“I came to see the First World War . . . as the great seminal catastrophe of this century—the event which . . . lay at the heart of the failure and decline of this Western civilization.”
—GEORGE F. KENNAN (1904–2005)
LIKE the headwaters of a great river, several influences converged in 1914 until they created an unstoppable flow of events that produced one of the most cataclysmic torrents mankind had ever experienced. Streams of imperialism, nationalism, and militarism joined; and soon they surged through an intricate system of alliances until they created the First World War. It engulfed much of two continents and engaged the rest of the globe for four years; and its effects continue to permeate twenty-first-century politics, economics, geography, and psychology.
Through the writings of Americans who lived it, this volume attempts to show how the United States confronted World War I. It reveals the country’s strained metamorphosis—from concerned observer to tide-turning participant and finally to a global force hoping to prevent the recurrence of another such catastrophe. All the authors presented here were eyewitnesses to the events depicted or participants therein; and though this collection comprises a diverse assortment of firsthand commentary—news articles, speeches, memoirs, poems, songs, editorials, letters, diaries, and histories—most of these pieces share a common thread, an often overlooked theme that accounts for much of what caused the war and much of what resulted: the affirmation of identity.
This impetus is as ancient as the Bible, suggested in the Book of Numbers when the Lord commanded Moses to count and name the members of each tribe; and thousands of years later, the United States Constitution issued a similar mandate—to take a census. Such tabulations did more than determine military power or how to apportion representatives; the numbers—today, as in earliest times—validate the people themselves, assuring them, as they are counted, that they count. Individual lives mattered; and virtually every selection in this anthology addresses that theme of identity, directly or indirectly—that desire for self-definition that helps us determine who we are as individuals, and as nations.
By the start of the twentieth century, Europe was prospering in the general calm that had lingered since Napoleon’s downfall. A handful of empires had steadily grown, often conglomerating populations even where they did not fit. Four dinosaurian autocracies ruled most of the Continent and into Asia.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a dual monarchy ruled by the House of Habsburg; and Emperor Franz Josef’s subjects included a large assortment of not just Germans and Magyars but also Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, and Croats. The Romanov dynasty dated back three hundred years, and its territory stretched from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from the mouth of the Danube River to the Pacific Ocean—more than 8.5 million square miles that were home to Ukrainians, Belarusians, Moldavians, Finns, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Kazakhs, Kirghizes, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and Poles, among many other nationalities. Adjacent to both realms, the seven-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire united Asia and Europe at Constantinople and spread east to Persia and south as far as the Gulf of Aden, encompassing Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia. While much of the empire was not arable, the entire world was beginning to appreciate not only its strategic location but also the oil beneath its sand. And finally the Hohenzollern dynasty, for centuries the kings of Prussia, ruled the new German Empire that had dominated the center of the continent since its creation in 1871. Fearing encirclement by Russia, France, and Britain, Germany’s autocratic rulers believed their survival depended on their military power and expanding navy. And though its population was far more ethnically homogeneous than those of the other empires, the rising tide of socialism was seeping into the national consciousness; and the leaders feared that in a crisis, class identity might prevail over national identity.
Thus hundreds of millions of people lived under the rule of four families. Ironically, greater consanguinity existed among the competitive crowned heads themselves—many of whom were first cousins—than between the sovereigns and their subjects. Outside castle walls, the discontent of those living under heedless autocrats intensified, and disaffected populations sowed the seeds of revolt. The Poles, for example, whose territory had been partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austria, felt no special affinity for any of those imperial powers; and political borders drawn after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 meant less to the people of Alsace-Lorraine than did the language they spoke or the boundaries imposed by the Rhine River. Ignored masses in polyglot empires invariably clung to their ethnic identities.
So it proved on June 28, 1914, when a teenage member of a small group of terrorists in the southern corner of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire shot the archduke and his wife. The assassin was a Bosnian Serb associated with a movement composed of other Serbs, as well as Croats and Bosnian Muslims. With no allegiance to leaders in Vienna or Budapest, he asserted both his motive and his identity at his trial, declaring: “I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be freed from Austria.”
Commitments established in preexisting treaties and ententes sprang into motion. Germany and Austria-Hungary quickly found themselves at war with France, Great Britain, Russia, and Japan. The Ottoman Empire, Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania would later choose sides, while a host of countries—including the Netherlands and much of Scandinavia—remained neutral.
