Bibliographic Details
Ronald Schaffer. America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. xvii + 244 pp.
Thesis Statement
Schaffer argues that the American mobilization for World War I did not merely involve military logistics but fundamentally transformed the relationship between the federal government, capital, and labor. More significantly, he contends that the administrative machinery, bureaucratic precedents, and ideological framework forged during 1917-1918—which he terms the “war welfare state”—became the blueprint for the modern American regulatory and welfare state, influencing the New Deal and beyond.
Summary
In America in the Great War, Ronald Schaffer provides a deeply revisionist account of the American home front during the First World War, challenging the traditional view that the conflict was a brief, aberrant episode in an otherwise isolationist century. The book traces how President Woodrow Wilson and his administration, facing an unprepared nation and a skeptical public, created an unprecedented apparatus of state intervention. Schaffer focuses on the new federal agencies—the War Industries Board, the Food Administration, the Railroad Administration, and the Committee on Public Information—and shows how they systematically mobilized, regulated, and propagandized the American economy and society.
The core of Schaffer’s argument is that this mobilization was neither temporary nor accidental. He documents how the Wilson administration deliberately used the wartime emergency to implement a progressive vision of a managed economy, one that would temper laissez-faire capitalism through expert-led public-private partnerships. Schaffer examines the tensions that arose between business leaders who sought to control the new boards and progressive reformers who saw the war as an opportunity to advance social justice, including women’s suffrage, labor rights, and anti-child labor legislation. He pays particular attention to the coercive side of this state-building, including the suppression of dissent through the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the persecution of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the racial violence that erupted during and immediately after the war.
The book culminates in an analysis of how the wartime state collapsed after the Armistice, yet left behind key personnel, habits of mind, and legal precedents that would be revived under Franklin Roosevelt. Schaffer argues convincingly that the New Deal was not a radical break with the American past but the reactivation, on a larger scale, of the experimental state created in 1917-1918. The war welfare state, he suggests, provided the administrative tools and the political justification for the enduring expansion of federal authority into American life.
Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown
- Chapter One: War as Opportunity – Sets the stage by describing how progressive reformers and Wilson administration officials viewed the war as a “plastic moment” for social and economic reform.
- Chapter Two: The Business of War – Examines the creation of the War Industries Board and the Council of National Defense, showing the contested partnership between government and corporate leaders.
- Chapter Three: The Politics of Food – Analyzes Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration as a model of voluntary national mobilization, blending propaganda, price controls, and moral suasion.
- Chapter Four: The Search for Industrial Harmony – Covers the National War Labor Board and the Wilson administration’s halting efforts to mediate labor disputes and secure union recognition in exchange for no-strike pledges.
- Chapter Five: The Coercive State – Documents the dark side of mobilization: censorship, the Palmer Raids, the prosecution of antiwar activists, and the suppression of the IWW.
- Chapter Six: Manpower and Morale – Focuses on the Selective Service System and the Committee on Public Information, including the role of advertising and film in manufacturing consent for war.
- Chapter Seven: The Color Line and the War – Explores how the war inflamed racial tensions, from the East St. Louis riots to the Houston mutiny, and how African Americans used the rhetoric of democracy to advance their own claims.
- Chapter Eight: The Legacy of the War Welfare State – Concludes by tracing the persistence of wartime personnel and ideas into the 1920s and their revival during the New Deal and World War II.
Scholarly Reception and Representative Quotes
Schaffer’s work has been widely praised for reframing World War I as a crucible of American state-building. Critics have noted that the book sometimes overstates the coherence of progressive intentions, but it remains a standard text in the field. The Journal of American History called it “an indispensable corrective to the view that the Great War left no institutional trace on American domestic life.”
Representative Quote 1:
“The war welfare state was not an accidental byproduct of the conflict. It was a deliberate construction, fashioned by men who saw in the emergency a chance to remake the American economy along rational, scientific, and—they believed—more just lines.” (p. 15)
Representative Quote 2:
“Long after the last gun fell silent in Europe, the structures of 1917-1918 lay dormant, waiting to be revived. The alphabetical agencies of the New Deal were not an invention of the 1930s; they were the ghost of the war welfare state, given flesh once more by a new crisis.” (p. 212)