its resources on the eastern front in 1915. The vastness of that front, and the clear superiority of German artillery and leadership, made possible an advance of some 300 miles. Although Italy joined the Allies in 1915, by the end of the year, Berlin dominated Central and southeastern Europe, had a bridge to Asia and Africa through its Turkish ally, and retained Belgium and the most industrial part of France. Serbia had been defeated and Bulgaria enlisted as an ally. British efforts to find a “way around” the western front ended in dismal failure in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns. The central powers, with a more unified command because of Germany's dominant position, interior lines, and a good system of railways, held a formidable position despite their inferiority in warships, manpower, and industrial capacity.

In 1916, Germany sought to break the stalemate in the west in the ten‐month Battle of Verdun, deliberately seeking a decisive battle of attrition and will. To relieve Verdun, a massive Anglo‐French offensive was launched on the Somme in July. When winter brought the fighting to a close, the western front had little changed: Verdun remained in French hands, and the Allies had captured no position of strategical importance on the Somme. Combined German‐Allied casualties exceeded 2 million. Despite the carnage, the warring coalitions faced a bleak future of continued stalemate and exhaustion.

Compared to the great powers of Europe, the United States was a profoundly peaceful and unmilitaristic nation. Prior to America's entry into the war in April 1917, Wilson's secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels, was decidedly antiwar if not pacifistic, and Newton Baker, secretary of war since 1916, was an ardent antimilitarist. The U.S. Navy had expanded to defend American shores and trade routes, but the U.S. Army ranked seventeenth in the world. The United States was the world's number one industrial power, but the army lacked modern weaponry, including tanks, poison gas, aircraft, heavy artillery, and trench mortars. War mobilization, 1917–18, failed to remedy this deficiency: the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) largely fought with foreign weapons.

Although legally neutral, the United States had become a vital factor for the Allies with their growing dependence on American credit and material. Caught between the effective Allied naval blockade and Germany's submarine warfare campaign, America's right to trade overseas was jeopardized. To keep the United States from being drawn into the global conflict, Wilson attempted mediation. With the European belligerents unable to take the U.S. military seriously, he had little diplomatic leverage except for American economic might. The European nations wanted a peace to reflect their immense sacrifices in blood and treasure. But an acceptable peace to one side represented defeat to the other.

Wilson's mediation efforts implied that he was prepared to accept a global role for the United States to obtain a compromise peace, but he certainly never imagined any circumstances that would involve American forces in what he referred to as the “mechanical game of slaughter” in France. Nor apparently could he identify any strategic interest for the United States in the total defeat of Germany, which he believed would result in an unbalanced peace of victors. His formula for a satisfactory end to the fighting as he announced in January 1917 was “peace without victory.”

Pressed into the war in April 1917 by Germany's gamble for quick victory through unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson initially believed that American belligerency would largely be economic and psychological and that the central powers could be forced to the peace table without U.S. troops becoming involved on European battlefields. Pressure from London and Paris and the realization that his voice in any peace conference would be small without an American military presence in Europe changed his mind.

Only once before, during the American Revolution, had the United States fought as part of a military alliance. The General Staff in the War Department, however, quickly concluded that the only way that the United States could fight in Europe was through a collective military enterprise with the British and French on the western front. Nonetheless, America's leadership was determined to maintain a distinct military and political position. Wilson immediately disassociated himself from the entente's controversial war objectives by insisting that the United States was an “associate power,” with freedom to conduct independent goals.

The commander in chief of the AEF, John J. Pershing, proved an excellent choice to defend a separate and distinct U.S. military role in the war. The AEF commander tenaciously adhered to his goal of an independent U.S. force with its own front, supply lines, and strategic goals. His preparations for a win‐the‐war American breakthrough to occur in 1919 in Lorraine to the east and west of Metz profoundly influenced America's military participation. The United States supported unity of command and the selection of Gen. Ferdinand Foch as generalissimo; but Pershing resisted anything but the temporary amalgamation of American units into French and British divisions, even during the grave military crisis confronting the Allies in the spring of 1918. The German High Command, with Russia knocked out of the war in the winter of 1917–18, attempted to destroy the French Army and drive the British from the Continent through a series of offensives. Pershing resisted the only means of immediately assisting the depleted Allied forces: the inclusion of American units in British and French divisions. Small numbers of American soldiers, however, began to enter combat under the American flag in May and June. On 28 May, 14 months after the United States entered the war, a reinforced U.S. regiment (about 4,000 men) captured the village of Cantigny. Several days later, the Second Division (which included a Marine brigade) took up a defensive position west of Château‐Thierry and engaged the advancing Germans.

