The Great War and America: Civil-Military Relations During World War I (review)

This is a confusing book. In the series Foreword the editors state: “No other aspect of a nation’s political health is as important as the relationship between its government and military”(p. ix). And the author in her Preface asserts “This book analyses the complex civilmilitary interaction during the Great War-an interaction that significantly impacted both American society and its armed forces”(p. xii). Yet readers will find little about the relations between President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of War Newton D. Baker in it. Nor will they find anything about the relations between the Secretary of War and his Chiefs of Staff, Hugh Scott, Tasker Bliss, John Biddle, and Peyton March. There is little or nothing about the Navy. Except to fault them for cutting postwar appropriations for aiding demobilized soldiers, connections between Congress and the military are barely mentioned. Finally, there is little about the new wartime relationships between government and industry. Bernard Baruch is mentioned twice-once on preparedness and once in the documents section (pp. 12–13, 118). The volume is apparently about the changing social relations between the Army and American civil society, but it deals with only a handful of selected issues. That does not mean that the author’s thesis is not significant. During the Great War the U.S. Army did become involved in daily life in the United States in ways that had never occurred before.

The book is very short for its topic. There is a chapter on the Preparedness Movement; one on the draft, which includes sections on foreign-born and African-American soldiers; one on public opinion and censorship; a strange one on “Science, Technology and Modern Warfare,” which spends a lot of time on poison gas and a few soldier’s battle memories; and finally, an interesting chapter on demobilization and re-employment. A number of documents are included at the end of the book.

Unfortunately, there are important omissions and errors of fact in this work. For example, although it only comes up in a footnote rather than in the text, Black officers did have a training camp, at Des Moines, Iowa (p. 49); the German “Paris Gun” was not a howitzer (p. 72); the Lewis Gun controversy, which the author does not mention, began in 1912, and only Marines carried the weapon to Europe (p. 75). The relatively few soldier’s memories are taken from the internet. Many of the other sources, especially for the preparedness movement, are published monographs with which most scholars are familiar. This book is very expensive; it is too detailed for the general reader; and it contributes little that is not already familiar to the specialist.