One hundred years ago, World War I ended.
Or did it?
Germany and the Allied Powers (led by Britain and France) signed an armistice, but an armistice is not an official end to war — it is a truce — a cessation of active warfare until the terms of peace can be reached.
Americans celebrated Nov. 11, 1918, as a moment of national triumph. But in both war and peace, Americans were lulled into a false sense of security. Active fighting had ended, but at home and abroad, the peace they built was rotten, infected by the war they fought and the ways they had fought it.
The war changed the American state in fundamental and enduring ways that shaped future development of the United States. While these changes allowed for the growth of a social safety net, they also had a darker side rife with bigotry and intolerance. Yet, Americans neither noticed nor confronted the darker aspect of these changes in any real, systematic way. A century later, the United States still struggles with this legacy of failure to act decisively.
World War I expanded the size and power of the U.S. state and honed its Anglo-centric nationalism. During the war, Woodrow Wilson’s administration instituted price controls, established a government apparatus to finance the war, set up a bureaucracy to produce government propaganda and built the controls for centralized government surveillance and oversight. Wartime calls for loyalty underscored the goals of an expanding nationalist state, backed up by the repressive Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 criminalizing dissent.
Thousands were jailed and hundreds were deported. In a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, agents from the Department of Justice jailed prominent socialist Eugene Debs for speaking out against the draft. As one Oregon district judge aptly put it: “All the government asked was that those who did not [support the war] keep quiet.”
This war effort mandated a national identity that inspired some to turn a wary eye on “foreigners” and other malcontents in their midst. Private hyper-patriotic organizations rose at local and state levels. Nationalist vigilante groups targeted German and Italian Americans, and other minority groups that could be branded as “radicals” or “disloyal.” Self-proclaimed followers of “Americanism” (also known as “100 percent Americanism” or “pure Americanism”) demanded “hyphenated Americans” prove they were “Americans and nothing else.” They railed against the specter of war refugees, strident antiwar activism and intellectual elites who fostered new ideas about cultural pluralism and the benefits of being an “immigrant nation.”
The immense costs of the Great War inherently affected everyone involved. Virtually every history of war and conflict reveals that nations take on some aspects or characteristics of the states they fight. And a peaceful resolution to war does not absolve or erase the anti-democratic, xenophobic or authoritarian impulses that war encourages.
This was the case a century ago.
Wilson attempted to rein in some of these impulses with his internationalist project of “peace without victory,” in which, for once, the spoils would not go to the victor. Wilson believed only a fair and equitable peace could be a lasting one. But his allies wouldn’t listen — which led to vindictive terms for Germany in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Despite this insight into international geopolitics, Wilson failed to see the menace lurking within the United States. The virulent strain of nationalism that World War I bred — and that Wilson supported — could not be quarantined or cured. The U.S. Senate, controlled in part by nationalist isolationists, rejected the possibility that the United States would join the League of Nations, hallowing out the serious possibility of a fuller internationalist peace project.
Domestically, hyper-patriotic nationalism remained. When major strikes and race riots (a term often used to describe massacres of people of color) followed the armistice, many nationalist groups perceived them as a sign of increasing chaos — instead of, for example, evidence of socioeconomic injustice.
In turn, these groups built an ideology that informed the “return to normalcy” under the Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge administrations and fueled the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Klan dogma explicitly associated Americanism with white supremacy and Protestantism, defining it as a spiritual connection to America developed through an “instinctive racial understanding.” In other words, as Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans put it, “Americanism can only be achieved if the pioneer stock is kept pure.” Meanwhile, wartime ideas about “aliens” outside the nation’s borders intensified to promote sweeping postwar restrictions on immigrants from certain “undesirable” countries (in eastern and southern Europe) and eliminating immigration from Asia.
This battle continued during the Great Depression. State infrastructure built during World War I became the platform upon which the New Deal grew, and the war itself had shaped expectations about who would benefit (white people) and why (because they were unquestionably “American” by wartime standards). This nationalism animated the America First Committee, which tried to keep the United States out of a second world war, and it came to fruition under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which placed Japanese Americans — U.S. citizens and legal residents — in internment camps throughout World War II.
One hundred years ago today, World War I ended. But we remain haunted by its legacy because we never resolved the questions it raised about executive power, democratic norms, the free press and state-mandated conformity to the standards of white America. We have never come to terms with the way that war changed us.
Today, America is still at war. Under the auspices of the War on Terror, the United States has been in an active state of (un)declared war against foreign powers for 16 years. Contemporary politics suggest that America has acquired a number of the attributes that it ascribes to “enemy” foreign powers, including religious intolerance, reactionary tribalism and an apparent preference for authoritarian rule. We are witnessing a resurgence of the nationalist populism that thrives in wartime, alongside a renewed vision of “America First.”
The roots of this current moment are in the remaking of America and U.S. citizenship that occurred 100 years ago. While we focus much more on World War II and the Cold War, we must acknowledge that the lingering issues produced by the incomplete, tainted peace of World War I have left us a toxic legacy with which we still have not fully grappled.