With a long-standing tradition of avoiding foreign entanglements, the United States naturally resisted involvement in this international conflict. But President Woodrow Wilson, who would become the dominant voice in the world during the war years, had deeper reasons for not wanting his country to participate in the war, as America’s evolving foreign policy tapped into his personal history, his very identity.
Besides being the most scholarly President in American history (to this day the nation’s only chief executive to have earned a doctorate) and the most religious, Wilson was the first Southerner elected to the presidency since the Civil War. Born in 1856 in Virginia and raised during Reconstruction in Georgia and South Carolina, he remains the only President to have grown up in a country that had lost a war—the Confederate States of America. Wilson had experienced not just the devastation and deprivation of war but also the degradation—all of which provided bitter memories that dictated his policy of avoiding war at all redeemable costs. “I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its terrible wreckage and ruin,” he would later say. “It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill . . . It is some poor farmer’s boy, or the son of some poor widow . . . who will have to do the fighting and dying.” Furthermore, millions of Wilson’s constituents were “hyphenated” Americans, immigrants with family members on either side of the war in Europe.
From its start, the President exhorted Americans to remain “impartial,” not only in their action but even in their thought. This proved hardest on Wilson himself, a lifelong Anglophile. At the same time, he faced increasing opposition from stateside jingoists—most especially former President Theodore Roosevelt, whom he had defeated in the 1912 election. With each passing month of neutrality, more Americans grew restless. The harrowing reportage from overseas—especially the accounts of Germany’s wanton destruction of Belgium—stirred moral outrage; and daily arguments ripened into the greatest debate in the United States since the Civil War, a profound national conversation. The adolescent nation—only fourteen decades old—was searching for its identity; protected by an ocean on either side, the United States questioned whether it should impose itself in a world fast shrinking because of advancements in communication and transportation, a world seemingly hell-bent just then on destroying itself.
The fighting in World War I ranged from Kilimanjaro to Kosovo, from Transylvania to Tsingtao, from Basra to Riga; and for most of the American population, such places existed only in atlases. They related more readily to the fighting in Western Europe, from where the great majority of America’s immigrants had set sail. Great Britain and France, with their democratic governments, felt most like the United States; and for humanitarian or political reasons, or just because they sought adventure, many Americans joined the French Foreign Legion or the Lafayette Escadrille or one of several volunteer ambulance services so that they could be part of the action on the Western Front.
The opening offensives of the war resulted in massive casualties on both sides and ended in stalemate. By 1915, the evenly matched Allied Powers and Central Powers looked to the sea for an advantage: the British Royal Navy blockaded Germany, in hopes of starving that nation into submission; and the German Kaiserliche Marine launched a counter-blockade with persistently aggressive submarine warfare.
For the United States, the fighting remained a world away—until May 7, when a German U-boat torpedoed the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania, taking the lives of almost 1,200 passengers and crew, 128 Americans among them. This disaster politicized the war for the United States. While Wilson himself continued to practice neutrality, he increasingly preached Americanism and Preparedness, as the small peacetime army of his isolationist nation gradually expanded. By the start of 1916, the President had rid himself of a pacifistic secretary of state and raised his rhetoric to new levels of patriotism; that June, he officially proclaimed Flag Day. The national debate raged.
“He kept us out of war” was a campaign slogan that helped re-elect Wilson in November; but within weeks of his second inauguration—at which he proclaimed, “We are provincials no longer”—American entry into the war felt imminent. Germany had reneged on earlier pledges and resumed unrestricted submarine warfare; and then interception of a telegram from the German foreign minister revealed his country’s attempt to enlist Mexico in fighting against the United States. On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. In his request he introduced a moral component to American foreign policy, one that has provided the foundation for the country’s international diplomacy ever since. In suggesting a mission of spreading democracy around the world, Wilson directed the United States to play a leading role in global politics.
Rising above the usual reasons that drew countries into war—territory, treasure, or simply long-standing tribal rivalry—President Wilson summoned Americans to fight for universal principles. He enumerated them in a speech in January 1918. Several of his points were general matters of diplomacy—such as arms reduction and self-determination; others were specific territorial matters. In no instance did the United States seek any specific gains for itself; he thought the country should fight for supra-national interests, most especially his fourteenth point—an Arthurian notion of a League of Nations, a table at which all countries would settle disagreements before they could mushroom into wars.
