Rating: 
Summary: Has contemporary relevance
Review: This is a good book about the First World War and American society. For a general description, see Roger Albin's review of June, 25 2000. I want to say a few words on an aspect of the book mentioned but not explained in seydlitz89's review of June 30, 1999--that the war "was an affair of the mind." It refers to Woodrow Wilson's need to overcome American disunity on the question of American involvement. As the author explains, Wilson needed to shape public opinion and to crush dissent to achieve his goals. Thus he embarked on his statist program of parades and propaganda, extreme patriotic rhetoric, moralistic calls to bring democracy to the world, free speech restrictions, police-state crackdowns on and government-sanctioned vigilantism against radical groups and draft-dodgers. As someone with an interest in the themes and paradoxes in American culture, I find the author's treatment of this war for the American mind to be utterly fascinating. It illuminates much about the the nature of America and the deep undercurrents in American thought that made the country so vulnerable to Wilson's calls for sacrifice. The author's discussion of the draft is a case in point. He quotes one government official of the time as saying after the war that "Conscription in America was not . . . drafting of the unwilling. The citizens themselves had willingly come forward and pledged their service." As there was mass draft resistance, this statement is misleading; but it is true enough: many, many men *did* voluntarily register. And one of the reasons why is contained in the statement's last word: "service." Insightfully, the author notes that it was in large part this ideal of "service" that enabled the government to sell the war to the American people. The word itself exploited a fundamental tension in American society: that between individualism and collectivism. By "at once connoting the autonomy of the individual will and the obligation of the individual to serve a sphere wider than his own," he says, this "fittingly ambivalent term" bridged and reconciled the two value systems. The draft was not called "Selective Service" for nothing. In our own age of government-promoted "volunteerism," such works of history as this book are not without contemporary relevance.
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