Over Here: The First World War and American Society
by David M. Kennedy
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Book Summary Information
Author: David M. KennedyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-10-07
ISBN: 0195173996
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of Over Here: The First World War and American Society
Book Review: the importance of securing one's own base of support
Summary: 5 Stars
I. The War for the American Mind
In convincing his progressive base to enter WWI, Wilson promised `a war for democracy, a war to end war, a war to protect liberalism, a war against militarism, a war to redeem barbarous Europe, a crusade.' In turn, the `progressives had rallied to Wilson on the promise that he would make the center hold, that his mobilization policies would preserve reform gains at home and that his diplomacy would introduce liberal American moderation into the settlement of the conflict in Europe.' Yet, `Wilson's determination to extinguish dissent' splintered and disillusioned his progressive base from the enactment of the Sedition Act, the `landmark of repression in American history,' to the empowerment of Post-master General Albert Sidney Burleson, who prosecuted the Espionage Act of June 1917 with gusto. Heading the Committee on Public Information, George Creel advanced rank nativism with his `Americanization' campaign emboldened the 100 percenters and spurred the `ugly fires of vigilantism' while the Department of Justice and Supreme Court remained mum on civil liberties violations. In this war for the American mind, Wilson alienated and besmirched his radical and liberal supporters contributing to the Democratic congressional losses in 1918 and his subsequent failure to advance his peace policies.
II. The Political Economy of War: The Home Front
In funding the war, the Federal Reserve became the bond-selling window of the Treasury and rather than `relying either on heavy taxation or on market-rate borrowing,' McAdoo exhorted the public to support Liberty Loans frequently employing forced emotionalism. Kennedy remarked that McAdoo's `polices in practice prompted massive bank borrowing. And because debt obligations in the hands of banks provide a basis for the creation of credit, McAdoo's tactics produced powerfully inflationary results.' Bernard Baruch's tenure in the War Industries Board to champion his vision of business-government integration left `entire industries, even entire economic sectors as in the case of agriculture, were organized and disciplined as never before, and brought into close and regular relations with counterpart congressional committees, cabinet departments and Executive agencies.' WIB's operations left a lasting legacy of the war in the American political and economic cultures: `From the war can be dated the origins of the modern practice of massive informal collusion between government and organized private enterprises; For the remainder of the century, government in America would be in large measure an affair conducted of, by and for special interest groups of that type, to the frequent neglect of the unorganized and of the `public interest.''
III You Are in the Army Now
John Pershing's plan for American army in Europe called for `a massive, head-on confrontation with the main German force.' Kennedy credited this American Civil War strategy for fixing the American image of war from the 1860s.
IV Over There - and Back
Kennedy contested Paul Fussell's claim that `American writing about the war tends to be spare and one-dimensional, devoid of allusion, without the shaping mold of tradition to give it proper form.' In the British experience, `irony displaced mimesis as the dominant form of understanding' as Fussell argued `that this transformation marked the passage of English literature form a "low mimetic" phase, in which the hero's power of action had typically approximated the reader's (as in the nineteenth-century novel) to an `ironic' modern phase, in which the protagonist's power of action is less than that of the reader, who has the sense of looking down on scenes of frustration or absurdity (as in many twentieth-century novels and plays).'
Kennedy's riposte centered on the truncated life cycle of American war writing. For most of the young men in the AEF, `the war had provided a welcome relief from ordinary life' and `they had arrived too late and moved too swiftly to be deeply disabused of their adventurous expectations.' Hence, American accounts, Kennedy explained, `reside along a different frontier of the low mimetic mode: the boundary that separates it from the `high mimetic' style of epic, romance, and myth in which the hero's power of action exceeds that of ordinary people in everyday life.' The duality in American literary culture can be found by contrasting the 'high mimetic' work by an older generation of writers, such as Edith Wharton, Claude Wheeler, Willa Cather, who `had preached that combat offered adventure-filled liberation from the iron trend of peacetime society toward mechanization, routine and the suppression of the individual' with those of postwar novelists of protests such as Hemingway, Dos Passos and Cummings.
One of the lasting legacies of the war, Kenney opined, was `an immense void of incomprehension that separated the intellectuals from the masses.' The sensibilities `enshrined in the minds of the American Legionnaires' were markedly different from 'those expressed in the novels of postwar novelists of protest.' They `protested less against the war itself than against a way of seeing and describing the war; they saw and remembered a different war than that which most of `Pershing's Crusaders' had witnessed' since many of them had participated in the war much earlier.
V Armistice and Aftermath
The post-mortem of the 1918 mid-term election revealed that `not the immediate details of the Armistice but the accumulated resentments at wartime domestic policies had swung the election to the GOP.' The Democrats' death knell was the bifurcation of its coalition of West and South. Wilson's fateful decision to veto the wheat price amendment which would have raised the government's artificial support level for the Western farmers `drove Westerners back into the Republican fold.'
VI The Political Economy of War: The International Dimension
Confuting the notion that `Wilson's efforts to force American trade and ships and capital into the international system economic policies abroad as a quest for profit,' Kennedy interpreted them as part of a political strategy to create `a largely internationally oriented constituency in the business community' to support his foreign policy. Wilson recognized the need to `break down the parochialism of American businessmen and stitch their interests permanently into the new international fabric.' Yet, `that constituency and that support did not materialize.' One of the chief obstacles was the `asymmetry of America's relation to the world economy' and the preponderance of the domestic investment opportunities.
In Kennedy's analysis, Wilson's own economic philosophies thwarted his foreign ambitions and atrophied his economic trump cards. First, `throughout the conflict, it had been Wilson's main intention to depart from the normal as little as possible, especially in economic matters.' This `ideological aversion of the President and his circle to perpetuating war-born governmental and inter-governmental controls over trade and investment' paradoxically frustrated `the cooperative economic arrangements that would provide necessary undergirding to the political structure they hoped to erect.' Wilson wanted influence without responsibilities by pursuing an `almost an opposite policy - seeking American political participation in the international order but hesitating to integrate American economic resources fully into that order.'
VI Epilogue: Promises of Glory
At the peace treaty, Wilson's dogmatic approach to peace followed a zero-sum game. Had Wilson `firmly grasped the outstretched hand of the European socialists in 1917 and 1918 in all the Allied countries, he might thus have brace those constituencies most sympathetic to his vision of peace and most disposed to challenge the reactionary designs of their own governments.' Similarly, by excluding Republicans from the American delegation at Paris, he ensured fierce Senate opposition. On Article X, Wilson fought to the bitter end; `if there could be no treaty other than a purely Wilson treaty, then there would be no legal close to the war itself except on Wilson's terms.'
Summary of Over Here: The First World War and American Society
The Great War of 1914-1918 confronted the United States with one of the most wrenching crises in the nation's history. It also left a residue of disruption and disillusion that spawned an even more ruinous conflict scarcely a generation later.Over Here is the single-most comprehensive discussion of the impact of World War I on American society. This 25th anniversary edition includes a new afterword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author David M. Kennedy, that explains his reasons for writing the original edition as well as his opinions on the legacy of Wilsonian idealism, most recently reflected in President George W. Bush's national security strategy. More than a chronicle of the war years, Over Here uses the record of America's experience in the Great War as a prism through which to view early twentieth century American society. The ways in which America mobilized for the war, chose to fight it, and then went about the business of enshrining it in memory all indicate important aspects of enduring American character. An American history classic, Over Here reflects on a society's struggle with the pains of war, and offers trenchant insights into the birth of modern America.
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