Pershing rebuffed efforts by Allied soldiers to share their increasingly sophisticated tactical techniques with his forces. Revisionists have been critical of his emphasis on riflemen, the American frontier spirit, and open field tactics, arguing that he did not comprehend how science and the machine age had revolutionized warfare.

After gaining reluctant approval from Foch for the formation of an independent American force, the U.S. First Army, Pershing went forward with plans to eliminate the threatening salient of St. Mihiel, as a prelude to his Metz offensive. The Battle of St. Mihiel (12–16 September 1918) proved to be an impressive but misleading U.S. victory because German forces were in the process of withdrawing to a new and shorter defensive line when the Americans attacked and cut off the salient.

The pressing demands of coalition warfare, however, forced Pershing to delay preparations for his 1919 Metz campaign. Complying with Foch's strategy, he reluctantly shifted most of his troops some sixty miles northward to the Meuse‐Argonne sector, where he was expected to participate in simultaneous and converging Allied attacks against the large German salient. Logistical chaos, flawed tactics, and inexperienced men and officers contributed to a disastrous start to the Meuse‐Argonne offensive (26 September–11 November 1918). Pershing hoped to advance ten miles on the first day; his front, however, had moved just thirty‐four miles by the armistice six weeks later, much of the ground gained only during the last phase of the offensive when Germany had exhausted its reserves.

Although only involved in heavy fighting for 110 days, the AEF made vital contributions to Germany's defeat. With tens of thousands of “doughboys” crossing the Atlantic to reinforce the Allies, and with the AEF emerging as a superior fighting force, the exhausted and depleted Germans had no hope of avoiding total defeat if the war continued into 1919.

Before Berlin's appeal in early October for a peace based on Wilson's Fourteen Points, the United States was on the verge of brilliantly coordinating its participation in the land war in Europe with its political plans to reshape the postwar world. If the war had continued into the spring of 1919, Pershing's plan to deliver a knockout blow to the German Army probably would have been achieved. Gen. Jan C. Smuts, the South African statesman who served in the British War Cabinet, warned the British government in October: if the war continued another year, the United States would become the “diplomatic dictator of the world.”

In contrast to Pershing's wishes for total victory, Wilson hoped to avoid placing Germany at the mercy of the Allies. American participation had not been designed to further the British empire, strengthen French security, or even maintain the European balance of power. Wilson stood not with the interests of the nation‐states, but with the rights of humankind. He thus attempted with mixed results to use separate negotiations with Berlin over an armistice to impose his Fourteen Points on the Allies as well as Germany.

As the Great War concluded with the armistice on 11 November 1918, American policy was directed toward the repudiation of power politics and the erection of a “permanent” peace. Wilsonianism promised an end to war primarily through democratic institutions, the end of secret diplomacy, the self‐determination for ethnic minorities, and most especially through a League of Nations. It has been argued that this visionary approach raised expectations that were impossible to meet. The war had destroyed the old balance of power in Europe, and the peace settlement made revisionist nations out of the two states that would soon dominate the Continent, Germany and the Soviet Union. The United States, the greatest economic beneficiary of the war, helped make the peace, but with its rejection of the Treaty of Versailles refused responsibility for maintaining it.

A war in which over 65 million troops had been mobilized by the belligerents ended in a twenty‐year truce instead of “permanent peace.” The failure to achieve Wilson's unrealistic though desirable goal was hardly surprising. But another general war was not inevitable. World War II was caused by many factors, including the flawed peace settlement of 1919, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the psychological scars of World War I, which enfeebled the democracies. But the inability of the victorious powers, especially Great Britain and the United States, to work together to prevent the resurgence of German military power, was certainly one of the most important reasons for the resumption of war in 1939.

