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  • California at War: The State and the People during World War One by M. T. North
  • Roger W. Lotchin (bio)
California at War: The State and the People during World War One. By Diane M. T. North. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Pp. 496. $29.95 hardcover)

I came to an interest in the "Great War" while browsing through the stacks at the University of Chicago library. I mostly read and was fascinated by first-hand accounts. Over time that helped me to understand why so many professors at the time were pushing their students toward history "from the bottom up." The approach encouraged me to think comprehensively about history. Perhaps the strongest point of Professor Diane M. T. North's study of the Great War is its exhaustiveness, especially its research. To say the least, it is immense. It covers manuscript [End Page 106] collections, reports from several levels of government, national and state archives, personal and public correspondence, memoirs, major public figures and many minor ones, prominent newspapers, educators, boosters, and more. The research is truly outstanding. The book certainly deserves to have been brought out by one of the best university presses on military history, the University Press of Kansas.

It broadens our understanding of the history of California at every step. All the major groups get their due—men, women, people of color, university students, nurses, professors, YMCA and YWCA personnel, and so forth. She treats with respect the homefront and the military in action, the bond drives, the actors and actresses, and the economics of war (a special contribution), plus the gassing and dreadful influenza epidemic at the end of this tragedy and in the early postwar period. The war killed 56,000 men in combat and some 117,000 men overall from the immediate effects of the fighting. And they kept on dying and suffering long after 11-11-11. My wife's friend's father shivered his life away after the war from the consequences of gassing and my own favorite history professor died in his eighties from its lingering effects. One of the author's most important contributions, although one that she does not develop, is that the American deaths were almost all male, most in the prime of their lives. The book is both well written and careful about detail, painstakingly careful. For example, when dealing with numbers, and she often does, the author invariably supplies both Great War numbers and their equivalents today. Nothing escapes her touch—combat medals, shoulder patches, insignias, ammunition, monuments. The book ends with a rich bibliography and an excellent chronology of the conflict covering all powers, but the curiosity that it provokes will not.

North writes from a liberal perspective, so she explores the civil rights violations in California especially well. She does not break new ground here, but she deepens it considerably. Yet here her interpretation fails to support the overwhelming mass of information that she has mobilized. For the mostly homefront failings of the conflict, especially civil rights ones, she blames various well-known villains like the contradictions of democracy, the class basis of the state, the Republicans, or the beginnings of the "surveillance state." These were important factors, but they were more effects rather than causes. Democracy was just as "contradictory" in peace as in war, and class bias was just as pervasive; war did not invent either. Employers might have been unduly aroused by the war, but they were already militant before the conflict, as was labor. The wartime abuses grew out of the creation of the modern nation-state. The war pumped up its authority in every way imaginable. [End Page 107]

One of North's best contributions is to show how a civilian level of wartime authority grew up under that of the national government, one which worked with the formal state. Between the well-known sedition, espionage, sabotage, and other wartime laws and the extraordinary expansion of civil agencies, the war created a "Leviathan." Randolph Bourne was absolutely correct when he said that "war is the life of the state." Long after the war ended, much of the legislation that liberal historians have lamented remained on...

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