World War I On The Home Front

Historian Hunt Tooley will be teaching World War One: A Revisionist Perspective, a Mises Academy online course, starting October 29.

The changes wrought in America during the First World War were so profound that one scholar has referred to "the Wilsonian Revolution in government."[1] Like other revolutions, it was preceded by an intellectual transformation, as the philosophy of progressivism came to dominate political discourse.Progressive notions – of the obsolescence of laissez-faire and of constitutionally limited government, the urgent need to "organize" society "scientifically," and the superiority of the collective over the individual – were propagated by the most influential sector of the intelligentsia and began to make inroads in the nation's political life.

As the war furnished Lenin with otherwise unavailable opportunities for realizing his program, so too, on a more modest level, it opened up prospects for American progressives that could never have existed in peacetime. The coterie of intellectuals around the New Republic discovered a heaven-sent chance to advance their agenda. John Dewey praised the "immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war," while Walter Lippmann wrote: "We can dare to hope for things which we never dared to hope for in the past." The magazine itself rejoiced in the war's possibilities for broadening "social control ... subordinating the individual to the group and the group to society," and advocated that the war be used "as a pretext to foist innovations upon the country."

More