Bibliography

B. H. Liddell Hart , The Real War 1914–1918, 1930.
Edward M. Coffman , The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I, 1968.
Donald Smythe , Pershing: General of the Armies, 1985.
Tim Travers , The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918, 1987.
Allan R. Millett , Over Where? The AEF and the American Strategy for Victory, 1917–1918, in Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Against All Enemies: Interpretations of the American Military from Colonial Times to the Present, 1988.
Timothy K. Nenninger , American Military Effectiveness in the First World War, in Military Effectiveness, Vol. 1: The First World War, Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., 1988.
David Stevenson , The First World War and International Politics, 1988.
Robin Prior and and Trevor Wilson , Command on the Western Front: The Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson 1914–18, 1992.
John Keegan , A History of Warfare, 1993.
David F. Trask , The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918, 1993.
David R. Woodward , Trial by Friendship: Anglo‐American Relations, 1917–1918, 1993.
Paddy Griffith , Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack, 1916–18, 1994.
D. Clayton James and and Anne Sharp Wells , America and the Great War, 1914–1920, 1998.

David R. Woodward

World War I (1914–18): Domestic Course With its dynamic economy, its large population, and its stable government, the United States was well suited to the kind of total conflict that was raging overseas in World War I. But to realize its potential as a belligerent, it had to overcome several obstacles. Unity was vital in a war that pitted whole nations against one another; yet in the months that followed the country's entry into the war in April 1917, the country remained divided. Faults ran through American society along lines of race, ethnicity, and economic class. The declaration of war had not eliminated isolationism apathy, pockets of pacifism and antimilitarism, and even sympathy in some quarters for the people America was fighting. Although American factories, farms, and mines had been producing materials for the Allies for many months, the task of converting the economy to war production promised to be complex and difficult. The method for raising and supporting an army of the size that would have to fight had barely been sketched out.

President Woodrow Wilson's administration improvised a series of solutions to these problems. It exhorted Americans to work and sacrifice for the war and to submerge their differences. It isolated and punished the war's opponents and rewarded people and organizations whose cooperation it needed. The result of its efforts was what has been called a wartime welfare state, in which government and interest groups sought to manage one another; in which patriotism and idealism and sacrifice existed alongside the determined pursuit of self‐interest; in which those with the greatest power, the strongest organization, or the most badly needed resources tended to secure the largest benefits from Congress and the Wilson administration.

To control domestic public opinion, the administration established a Committee on Public Information, which supplied American media with overwhelming quantities of facts and propaganda. Together with the Department of Justice and the Post Office, the Committee on Public Information defined what Americans were permitted to say in wartime. Notable dissenters, including the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs and hundreds of others whom government officials felt had opposed government policies or interfered with war production, were sent to prison. The government's portrayal of a monstrous enemy and its attacks on dissenters, together with the reports of casualties suffered in battle at enemy hands, helped promote a frenzy of anti‐German and anti‐German American feelings in parts of the nation.

Appealing to liberals, at that time a very large faction, the administration made the war, in some respects, a continuation of the prewar Progressive movement. It depicted the struggle against the central powers as a campaign for worldwide reform. It endorsed a federal women's suffrage amendment as a reward for women's war work. It extended disability benefits to members of the armed forces, provided financial support to their dependents, and created occupational health and safety standards for war workers. It tried to limit alcohol consumption and abolish prostitution, goals of many reformers. To assure the cooperation of pro‐war labor unions, the administration approved collective bargaining for the duration of the conflict, provided federal mediation of labor disputes, and gave union officials an opportunity to sit on boards that managed the economy—but not to determine the policies of those boards. To the small and weak contingent of racial equality reformers, however, it offered only modest concessions, including positions in government as intelligence workers so that civil rights leaders could inform the government of possible disaffection among African Americans.

