Abstract
World War I wrought truly staggering change in the US government. Prior to the conflict, annual federal budgets never reached $800 million. After the smoke had cleared, the government had spent an average of about $43 million per day during wartime. Some recent historical work has connected this dramatic change in the scope of governance to everyday living. Historian Robert H. Zieger has noted that the federal government “created a host of new agencies and bureaus, employed an army of clerks and secretaries, and intruded into virtually every area of private life.” Historian Christopher Capozzola has rightly asserted that the government had help:
During the war, Americans policed their fellow citizens as part of a culture of obligation that pervaded nearly every facet of national life. At the factory and at school, in churches and in dance halls, on the streets and on the telephone, ordinary Americans were watched and governed by their fellow citizens.
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Notes
Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 77;
Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 143.
On urban life in Europe during the war, see Jerry White, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War (London: Bodley Head, 2014);
Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
and Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Strike figures from David Montgomery, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 1909–22,” Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974): 513.
Growth figures from E. Kimbark MacColl, The Shaping of a City: Business and Politics in Portland, Oregon, 1885–1915 (Portland, OR: The Georgian Press, 1976), 492;
Ship figures from Carl Abbott, Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 74–75.
Marc Allen Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 12.
William J. Breen, Uncle Sam at Home: Civilian Mobilization, Wartime Federalism, and the Council of National Defense, 1917–1919 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984) and Labor Market Politics and the Great War: The Department of Labor, the States, and the First U.S. Employment Service, 1907–1933 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997);
Gerald E. Shenk, “Work or Fight!”: Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); quote from Breen, Uncle Sam at Home , 8.
April 1917 workforce figure from Colin V. Dyment, “West Coast Shipbuilding,” American Review of Reviews (June 1918): 626 and October 1918 figure from P. H. Douglas and F. E. Wolfe, “Labor Administration in the Shipbuilding Industry during War Time,” Journal of Political Economy 27 (Mar. 1919): 147.
James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), ix;
Melvyn Dubofsky, The State & Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), xvi;
Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992), 41–60.
On the transition, see David Brody, “Workers and Work in America: The New Labor History,” in Ordinary People and Everyday Life: Perspectives on the New Social History , ed. James B. Gardner and George Rollie Adams (Nashville, TN: American Association of State and Local History, 1983): 138–159;
on the developing agenda of working-class history, see J. Carroll Moody and Alice Kessler-Harris, eds., Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990);
Ira Katznelson, “The Bourgeois Dimension: A Provocation about Institutions, Politics, and the Future of Labor History,” International Labor & Working-Class History 46 (Fall 1994): 7–32;
Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 6–9;
for the “shop floor control” synthesis, see David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004);
Christopher C. Gibbs, The Great Silent Majority: Missouri’s Resistance to World War I (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988).
Marc Scott Miller, The Irony of Victory: World War II and Lowell, Massachusetts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 12–13.
Gerald D. Nash, Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890–1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 161, 175;
Carl Abbott, How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 8;
Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 58.
Robert D. Johnston, “Beyond ‘The West’: Regionalism, Liberalism, and the Evasion of Politics in the New Western History,” Rethinking History 2 (Summer 1998): 257, 259.
Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Roger W. Lotchin, “The Impending Urban Past: An Essay on the Twentieth-Century West,” in Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century , ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 59;
Karen R. Merrill, “In Search of the ‘Federal Presence’ in the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 30 (Winter 1999): 455.
Dubofsky, The State & Labor in Modern America , 84; Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 139; Dubofsky, The State & Labor in Modern America , 97.
Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State , 12; Daniel Amsterdam, “Before the Roar: U.S. Unemployment Relief after World War I and the Long History of a Paternalist Welfare Policy,” Journal of American History 101 (Mar. 2015): 1123–1143;
Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 217.
Scholarly progress on the national importance of local antiradical politics during mid-century is evident in Shelton Stromquist, ed., Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
Frank Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Knopf, 1980), 32;
Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 39; see Donner, The Age of Surveillance , 46–47 [on 1924] and 52–55 [on 1936];
Robert Justin Goldstein, ed., Little “Red Scares”: Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921–1946 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), xiv;
Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919–1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 364, 362.
Charles Merz, The Dry Decade , American Library edition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969, ©1931), 236, 252; Mabel Walker Willebrandt, “The Inside of Prohibition: Chapter 13—When States ‘Secede,’” New York Times , Aug. 17, 1929, p. 15.
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© 2016 Adam J. Hodges
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Hodges, A.J. (2016). Introduction: World War I and the City. In: World War I and Urban Order. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137498113_1
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