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His contemporaries, subsequent historians and biographers, and Woodrow Wilson himself have all agreed that his religious convictions are crucial to understanding the Democrat’s political thought and actions. Wilson revered the Bible, wore out several of them during his life, quoted it frequently, and sought to use its principles to guide his work as president. He prayed every day on his knees and followed Presbyterian standards in his personal life. While concurring that Wilson’s faith is pivotal to understanding him, scholars disagree over whether it had a positive or negative impact on his performance as president and his policies. Wilson’s firmly rooted and fervently cherished Calvinist faith significantly influenced his thought and actions as president. Clearly America’s preeminent Presbyterian statesman, Wilson’s faith is evident in his philosophy of government, his view of America’s mission in the world, and many of his major domestic and foreign policies, especially his attempts to mediate among the combatants in World War I, his decision to involve the United States in the war, and his role in devising the Paris Peace treaties and the League of Nations.

Wraps up the analysis of labor market developments in the U.S. through the 1940s showing how and why employers abdicated their segmentalist autonomy and submitted temporarily to state‐imposed solidarism, including intersectoral wage compression similar to what Sweden's normal peace time system brought about. During the prewar and interwar periods, the same employers actively sought another kind of intersectoral control, especially over wages in the building and construction trades, because high wages in this sector disrupted major manufacturers’ otherwise workable system of labor market governance just as they did in Sweden. Unlike in Sweden, however, major American manufacturers were unable to find allies for a cross‐class alliance against the building trade unions, and thus political relations between capital and labor remained far more hostile than in Sweden despite the Swedish labor movement's explicitly anticapitalist ideology.

Clausewitz's On War aroused controversy from its first publication in 1832-4, and the validity of its interpretation of war's nature was challenged in the wake of both world wars and in the Cold War. Those who condemn Clausewitz today as the exponent of an outdated form of inter-state war therefore form part of a familiar tradition. They are however guilty of reading Clausewitz's text selectively. Because he used dialectics as a means to understanding war, he himself provided counters to many of his best known propositions.

This chapter focuses on selective service in America during World War I. The Selective Service Act of 1917 was the centerpiece of wartime citizenship and its defining obligation. It reflected the state's power at its most extreme by demanding that its citizens die for it. Selective service embodied the national culture of voluntarism: not only through individual effort but together with the institutions of everyday life. Voluntarism also shaped the “slacker raids,” vast dragnet operations of interrogation conducted by the 250,000 volunteer members of the American Protective League. By the end of the war, conscription would result in courtroom battles, shoot-outs in the Ozark Mountains, and even a fistfight in the cloakroom of the US Senate.

In August 1914, after a hastily organised campaign for British neutrality, the peace movement divided: some peace activists supported British intervention in the war in Europe, while others opposed it. The peace journals attest to the fact that most activists changed their position in August 1914. However, the existence of two different ideologies within peace thinking — pacifism and pacific-ism — has not been sufficiently recognised. Some of the peace campaigners who decided to support the participation of Britain in World War I did so without totally abandoning pacific-ism. The majority of peace activists, however, explained their support for British involvement in terms of the country's moral responsibility to Belgium. This chapter looks at peace associations in Britain that were for and against the war, as well as the debate about pacifism among peace societies.

This chapter describes the confluence of political, technological, and social changes that prompted the emergence of covert military intervention as an escalation-control technique. It lays the foundation for assessing how more recent political and technological changes, such as cyberwarfare and drones, influence the covert sphere. In particular, this chapter highlights the special role of World War I. It conceptualizes the Great War as a critical juncture that dramatized the dangers of large-scale war escalation and accelerated political, social, and technological developments that influenced escalation control. These changes sharpened the problem of escalation control by making leaders more vulnerable to hawkish domestic constraints and making intentions about limited war harder to discern. Yet it also made possible new ways of using military force anonymously through, for example, the development of airpower. World War I prompted major powers to experiment with ways of limiting war; this included manipulation of the form of external military intervention.

This chapter looks at the war experience of Jews in World War I and the toll the war inflicted on hundreds of thousands of Jews who fought as soldiers on all the war's fronts. Jewish sensibilities about the war shared much in common with those of non-Jews of a similar class and educational background. However, the war could be more meaningful for Jews than for most combatants, partly because of the ongoing sense of need to prove one's masculine and civic virtue in the face of antisemitic attacks, and partly because the Triple Alliance was arrayed against Russia—seen by most Ashkenazic Jews as their greatest oppressor in modern times. A specifically Jewish subculture that valorized the war was most prominent in Germany, where Jews did not allow themselves to grieve publicly over wounded Jewish soldiers and veterans, but rather commemorated only the Jewish dead, those who had made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation.

This chapter focuses on Americans' opposition to draft exemptions for conscientious objectors. It shows that Americans actively opposed draft exemptions for conscientious objectors, employing scriptural argument in the pews of the nation's churches and applying physical torture in its military prisons. Objectors earnestly tried to reconcile the dictates of personal conscience with the needs of the state, and after extensive lobbying by peace groups and religious organizations, military and civilian policy makers ultimately crafted an official policy that recognized the category and found a place for them in the American state.

