World War I (1914 – 18): Changing Interpretations
This entry is a subentry of World War I (1914 – 18).
Historical opinion about the causes of World War I, American entry, and the making of peace has changed sharply over the years, with the publication of documentary collections, the opening of archives, and the appearance of memoirs and collections of personal papers, as well as changing theories and international circumstances. There is now general agreement on the causes of the war and of American entry; but disagreement remains over the American role in the peace.
During the years between the two world wars, contentions abounded between the adherents of Sidney B. Fay of Harvard University and Bernadotte Schmitt of the University of Chicago, who took respectively the sides of the central powers and the Allies, and based their books and articles on the national documentary collections and memoirs. At the end of World War II, the American and British governments took control of the German Foreign Office files and opened them, which revealed the bias of the earlier German documentary collection, Die Grosse Politik der Europaeischen Kabinette: 1871–1914. Opinion now is that German nationalism bears primary responsibility for starting the war.
American entrance into the great European conflict, which made it a true world war, produced an argument in the 1930s between Charles Seymour of Yale University and the popular historian Charles A. Beard, in which Seymour singled out German submarine warfare, especially the resort to unrestricted use of submarines beginning 1 February 1917, contrary to historical American neutral rights, as the cause of President Woodrow Wilson's decision to move from neutrality to intervention. Beard belittled such a monocausal contention, writing that the cause of any large event is necessarily complex, akin to a chemist pouring reagents into a test tube and obtaining a precipitate—but the latter is not the cause. Historical opinion now favors multicausality within a larger cultural and economic context provided by U.S. ties with the Allies.
In the making of the peace it is possible to say that the Wilsonian internationalists, the champions of the American president, such as historians Arthur Link and Arthur Walworth, have held the field. But questions remain, notably about whether the American people were prepared in 1919 for, if not a world government, then a world organization. Historians have agreed that Wilson himself was not his own best advocate. Thomas J. Knock has argued that Wilson undermined the progressive internationalist coalition by wartime repression. There is particular concern about the Wilson design of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which was neither fish nor fowl—neither a general scheme to promote international law and arbitration, which was in the American diplomatic tradition, nor a design for a postwar alliance of the victorious powers, which such conservative senators as Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts might have approved on a short‐term basis. Historians have remarked on the extraordinary nationalism of post‐1918 America, the inchoate but ardent desire to promote peace, and the victory of isolationism. They are unsure that any American president, seeking an acceptable peace, could have done anything other than what President Warren G. Harding did, which was to declare agreement with the nonpolitical provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.
[See also Disciplinary Views of War.]
