Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE BASIC REFLECTIONS
- PART TWO THE CHANGING REALITIES OF WARFARE
- PART THREE WAR AGAINST NONCOMBATANTS
- PART FOUR POLITICIANS, SOLDIERS, AND THE PROBLEM OF UNLIMITED WARFARE
- PART FIVE MOBILIZING ECONOMIES AND FINANCE FOR WAR
- PART SIX SOCIETIES MOBILIZED FOR WAR
- 22 Mobilizing German Society for War
- 23 Women's Wartime Services Under the Cross
- 24 Pandora's Box
- 25 Painting and Music During and After the Great War
- Index
24 - Pandora's Box
Propaganda and War Hysteria in the United States During World War I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE BASIC REFLECTIONS
- PART TWO THE CHANGING REALITIES OF WARFARE
- PART THREE WAR AGAINST NONCOMBATANTS
- PART FOUR POLITICIANS, SOLDIERS, AND THE PROBLEM OF UNLIMITED WARFARE
- PART FIVE MOBILIZING ECONOMIES AND FINANCE FOR WAR
- PART SIX SOCIETIES MOBILIZED FOR WAR
- 22 Mobilizing German Society for War
- 23 Women's Wartime Services Under the Cross
- 24 Pandora's Box
- 25 Painting and Music During and After the Great War
- Index
Summary
In an interview shortly before America's entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson revealed his anxieties about the likely disruptive social effects of the war on the American people. To Frank Cobb, the editor of the New York World, he observed, “Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.” Shortly thereafter, on April 4, 1917, the conservative Republican senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, offered his own views on the imminent American involvement in the war:
[W]e have never been a military nation; we are not prepared for war in the modern sense; but we have vast resources and unbounded energies, and the day when war is declared we should devote ourselves to calling out those resources and organizing those energies so that they can be used with the utmost effect in hastening the complete victory. The worst of all wars is a feeble war. War is too awful to be entered half-heartily. If we fight at all, we must fight for all we are worth. It must be no weak, hesitating war. The most merciful war is that which is most vigorously waged and which comes most quickly to an end.
These reflections on the pending American war effort from two major — albeit hostile — political figures offered prescient projections about the nature and consequences the Great War in the American experience. Although they were antagonists in their political philosophies, Wilson and Lodge shared the view that victory required decisive, full-scale warfare. Wilson, however, who was a trained historian and political scientist, was keenly aware of the disruptions that had been inflicted on American society by earlier wars, and he foresaw that “making the world safe for democracy” might come at the expense of democratic institutions and practices at home.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Great War, Total WarCombat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, pp. 485 - 500Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000