This chapter focuses on American women's voluntarism during World War I. It argues that in a political culture organized around voluntarism, Americans struggled to understand the difference between voluntary sacrifice and unpaid, or even forced, labor. Coercion operated differently in women's organizations than in the male vigilante societies that dominated headlines. Although women did not by and large experience or participate in physical violence, coercion still abounded.

This chapter focuses on civil liberties during World War I. It shows that during America's first world war, a broad but tentative and fragmented coalition developed around the concept of civil liberties, using rights as a weapon of defense. Americans resisted obligation's coercive aspects and gave voice to a politics that imagined the citizen first and foremost as an individual and as a bearer of rights. They formed social networks, voluntary associations, and political institutions dedicated to realizing this vision. Out of this wartime effort emerged the American Civil Liberties Union, modern First Amendment jurisprudence, and understandings of individual rights in popular political culture that would transform American politics in the 20th century. The trial of Jane Addams, the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, and the Nonpartisan League are discussed.

This chapter focuses on the persecution and response of German Americans in wartime America. It shows that under wartime pressure, public symbols of conflicting loyalties — flags, languages, voluntary associations, schools — disappeared. If the obligation of loyalty could not be coerced, the obligation of silence could — and during the war, it was, with new tools of state power that changed the relationship of the citizen to the government. Time and again, German Americans chose silence, which helped them walk the line between loyalty and disloyalty in a hostile America.

This chapter argues that Wilson's failed project — integrating the United States into the League of Nations — haunted American international lawyers for the two decades 1919-1939. To a considerable extent, the haunting continues to this day. World War I, Wilson, Lodge, and the Versailles Conference all shattered the long-standing American consensus that the law of nations was inherently a good thing. International law became and remains a divisive issue in American politics.

At the War Cabinet, David Lloyd George outlined what he regarded as the four alternative policies for Britain with respect to World War I. First was concentration of the entire British forces on the Western Front; second was to concentrate mainly on the Western Front, but utilise the forces now in the various overseas theatres as actively as possible; the third option was essentially a holding operation until Russia recovered and the United States was supplying enough troops to ensure superiority; and the final one consisted of ‘knocking the props from under Germany’ by military and diplomatic operations against enemy allies such as Turkey and Bulgaria. The Prime Minister preferred for some combination of the second and last options. With this in mind, John French and Henry Wilson were to report on the current state of the war and the future prospects and future action to be taken.

This chapter focuses on mob violence and vigilantism in wartime America. It shows that Americans who engaged in extralegal actions to support the war effort insisted that they were exemplars of vigilant citizenship. Their victims, however, denounced them as lawless vigilantes unworthy of the nation's honor. The wartime and postwar concern with mob violence led many to ignore legal and nonviolent forms of state and private coercion that arose alongside, and outlasted, crowd actions. The distinction obscured the ways that Americans wove coercion into the fabric of their political culture during this period.

This chapter demonstrates the effect of the mobilization of ideas and manpower on the Zionist movement during the two world wars as well as a smaller international conflict that adumbrated World War II. During World War I, the Zionist movement sponsored the formation of Jewish units for the British armed forces, and although these units' military accomplishments were modest, they had a galvanizing effect on Jewish collective solidarity throughout the western world. A very different type of international mobilization sent thousands of Jews into the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Ideologically, these wars were perceived as serving Jewish interests, albeit often conflicting ones such as Zionism, on the one hand, and international socialism, on the other. Operationally, these were, for Jews, international conflicts, involving mass movements of Jews not only as refugees or inducted soldiers but also as volunteer fighters.

This chapter examines the state of American and European economies during the outbreak of World War I until the Genoa Conference was convened in 1922. It first considers the military–political origins of the war before analyzing the role the international business community played at the time of the war's outbreak. Hereafter the chapter focuses on the American perspectives, as it studies the ambiguities of American neutrality, the state of the American economy and its eventual entry into the war, and the beginnings of a strain on the Anglo-American relationship at the Paris Peace Conference. The chapter then returns the focus to the international stage as postwar reconstruction begins, highlighting the attempts at European recovery and the role of American businesses in these endeavors.

The novel experience of ‘total war’, which had such important domestic ramifications, was accompanied on an international level by a closer wartime alliance than Britain had ever had in the past. Rather like the domestic situation, Britain's relationship with its allies, above all France, steadily moved from haphazard improvisation to increasingly formal and permanent arrangements. At the top level, Anglo-French coordination began with individual visits, such as Lord Kitchener's to Paris in September 1914 and his French counterpart Alexandre Millerand's to London in January 1915. The first formal conference between the British and French governments did not take place until July 1915 at Calais, nearly a year into World War I. This chapter discusses the British-French coalition in the war, the role of Henry Wilson in coordinating the Allied efforts, politics in the British army, and the British War Cabinet.