So why, given such solid achievement, is America's Great War so little regarded at home? Obviously, this conflict has been overlaid by the wars that followed, the Second World Ear in particular. But emotion has helped make America's memory selective too - and the strongest emotion in the mix has been shame: the nineteen months of war began in a blaze of patriotic unity, and ended in bitterness, division, and regret.
American went to fight in 1917 with an innocent determination to remake the world; the nation emerged in November 1918 with its sense of purpose shattered, with its certainties shaken, and with a new and unwelcome self-knowledge. Many Americans wanted to turn their backs on the war almost from the moment it ended.
The timing of the war could not have been worse for American society. In 1914, the country was changing more rapidly than at any time in its history. People were trying to come to terms with the massive industrial development that had followed the Civil War - the vast immigration it had sparked, the growth of the cities, the closing of the frontier, the new technologies and their impact on daily life and work. War interrupted all the attempts at social reform and the search for a new, united America, and it aggravated the tensions of a society in flux.
The nature of the war increased the damage. This was total war, the conflict not of army against army but nation against nation, and it required the mobilization of every resource, human, moral, and material; the shock was greater because few Americans had seriously contemplated the possibility of entering the war and the country had made no preparations to fight a land war in Europe. Unplanned and uncoordinated, the mobilization exploded under a society that prided itself on being quintessentially civilian.
The federal budget grew from $742 million in 1916 to almost $14 billion in 1918, and the balance of political power shifted just as dramatically. Where once power had been widely dispersed and shared, during the war the nation was organized and directed from the center down to the details of its dress, its food, and its conversation. The nation surrendered itself to the draft, to censorship, to repression. Dissent was forbidden, and even honest criticism was outlawed. Worse, ordinary Americans volunteered to police the system, to spy on their neighbors, to condone violence and the abuse of civil rights, to participate in a shameful travesty of their former lives.
By insisting on conformity, the government placed enormous strains on this diverse society. The emotions it whipped up to unite its people against the foreign enemy - hatred, fear, suspicion, intolerance - turned inward and ravaged the people themselves. Blacks, radicals, religious minorities, the foreign-born, all became scapegoats for the country's ills, victims of a nativism that grew more intense as the first shoots of communism appeared on American soil in 1918.
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When the peace negotiations at Versailles finally came to an end, America perceived itself as having gained nothing; the prevailing sense was of having participated in a vindictive, dishonorable treaty dictated by the Allies. As far as they were able, Americans turned their backs on Europe and tried to return to normality. But there was no going back for America, any more than for Britain or Russia. Americans could not recapture the innocent optimism and self-confidence of the prewar days. Wide rents had appeared in the social fabric of American, and the experiment of the melting pot appeared to be over. Rudely, the war had thrust Americans into the uncertain future of the twentieth century: its consequences are our legacy today.
~ Meirion & Susie Harries, The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917-1918 (1997), prologue, pp. 7-9
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