Mobilizing for Modern War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865-1919

Rating:
Summary: Little on war finance and biased in favor of Progressivism
Review: "Mobilizing for Modern War" examines the impact of industrialization and technological innovation on American mobilization for defense and war....

Koistinen does not seek to explain why America became an empire or why it went to war in 1898 and again in 1917 or how the nation conducted war on the battlefield and at sea, but rather to discern the pattern of the constantly evolving relationship between business, government, and the military in "harnessing the economy for hostilities" (p. ix). He looks at how the nation actually mobilized its robust economy for the sake of empire, defense, and war, and at how the public and private sectors--their boundaries increasingly "blurred" over time--learned to cooperate to those ends. The relationship evolved as each side adopted pragmatic, "makeshift" changes in response to actual experience, first in building a modern, professional, technologically up-to-date navy and army and then in mobilizing those forces and industry in the brief Spanish-American War and in the more protracted and demanding Great War. By stressing adaptation, experimentation, improvisation, and the "drift" of the process, Koistinen minimizes the ideological dimensions of the changing relationship between government and big business and points instead to the allegedly inevitable adaptation of mobilization to the environment of a rapidly emerging industrial economy.

Although it is a serious, methodical, and impressive scholarly work, "Mobilizing for Modern War" suffers from several weaknesses. Its effectiveness is hindered in part by the recurring assumption of the "inevitable" role of the Leviathan state in the industrial stage of war mobilization.... He also makes various claims, as if they were self-evident truths, such as that a powerful President is "a necessity in a modern, complex society" (p. 14) and that the government was forced to nationalize the railroads during the First World War (pp. 221, 277)....

More important, and contrary to its subtitle and to the promise of the introduction, "Mobilization for Modern War" is not a comprehensive study of the political economy of American warfare from 1865 to 1919. It is not a study of economic mobilization, but rather a narrower work about industrial mobilization. Despite the author's attempt to summarize in several paragraphs other pertinent dimensions of economic mobilization, there is little discussion here of how the government financed the war through taxes, loans, and inflation--all means of extending state power in wartime. To be sure, J. P. Morgan and Company figures large in Koistinen's revealing account of U.S. financial aid to the Allies from 1914 onward, but the banking industry, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department play at best a tangential role in the rest of his story of mobilization after American entry into the war in 1917. As painstaking as Koistinen's work is overall, anyone looking for a full treatment of the political economy of U.S. involvement in World War I will not find it here.

Rating:
Summary: An must for any WWI buff...
Review: Koistinen's look at the economic and military powerhouse that the United States became during the years before World War I was done with style and economy. This view of history is an import part of the military that is often over looked by other accounts of the same period. The story of individual personalities however romantic they may be is incomplete with the information presented by Koistinen. Koistinen's writing keeps the reader interested with the use of in depth descriptions gained through the use of many different resources. He does cover the role of the WIB, and J.P. Morgan and company in depth, and almost to the point of exhausting the topic. I would have liked reading more about how all the policy changes effected the lower enlisted man's life. Other than what I mentioned above I think the book is necessary read for anyone that intends to study WWI with any seriousness. It completes the typical military history of battles and generals with the story of the battles ship builders and steel mill owners fought at home.