One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, Congress voted to declare war on imperial Germany. The First World War was the pivot of the 20th century: It took the lives of 17 million people and resulted in the collapse of three major empires (the German, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian). In the aftermath, totalitarian regimes both right and left came to power, leading to a second, far bloodier global conflict. Alas, for most Americans, the “Great War” holds little interest, particularly compared with the Civil War, World War II and Vietnam — all conflicts remembered as titanic moral struggles that transformed the nation. This neglect has given rise to some serious misconceptions about the war in which more than 116,000 Americans died.
Myth No. 1
The United States was neutral, in fact as well as name, until 1917.
America was an “exemplar of peace,” according to the title of the first chapter of Margaret E. Wagner’s forthcoming history of the United States during the war, sponsored by the Library of Congress. The keepers of Woodrow Wilson’s post-presidential home in Washington echo that conventional wisdom: His “primary goal at the outset of the European war . . . was to maintain American neutrality and to help broker peace between the warring parties.” In August 1914, Wilson called upon Americans to be “neutral in fact as well as name,” and in 1916, he ran for reelection on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Wilson hoped, at some point, to mediate an end to the carnage.
But his private sympathies were never in doubt. A German victory, the president told his closest adviser when the war began, “would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation.” So the federal government did little to prevent U.S. businesses from selling goods and lending money to Britain and France. Bethlehem Steel made arms for the Allies, and the investment house of J.P. Morgan and Co. served as the British government’s exclusive purchasing agent in the United States. By war’s end, the total cost to king and country came to $3 billion; J.P. Morgan collected a tidy 1 percent commission on every sale. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy was blockading the North Sea, making it all but impossible for American firms to do business with Germany — a disparity Wilson complained about briefly and only in the mildest terms.
Myth No. 2
Americans who actively opposed going to war were isolationists.