The Great War in America: World War I and Its Aftermath

Peck’s workmanlike volume, which examines America’s role in WWI and subsequent events, often reads like a textbook. Peck produces a faithful, conventional chronology of President Woodrow Wilson’s trajectory from seeking “peace without victory” to joining the war. A heavy emphasis on Wilson’s personality and speeches, with little depth or illumination of American life beyond what happened in Washington or soldiers’ experiences, makes this more of a political biography than the comprehensive history it’s packaged as. The account of Wilson’s prickly, often arrogant idealism at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference is detailed, though, and the argument that Wilson’s call for a Democratic Congress provoked lasting domestic political enmity is insightful. One exception to the Wilson focus is Peck’s exploration of American belligerency among a large portion of the U.S. population with German heritage. His accounts of famed columnist H.L. Mencken’s pro-German writings and other Americans of German descent reflect a population mobilized by government propaganda and media reports (for example, that German-Americans were planning to attack American cities) to, among other things, rename frankfurters “hot dogs” and sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.” Passages on labor, leftist politics, the government’s stifling of dissent, women’s suffrage, and the dire state of race relations cover the facts, but have a bolted-on quality. This account fails to give life to a period whose events still affect the U.S. 100 years later. Photos. [em]Agent: Tom Miller, Carol Mann Agency. (Dec.) [/em]