Nothing Less than War: A New History of America's Entry into World War I

Abstract

Justus D. Doenecke, best known for his classic study of the anti-interventionists just before World War II (Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941, 2000), turns his attention here to the domestic controversy leading to American participation in World War I. This is a thrice-told tale, and Doenecke does not aim to break new archival ground. Instead, he offers a comprehensive and elegantly written synthesis of existing scholarship, informed by his own use of the Woodrow Wilson Papers, the Congressional Record, and the contemporary press. In scarcely more than three hundred pages of text, Doenecke chronicles the debates over German and British violations of neutrality that persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to intervene in April 1917—not as an ally, but as a reluctant associate of the entente powers. Graduate students seeking to master the topic quickly will find Doenecke an informed and generally dispassionate guide. In an era when the United States repeatedly sends forces abroad without a formal declaration of war, Wilson's concern for the niceties of neutral rights a century ago seems anachronistic, even quaint. Yet Doenecke confirms the consensus view that, in the American public mind, violations of so-called international law by German submarines and British surface ships loomed larger than either commercial interests or the bonds of sentiment. Although Wilson made a point of not reading the newspapers, he believed in his own genius for leadership and, according to Doenecke, “possessed an uncanny ability to articulate the fears and aspirations of his people” (p. 4). This may be true; still, public discourse and Wilson's interpretation of it remained astonishingly unsophisticated. In retrospect it is astounding that the president stood convinced that “nothing in particular” except a disembodied interlacing of alliances had started the war and that the two sides sought virtually the same objectives (pp. 230, 304).