American corporations made large gains in wartime. The government enabled business groups to regulate themselves. Executives of leading companies dominated agencies, such as the Council of National Defense and the War Industries Board, that coordinated war production and distribution and arranged prices. It could hardly have been otherwise. Without a large, experienced regulatory bureaucracy of its own, the U.S. government needed not only the products of factories run by these businessmen but also their expert knowledge of how their industries operated. The president and Congress provided some checks on abuses by businesses. They declined for several months to give precise authority to the Council of National Defense and the War Industries Board; for a long time they failed to stop the War Department from resisting control over procurement by the business‐dominated agencies. Congress passed legislation that in principle outlawed conflicts of interest. In some cases, the administration even used federal agencies to run important segments of the war economy, such as the railroad system. Yet the bureaucracy that managed railroads for the Railroad Administration was recruited from executives who had managed the railroads before the government took them over, so even that organization—a supposed example of “war socialism”—continued the practice of self‐regulation.

The economic war agencies operated largely through a system of incentives, often using indirect methods rather than overt commands to achieve their objectives. They established a priority system in which companies that volunteered to manufacture war goods were given greater access to raw materials, workers, fuel, and transportation than those whose activities were deemed less essential. (To put it another way, companies that chose not to cooperate might receive barely enough of what they needed to keep them going). These agencies offered cooperating businesses the chance to earn very large profits, partly because prices for whole industries were set at a level that could make the most inefficient producers profitable. Because the people who awarded contracts and negotiated their terms came from the industries that received the awards, executives who sought those contracts could feel confident that they were dealing with knowledgeable persons, not insensitive government officials. Businesses could engage in collusion without fear of being prosecuted. Although producers in the lumber, steel, automobile, and other industries drove very hard bargains with the war agencies, and in some cases threatened to refuse contracts for vital war products, American capitalists used publicity about their war work to restore an image of private enterprise that had been seriously tarnished in the prewar years. Certain large business leaders also appreciated the wartime opportunity to substitute cooperation for competition—a change some of them hoped would be permanent.

Incentives and publicity played significant parts in other areas of war mobilization. To induce farmers to expand production, the federal government set a minimum price for wheat. It ran massive propaganda campaigns encouraging citizens to conserve food and fuel and to help pay for the war by purchasing government Liberty bonds. The Committee on Public Information and the Treasury Department staged Liberty bond rallies at which movie stars, war heroes, politicians, and other celebrities appeared to promote bond sales. Government publicity encouraged men of military age to join the armed forces and promoted a public climate in which able‐bodied “slackers” felt extremely uncomfortable. Though thousands held back out of conscientious objection or for other reasons, plenty of Americans wanted to enlist. Still, the government decided not to rely on volunteers alone. It instituted conscription, administered by a Selective Service System, which sent two and three‐quarter million men to the armed forces. The Selective Service System also promoted economic mobilization, inducing essential civilian workers to stay where they were by exempting them from the draft, but warning them that they must work or fight.

From women suffragists to civil rights leaders, from union officials to corporate executives, American civilians sought to turn the war to their advantage or to the advantage of the groups to which they belonged. Their political leaders and representatives did the same. After announcing that “politics is adjourned,” President Wilson asked the voters to elect candidates from the Democratic Party in 1918 as a referendum on his war leadership. (They responded by giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress.) Several of the state councils of defense, which had been established to foster mobilization, became political organizations, usually dominated by Republicans. Many wartime measures were intensely political—for example, the decisions to fix minimum prices for certain products and not others, and to pay part of the cost of the war by progressive taxation and by taxes on “excess” profits.

The wartime welfare state, created for temporary purposes and staffed largely by volunteers rather than by a standing bureaucracy, dissolved at the end of the war. But the memory of the wartime system remained in the minds of those who had run it, and some of its components persisted in the 1920s—such as a federal system of medical benefits to veterans and government‐sponsored cooperation among businesses. During the Great Depression, several wartime agencies were resurrected with new names and altered purposes, including the War Finance Corporation, restored in Herbert C. Hoover's administration as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and a host of New Deal organizations such as the National Recovery Administration, which traced its origins to the War Industries Board. Short‐lived though it may have been, the wartime system for managing America's home front in 1917 and 1918 contained some of the germs of the late twentieth‐century welfare state, and was a progenitor of modern big government.
[See also Agriculture and War; Civil Liberties and War; Economy and War; Industry and War; Public Financing and Budgeting for War.]

