HOORAY FOR PEACE, HURRAH FOR WAR: The United States During World War I (The Living History Library)

By way of a montage of personal reactions, Jantzen traces America's change of mood from the confident optimism of 1914 (the United States, said Carnegie, ""bears a charmed life and all works for her good"") through the crisis of conscience occasioned by the advent of World War I. The great men speak here (Wilson, Debs, Roosevelt), but most illuminating are the words of ordinary citizens: Red Cross nurse Marie Van Vorst felt entry into the war would give young men a chance to develop nobility of spirit, pilot Archie Taber's letters reveal an unshaken faith in Wilson, while Ernest Meyer's correspondence states the lonely position of a conscientious objector. Events abroad are reported through the eyes of American observers, among them Richard Harding Davis, Dreiser and survivors of the Lusitania. The social context of the war effort--Liberty Bread (recipe included here), the Four-Minute Men, the patriotic songs--has been chronicled before by Irving Werstein in Over Here and Over There (1968), but Jantzen, by allowing us a closer look at the source materials, re-animates the issue of intervention vs. isolation.