STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK
The date 9-11 is seared upon our brains. But the most important but least understood event in modern history occurred on April 16, 1917, says A. Scott Berg.
That’s the day American entered into World War I.
“Everything that goes on in modern life goes back to World War I,” Berg said.
“Wars are game changers in the way government works, in the way we conduct our lives,” he added.
Berg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who has written of aviator Charles Lindbergh and President Woodrow Wilson, opened the 2017 Sun Valley Writers Conference in the Pavilion Friday night. He talked about a book he just finished editing--The Library of America anthology “World War I and America: Told By the Americans Who Lived It.”
The book contains 88 writings penned by soldiers, nurses, journalists and songwriters, as well as people like William Jennings Bryan, Will Rogers, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and President Woodrow Wilson, whom Berg noted was the last president who wrote all of his own speeches.
Guest authors at the Sun Valley Writers Conference read some of the excerpts while a trio of musicians played World War I tunes.
The book was published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of this country’s entry into the war.
Europe went to war unnecessarily, Berg said, after “a teenage terrorist” assassinated an Austrian archduke to evoke his identity. It was a period of great nationalism and militarism and an era of alliances—countries rushed to back up those they had allied with.
The question of American involvement was trickier. America was an isolationist country with a large agrarian economy and it hadn’t been attacked. But after a hundred Americans sank with the Lusitania, President Woodrow Wilson saw the country’s sentiments lean towards war. And so he began steering it that way by inventing Americanism and Flag Day.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was a communiqué that England intercepted between Germany and Mexico, in which German leaders suggested they could help Mexicans take back land from the United States if they joined the German cause.
Wilson told Congress that the world must be made safe for democracy, marking the first time a President had pled a moral component. That is, he contended that we must do this out of moral responsibility, said Berg. And that idea has been invoked in every war or skirmish the United States has been involved in since.
It asks a question that still haunts us today: What role should we play in the world? Are we peace keepers? Peace makers? Policemen of the world? he added.
World War I served as a launching pad for other practices we retain today.
- It started the selective service. This changed the identity of the United States because it meant that a rich Harvard University student would serve in the trenches next to a poor farmer from Missouri. You could no longer pay someone else to fight a war for you.
- Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, which provided the basis for British and the United States’ support for a Jewish state in Palestine.
- Taxes were revamped to pay for the war, meaning that more Americans were enlisted as taxpayers.
- The Federal deficit went from $1 billion to $9 billion.
- Wilson enlisted movie stars like Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin to sell war bonds, establishing the first link between Hollywood and government.
- The debt ceiling was enacted, introducing a new way of managing how much money the federal government may borrow.
- The United States built military camps all over the country.
- The government built a propaganda department to sell the war and to sell the America’s message overseas. “If we had had the writer’s conference during the war, four people would have come out and told us why we’re going to war,” Berg said.
- Wilson proposed Daylight Savings Time with the idea that it would enable farmers to raise more food.
- He also espoused self-determination, contending that people, not autocrats, should determine the direction they want their country to go.
- And he proposed the League of Nations in the belief that the world would not have gone to war had we had a roundtable like King Arthur’s.
Women earned the right to vote, as a result of the war. After all, they had kept the home fires burning while the men were away, said Berg.
But the war led to race riots after black soldiers returned home to two lynchings a week.
“We return from fighting. We return fighting,” Berg quoted W.E.B. Dubois.
World War I may top America’s list of “forgotten wars,” Berg noted. “But we all live in a world that was forged by World War I.”