It took a year before the United States had armed and trained enough soldiers to engage in battle; and in the six months that followed, the fresh American Expeditionary Forces fought across rivers and through villages, towns, woods, and forests north and east of Paris, their charming names becoming synonyms for blood-soaked battlefields. By then, almost four years in the trenches, artillery bombardments, machine guns, chemical warfare, and disease—notably an influenza pandemic—had exhausted both sides; but the Allied forces won.
With the Armistice in November 1918, Wilson realized his toughest fights lay ahead—in crafting a peace treaty. The world was a jump ball, what with the demise of the four autocratic empires and their former territories up for grabs, economies in crisis, and measurable percentages of populations decimated. Wilson hoped the war had unknotted enough foreign entanglements to allow a new world order to be knitted together.
The President of the United States spent the next six months outside the country—in Paris, wangling to get his Fourteen Points incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles, all the while arguing with the Allied leaders to lessen their punitive demands of Germany. By the end of his stay, Wilson had made certain compromises to ensure the inclusion of his League, for he believed the “future peace and policy of the world” depended upon an entirely new political model—that there must no longer be a “balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.”
Wars are game changers, and the First World War catalyzed transformations in America that altered the country’s nature—from the halls of government to the wheat fields then feeding the world. Upon America’s entering battle, President Wilson had told Congress, “Politics is adjourned”; but every one of the wartime issues that would actually change America’s identity invoked intense partisan debate and sometimes provoked violence. Redefinitions of government operations (if not new vocabulary altogether) left traces that exist to this day.
Almost overnight, the federal government enlarged—creating an alphabet soup of thousands of boards, agencies, committees, and commissions. The President recruited America’s business titans to work in conjunction with the armed forces, establishing an infrastructure for a military-industrial complex.
This sudden growth demanded a reconstruction of the economy, as the federal deficit had bounced from $1 billion to $9 billion. The government sharply raised the tax rates on extreme wealth and added to its coffers by selling war bonds. Washington courted Hollywood—a new American industry built on the premise that people enjoyed watching flickering images of larger-than-life people; and recruitment of these movie stars contributed to the bonds’ hugely successful subscription. So that the Department of the Treasury did not have to go to Congress every time it wanted to float a bond, the legislature established what it called a “debt ceiling,” a roof they kept raising.
For the first time, the United States had militarized on a scale grand enough to fight an overseas war—expanding an army of 130,000 “doughboys,” as they were called, to some four million and a navy that increased almost tenfold to 500,000 sailors. In order to muster an army of this magnitude, the government created the Selective Service System, a nationwide network of local boards that would determine the fitness of its community members to serve. It became a great social equalizer that might place a scion of a great family in the same trench with a dirt-poor farm boy. Many rural high school students were excused from class to work their land, producing the additional food necessary for the troops and the starving civilians overseas. The government authorized Daylight Saving Time, creating an extra hour of productivity each day.
This great military mobilization affected all races in America—separately and not always equally. Four hundred thousand African Americans were inducted, and many considered their service a path to full citizenship. Surely, they thought, making the world safe for democracy meant an end to disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and lynching at home in the United States. But military units, trenches, and burials remained segregated; and in 1917, African American soldiers experienced a death rate twice that of whites, performing the lowliest duties while receiving inferior medical care. Stateside, a need for labor in the North spurred a Great Migration of African Americans, who imagined greater fortune ahead. But when black soldiers returned from the war, they found their opportunities were the same as when they had left, or worse; and whites across the country who feared the creeping acceptance of racial equality incited the most brutal race riots the nation had ever seen.
Female identity underwent several significant changes as a result of the war. With so much of the male population in military service, women took to working outside the home. Black women were able to find employment as something other than domestics—serving as waitresses and elevator operators. Most important, while President Wilson had long considered woman suffrage a states’ rights issue, he went to Congress to argue that passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was essential to winning the war and fulfilling the nation’s democratic goals. After decades of speeches, petitions, and demonstrations, women finally received the vote for which they had long fought.
And the war revived an aspect of the American character that had lain dormant for years—xenophobia. Fear of German subversion had sparked the adoption of draconian espionage and sedition laws that not only established a framework for protecting national security but also dangerously curtailed free speech. After the Armistice, a spate of anarchist bombings prompted a nationwide surge of arrests, imprisonments, and deportations that came to be considered perilously excessive in their disregard for civil liberties and due process.
