Was the Great War a Good War?

Reading these two books together makes one appreciate how fundamentally historians still dispute whether U.S. intervention in the First World War was either necessary or moral. To their credit, neither Michael S. Neiberg nor G. J. Meyer leaves any doubt about where they stand. Neiberg decisively argues that it was, while Meyer, just as resolutely, disagrees. Both authors are vigorous proponents of their particular points of view. But as in legal briefs, their books neglect aspects of the problem that would weaken their case.

According to Neiberg, "A German victory would impose a European and global order unacceptable to the American people" (p. 212). His narrative ends with the declaration of war by Congress in April, 1917. Until that point, he describes those who opposed building a larger military as utterly naïve about the malevolence of German intentions and portrays Woodrow Wilson as an overly cautious politician whose indecisiveness "highlighted the nation's essential weakness" (p. 87). For Neiberg, the president, prominent "isolationists" like William Jennings Bryan, and any Americans who followed their lead only postponed the inevitable and probably prolonged the war. Neiberg concludes, "by failing for so long to confront reality they had put themselves in an even more dangerous position" (p. 229).

Meyer would undoubtedly view this argument as a species of retrospective jingoism. For him, the decision to go to war was the result of "two and a half years of unrelenting anti-German propaganda and self-censorship by the American press" (p. 192). His Wilson is a vain, self-righteous figure who finally resolved, despite a lack of public enthusiasm, to take the U.S. into Europe's bloody cauldron because, for him, "the thought of being on the outside while other men decided the fate of the world would have been unbearable" (p. 212). Meyer devotes two-thirds of his book to what occurred after the U.S. joined the Allies—government repression, six months of combat, the influenza epidemic, the Versailles conference, and the Senate's rejection of the peace treaty. But his interpretation of those events only deepens his cynical approach to the role the U.S. played in the conflict and the post-war world.

Unfortunately, each writer takes less care with the factual construction of his narrative than he does to present a vigorous argument. Neiberg's largest failing is his penchant for making bold assertions about the state of popular opinion while offering little or no evidence to back them up. He claims that, in 1915, backers of an arms embargo "did not … represent the views of the American people" but cites just two newspapers and one magazine, all of which were published in New York City (p. 61). Later, writing about the Armenian genocide, he writes that "Americans grew increasingly frustrated at either the inability or the unwillingness of the government to act" (p. 97). His evidence for that statement consists of a report by an Episcopal missionary who was living in Armenia and Theodore Roosevelt, who despised Woodrow Wilson. When Neiberg turns to the critical issue of whether to the U.S. military should have expanded, he claims "Most Americans in 1915 saw Preparedness as a way to avoid war through the creation of military strength that the nation would hopefully never have to use" (p. 124). To support that assertion, he cites two newspapers and former Secretary of War and State Elihu Root, whose advocacy of preparedness was nearly as strong as Roosevelt's. There are as many as a dozen other examples of such unsubstantiated confidence in what the majority of Americans believed.

Any historian who tries to gauge public opinion in the U.S. about a contentious matter from any era before the 1930s (when serious polling began) must rely on a range of sources, nearly all of which took one side or another. During...