There is no man more dedicated to documenting the entirety of the American experience in World War I than historian Justus D. Doenecke. His monumental More Precious than Peace: A New History of America in World War I covers diplomatic, military, and ideological aspects of U.S. involvement as a full-scale participant in World War I. In the following guest post, he describes his goals for the project and summarizes his work for the reader.
Particularly within the past decade, amid the centennial of World War I, many fresh accounts have been written concerning the American role in the struggle. Some narratives paint with a broad brush, covering such matters as the nature of Wilsonianism and America’s rise to global financial dominance. Not surprisingly, the story of American ground forces has received fresh treatment, and attention is now given to the role of war correspondents. New biographies have been written on such diverse figures as President Wilson, Colonel House, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Lansing, William Gibbs McAdoo, Newton D. Baker, Josephus Daniels, and journalist Roy W. Howard.
This account does much with the domestic controversies regarding the nature of American participation. As one who has spent much of his career dealing with opponents of administration foreign policy from 1931 to the early Cold War, I continue to examine foes of American intervention, this time scrutinizing the way the nation waged World War I. Hence, I offer extensive coverage of critics of the president’s policies, both those who found him insufficiently belligerent and those who sought immediate negotiation with the Central Powers. I explore diplomatic ineptitude, as reflected in a Russian policy singularly incompetent in execution; production snags, leading to AEF reliance on Allied weapons during the entire involvement; and military incompetence, as revealed in crucial battles and campaigns. When historians have differed over various topics, their views are included.
My narrative is the second in a series of dealing with the administration of Woodrow Wilson in regards to World War I and its aftermath. The first volume, Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I (2011), covers the period beginning in August 1914, when the European powers found themselves embraced in deadly struggle, and ends in April 1917, when the United States entered what was once known as the Great War. As with the previous volume, I hope to share with both the general reader and the specialist my research in both primary sources and secondary literature.
This work begins with the first great controversy of the war, the conscription issue, in the process revealing lively debates as to what America’s general role should be in the conflict. It moves to the nation’s first military participation in the war, that involving the navy, which played a crucial role as the United States initially entered the conflict. As, from the outset, the Wilson administration deemed national unity essential to achieving victory, the book takes up in turn the Creel Committee, legislation designed to suppress dissident opinion, the activities of those responsible for enforcing “100% Americanism,” ethnic targets of the “patriotic” crusades, attacks on publisher William Randolph Hearst and Senator Robert M. La Follette, and assaults on the political left. The narrative continues with the U.S. reaction to the Russian revolutions of March and November 1917, events that challenged war aims throughout the entire West,
increased radical sentiments everywhere, and soon led to Allied military intervention. These topics are succeeded by Wilson’s vision of a just peace, scandals in military training and production, and American combat on the Western front. After describing the nation’s final negotiations with both the Germans and Allies and the politics leading up to the 1918 congressional race, the book concludes with the armistice of November 11.