Bibliography

David M. Kennedy , Over Here: The First World War and American Society, 1980.
Robert H. Ferrell , Woodrow Wilson and World War I: 1917–1921, 1985.
David R. Woodward and and Robert Franklin Maddox , America and World War I: A Selected Annotated Bibliography of English‐Language Sources, 1985.
John Whiteclay Chambers II , To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America, 1987.
Ronald Schaffer , America and the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State, 1991.

Ronald Schaffer

World War I (1914–18): Postwar Impact World War I marked a turning point in world history. It reduced the global influence of Europe, destroying some of its monarchies and empires and diminishing the strength of others. It enabled new nations to emerge. Shifting economic resources and cultural influences away from Europe, the war encouraged nations in other areas of the world, notably the United States, to challenge Europe's international leadership.

Essentially a civil war in Europe with global implications, World War I destroyed some empires and weakened others. The 1917 Revolution in Russia, following the czarist regime's collapse, culminated in the Bolshevik seizure of power. With military defeat in 1918, the Otto man and Austro‐Hungarian Empires disintegrated, while Germany replaced the kaiser's government with the Weimar Republic. New nations such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia emerged from former empires. Victory for the European Allies came at a high price. They owed over $11 billion to the United States, which was transformed from a net debtor to a net creditor. New York replaced London as the world's financial center. The European Allies also faced increasing demands for self‐rule from their colonies. They no longer controlled sufficient military and economic resources to shape world affairs as before.

By war's end, the United States and Japan were among the victorious powers at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, along with the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, with U.S. president Woodrow Wilson playing a leading role. He made the League of Nations an essential part of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany. The United States and the Allies, refusing to recognize the Bolshevik government in Russia, excluded the Soviet Union from Paris. Still, the specter of Bolshevism loomed over the conference.

Wilson sought a peace settlement that would protect democratic and capitalist nations. Affirming the principle of national self‐determination, he called for a postwar League of Nations to provide collective security for its members. He expected the League, under American leadership, to protect its members' territorial integrity and political independence against external aggression, and thereby preserve the peace.

Within the belligerent countries, the war had enhanced the state's role in the economy and society, but it also generated a backlash. Democratic governments in Western Europe retained civilian control, while autocratic governments in Central and Eastern Europe had succumbed to both military rule and revolution. Western democratic governments lost authority after the war. British elections in 1918 that kept Prime Minister David Lloyd George in office also registered Irish demands for self‐rule. France experienced political instability after Premier Georges Clemenceau's resignation following his defeat in the presidential election.

Americans likewise reacted against Wilson's strong wartime leadership. The 1918 elections reduced the Democrats to the minority in Congress. After the war, as wartime agencies removed regulations, the United States experienced rapid inflation, labor strikes, and economic recession. The American Expeditionary Forces returned from France and quickly demobilized. Congress reorganized the armed forces with the National Defense Act of 1920, reducing the regular army to nearly its prewar level.

Rapid readjustment and demobilization produced social unrest in the United States in 1919–20. Regardless of their wartime patriotism, African Americans were primary victims of urban race riots and rural lynchings, while socialists and other radicals, whether immigrants or native‐born, were targets of the Red Scare. Wilson was partly responsible for this postwar impact, given his negative attitudes toward black people, new immigrants, and labor strikes, and his international focus, resulting in a neglect of postwar reconstruction at home. He contributed to the Red Scare, too, by advocating the League of Nations as a barrier against Bolshevism. Nevertheless, under Henry Cabot Lodge's leadership, the Republican Senate kept the United States out of Wilson's League by rejecting the Treaty of Versailles.

