Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America

 

Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, written by Jennifer Keene can best be described as a social history of the American citizen soldiers that fought in the Great War. The focus is mainly on the men drafted and how the military had to deal with the influx of hundreds of thousands of these citizens and convert them into soldiers. Several aspects of the issues were addressed in the book: training, discipline, race relations, and demobilizing the new soldiers.

With war looming on the horizon the American military was faced with the specter of having to increase their standing army and navy a dozen times over. A mobilization that reached deep into the various levels of American society. The author goes into the great detail of the methods used to raise and train this army, issues that were complicated by the uniquely American idea of the “citizen soldier”. Who would be in the army, who would lead the army and what role would the National Guard play.

Once the new soldiers were in the military they were difficult to discipline, many did not understand the new military life they had entered and many more were foreigners. Many of the traditional punishments for military crimes did not seem to faze the new soldiers and this caused many changes in the way that discipline was handed out.

The author deals with the issue of race in the military in a frank and honest manner. This issue is one that would haunt the military all the way from the stateside training camps to the frontlines of the war. An interesting aspect that is dealt with is how the colored soldiers found some kind of equality among the French countryside, something they could never find at home.

Desperate to avoid the mistakes of the Civil War, the issue of how best to demobilize the troops back into civilian lives came to the forefront. At this point politics and Spanish Flu complicate the issues, all well sorted in the end.

The author takes all these issues and rolls them together under the premise that the Military treaded carefully with all of these issues in the hopes that after the war the soldiers would become a powerful lobbying group, designed to support military appropriations bills. As a method of achieving this goal the Military constantly tried to stay informed of what their soldiers were thinking by clandestine operations against their own troops. The information gathered from the troops shaped and molded policy in a way that individual soldiers had never done before.

Where I feel the author wanders from their point was towards the end when the formation of the various Veteran societies became intertwined with the various labor interests. It is here that the authors own politics seep into the writing and ruin what is an otherwise solid social history of that generation.

At the time this book was written Jennifer Keene was an assistant professor of history at the University of Redlands in Redlands, California.