In the wake of the Allied victory, America was perceived as the world’s first modern superpower, and its president was received in Paris, where the peace talks were held, as its savior. With several empires dismantled, everybody waited to see how Wilson thought the maps of the world should be redrawn. His concept of “self-determination” raised old questions of identity, especially when it came to defining nations. Such factors as geography, ethnicity, language, religion, economy, and history all had to be considered. Censuses were taken, and numbers in almost every imaginable category were totaled. Much of America’s future identity would also be determined at those peace conference tables, as several members of its next generation of leaders played roles in Paris—including two future Presidents (Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt), two future secretaries of state (John Foster Dulles and Christian Herter), and numerous future ambassadors and heads of agencies.
The Treaty of Versailles ended the war with Germany on June 28, 1919, but then the next battle began. While the United States Constitution allowed the President to make treaties, it required Senate approval; and a rancorous Republican upper chamber intended to shred Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic accord, which included the League of Nations. Before a vote could be taken, he took his argument to the people by embarking on a month-long whistle-stop tour of the country. He made the cause one of identity—melding his with that of his nation. “Sometimes people call me an idealist,” he told a crowd in South Dakota. “Well, that is the way I know I am an American.” And if the Senate did not accept this treaty, he warned, “I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war.”
Before the tour had ended, the President collapsed. Rushed back to Washington, he suffered a stroke days later. His vision of bringing America into the League died, and his prophecy lived: the victors and the vanquished went to war twenty years later, fighting over many of the same battlefields as before. Many argue that the severe terms of the Treaty ruined Germany, guaranteeing its desire for revenge; others contend that Germany never even made a dent in its reparation bills and that its refusal to accept its defeat in 1918 caused the second global conflagration. Several of the reconfigured countries after the First World War held for the better part of a century—including Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and various states in the Middle East. But people’s undeniable need for identity keeps returning, begging acknowledgment; and new nations continue to emerge a century later.
While this collection focuses on factual writing, its coda acknowledges a related cultural phenomenon: World War I stimulated a landmark era in American fiction. The war became the defining moment for “the lost generation”—those young people who served in the war and spent the next several years searching for their identities. While the United States reveled in a decade of prosperity and madcap behavior, its most serious novelists explored the themes of postwar disillusionment, creating some of the most enduring fiction in the American canon: Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby meets Daisy Fay at Camp Taylor in Louisville; Hemingway’s Jake Barnes struggles with his war wound from Italy; Faulkner’s self-destructive Bayard Sartoris, his twin brother killed in action, returns from the war to Yoknapatawpha County.
Several of America’s most significant novelists appear in this collection, but not in their customary roles. Here they join the ranks of the nonfiction writers as correspondents—for major periodicals or just in sending letters home—recording their firsthand experiences of the war. Many thoughtful histories of World War I have appeared over the last century, as each generation has extracted new information and examined it under the lens of its era; they tend to magnify those moments of the past that especially address the present.
All the selections that follow capture moments of the past when they were the present. One hundred years after the events depicted in these pages, readers know the outcomes of World War I; but the authors of these pieces did not. The immediacy of their observations and the rawness of their emotions are all fraught with electrifying uncertainty.
It remains difficult to mark the conclusion of the First World War as the world continues to live in its aftermath, still fighting over many of the same places and issues of one hundred years ago. In the end, the ancients proved wise in urging censuses, as time tends to reduce history to its basic numbers; and the horrifying statistics of this war should never be forgotten. The reckoning comes to 10 million soldiers killed, 23 million more wounded, and another 6 million civilians dead directly because of the war or disease. (And those numbers do not include the tens of millions who succumbed to the war-related influenza pandemic.) The Congressional Research Service tallied 116,708 American military deaths. One of those souls has been specially memorialized at Arlington National Cemetery—a body that got counted but could never be identified, an American who eternally remains “the Unknown Soldier.”
World War I forever altered America’s character. After supplying humanitarian relief to faraway countries during the early part of the war, the United States proceeded to act further on a moral imperative, offering the commitment of an entire nation in the name of peace and freedom. In years thereafter, America’s confident stride on the world stage would often become a swagger, and peacemaking efforts would evolve into peacekeeping. But fundamentally, the enduring legacy of this war for Americans lies in its commitment to the belief that all people forging their identities, no matter how small their numbers, are entitled to the privilege of self-determination and to the principle that all people are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights. The war gave Americans that new sense of their own national identity, one that emboldened them to help others realize theirs.
—A. Scott Berg
July 2016