Americans reacted against the wartime regulatory state and international involvement. Voters in 1920, including women who had just gained the suffrage under the Nineteenth Amendment, elected Republican senator Warren G. Harding to the presidency. Promising less government at home and less entanglement abroad, he epitomized one postwar alternative to Wilsonianism.

The postwar legacy of World War I was very different from Wilson's hopes. The League of Nations failed to maintain peace when aggressive nations—notably Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan—later challenged the Versailles peace. These revisionist powers rejected democracy and capitalism and challenged the status quo. They exploited the Anglo‐American revisionism of the treaty's critics, such as John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920), to justify their aggression. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, which resulted in part from the postwar failure to create a sustainable world economy, they turned modern nationalism into a hostile force that culminated in World War II.

Yet the long‐term impact of World War I also included the enduring legacy of Wilsonianism. Wilson had emphasized the principle of national self‐determination in the peacemaking. To curb nationalist excesses and aggression, he had advocated collective security through the League of Nations, hoping to enable free nations to participate in a new world order of peace and prosperity. He had endeavored to shape public opinion in favor of democracy and capitalism as well as internationalism. Despite his failure after World War I, Wilson's ideals deeply influenced the statecraft of future generations. Wilsonianism would continue to shape the international history of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Burl Noggle , Into the Twenties: The United States from Armistice to Normalcy, 1974.
Barry D. Karl , The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945, 1983.
Robert H. Ferrell , Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921, 1985.
Klaus Schwabe , Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918–1919: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power, 1985.
Arthur Walworth , Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, 1986.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius , Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective, 1987.
Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser‐Schmidt, eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, 1998.

Lloyd E. Ambrosius

World War I (1914–18): Changing Interpretations Historical opinion about the causes of World War I, American entry, and the making of peace has changed sharply over the years, with the publication of documentary collections, the opening of archives, and the appearance of memoirs and collections of personal papers, as well as changing theories and international circumstances. There is now general agreement on the causes of the war and of American entry; but disagreement remains over the American role in the peace.

During the years between the two world wars, contentions abounded between the adherents of Sidney B. Fay of Harvard University and Bernadotte Schmitt of the University of Chicago, who took respectively the sides of the central powers and the Allies, and based their books and articles on the national documentary collections and memoirs. At the end of World War II, the American and British governments took control of the German Foreign Office files and opened them, which revealed the bias of the earlier German documentary collection, Die Grosse Politik der Europaeischen Kabinette: 1871–1914. Opinion now is that German nationalism bears primary responsibility for starting the war.

American entrance into the great European conflict, which made it a true world war, produced an argument in the 1930s between Charles Seymour of Yale University and the popular historian Charles A. Beard, in which Seymour singled out German submarine warfare, especially the resort to unrestricted use of submarines beginning 1 February 1917, contrary to historical American neutral rights, as the cause of President Woodrow Wilson's decision to move from neutrality to intervention. Beard belittled such a monocausal contention, writing that the cause of any large event is necessarily complex, akin to a chemist pouring reagents into a test tube and obtaining a precipitate—but the latter is not the cause. Historical opinion now favors multicausality within a larger cultural and economic context provided by U.S. ties with the Allies.

In the making of the peace it is possible to say that the Wilsonian internationalists, the champions of the American president, such as historians Arthur Link and Arthur Walworth, have held the field. But questions remain, notably about whether the American people were prepared in 1919 for, if not a world government, then a world organization. Historians have agreed that Wilson himself was not his own best advocate. Thomas J. Knock has argued that Wilson undermined the progressive internationalist coalition by wartime repression. There is particular concern about the Wilson design of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which was neither fish nor fowl—neither a general scheme to promote international law and arbitration, which was in the American diplomatic tradition, nor a design for a postwar alliance of the victorious powers, which such conservative senators as Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts might have approved on a short‐term basis. Historians have remarked on the extraordinary nationalism of post‐1918 America, the inchoate but ardent desire to promote peace, and the victory of isolationism. They are unsure that any American president, seeking an acceptable peace, could have done anything other than what President Warren G. Harding did, which was to declare agreement with the nonpolitical provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.
[See also Disciplinary Views of War.]

Robert H. Ferrell