Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (review)

Jennifer Keene has made a noteworthy and important contribution to a growing renaissance of studies on the First World War. Keene successfully challenges the facile conventional wisdom of many American historians that the war was an event of relative insignificance, especially when compared to the Civil War that preceded it and the Second World War that followed it. Instead, she powerfully demonstrates that the war was responsible for an entirely new social contract between the government and the millions of men who either volunteered for, or were conscripted into, the American army. This rearranging of traditional American notions of military service converted the military into an avenue of social mobility and the government into a large-scale provider of social services. The GI Bill of Rights that World War I veterans helped to craft in 1944 ensured that the military service of World War II veterans led to the mass creation of a middle-class society.

Keene’s work shares a focus with that of David Montgomery and others who studied workers’ control of industrial production in the nineteenth century. Keene argues that even in a normally authoritarian environment like the military, workers (in this case, soldiers) have tremendous power to reshape the terms of discipline and service. The unwillingness of citizen-soldiers to accept the military’s attempt to subordinate them led to a process of negotiation that surprised and often frustrated professional officers. As a result the army had a “diluted ability to dictate the terms of obedience” (5). Citizen-soldiers could, and did, resist even basic military requirements like the salute. Army hard-liners soon realized the futility of attempting to enforce such regulations on each and every member of a citizen army. Progressive reformers inside the army therefore turned to morale enhancement programs and more gentle methods of enforcement.

Like Fred Anderson’s work on the colonial period, Keene argues that soldiers in the First World War understood their service as a social contract whose terms were subject to negotiation and even termination. These idealistic and naïve young men expected to join the army, charge at German trenches, and lead a triumphal march to Berlin. When they instead found themselves undergoing arduous training in squalid stateside bases and performing manual labor in France, they often assumed that the terms of their contract had been broken. Noncombatants, selected from the same pool of men as combat soldiers, responded by working slowly or not at all. Finding ways to legitimate and render meaningful the contributions of such men proved to be a major challenge for the army. Keene’s focus on noncombatant soldiers is significant and has no parallel in a literature that devotes the bulk of its attention to the dramatic events of the front lines.

Keene’s nuanced treatment of the incredible complexities of race in the American army is another strength of this book. Soldiers, white and black alike, brought their own preconceived notions of race into the armed forces. While the army had no interest in turning itself into a social laboratory, it did search for predictability in race relations. The army’s segregation and assignment of most blacks to labor units were critical elements to their solution to the race problem. While racism tended to be the dominant characteristic of the American army, Keene argues that the picture was more complicated. Because military service became a mark of honor, the uniform itself occasionally became a force for uniting soldiers of different races. While official army policies nearly always preferenced whites, black soldiers could expect some social and legal protections from their uniforms. The much less restrictive racial environment that black troops found in France underscored the discriminatory nature of American society. The ease with which blacks forged friendships with French men and women had the ironic result of diminishing the image of France in the eyes of many whites. At the same time, it showed blacks that “one’s actions could...