The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Something had to be done to insulate Washington from the alarming rise in militancy that threatened not only the domestic order but America’s international standing. This was one of the principal missions both of Wilson’s administration and its Republican predecessors early in the twentieth century.64 But whereas Teddy Roosevelt and his ilk saw military power and war as powerful vectors of progressive state construction, Wilson resisted this well-trodden, ‘old world’ path. The peace policy that he pursued up to the spring of 1917 was a desperate effort to insulate his domestic reform programme from the violent political passions and the wrenching social and economic dislocation of the war. It was in vain. The calamitous conclusion to Wilson’s second term in 1919–21 saw the coming apart of this first great twentieth-century effort to remake American federal government.