Throughout the period of neutrality, US government officials kept a close eye on the growing indebtedness of trade partners to private American lenders and the war’s economic implications for American prosperity. This raised the question of how to finance the war – taxation, borrowing, or printing money? By the time Congress declared war, the American economy operated near full capacity, meaning war effort requirements would not be met by simply putting underutilized resources to work. ![]() When the United States officially entered World War I in 1917, it became clear that an unprecedented effort would be required to divert the nation’s industrial capacity away from meeting consumer demand and toward fulfilling military needs. As Keene wrote: “The economic history of the war effort remains mostly focused on fitting the war into the broader battles over regulation, trade unionism, and monopolies occurring during this period.” Existent scholarship examines the war’s effect on business-government relations and class conflict trends, particularly in urban and industrial areas of the economy, with little attention paid to the war’s impact on agriculture. While offering a more nuanced view of complicated business-government relationships during wartime, both they and the New Left historians agreed on the resurgence of business in American politics. Zieger, focused on the federal government’s role in supporting moderate labor unions despite objections from business interests. Labor historians, such as Joseph McCartin and Robert H. Historians building on Cuff’s work examined top federal administrators’ ideological objections to monopolistic business practices, tensions between the War Industries Board and the War Department, and government control of railroads during the war. His work illustrates a network of complex relationships between individuals, industries, and government agencies – some harmonious and others contentious. While these historians, particularly Leuchtenburg and Hawley, portrayed World War I as a transitional moment, Robert Cuff and others studied the “gap between the rhetoric and reality,” and concluded that administrators in charge of wartime economic agencies sometimes exaggerated their influence over the economy. ![]() Ellis Hawley went further, arguing that the close relationship between business interests and the federal government cemented the liberal state’s role in the American economy. William Leuchtenburg encouraged historians to take a longer view in assessing the war’s legacy, arguing that methods of economic mobilization during World War I influenced early New Deal approaches to stabilizing prices and wages during the Great Depression. They saw business as emerging triumphant from the war effort. Scholars in the 1960s, including Gabriel Kolko, Melvyn Urofsky, and James Weinstein, offered a different characterization of wartime economic mobilization. Keene noted that studies in the 1940s and 1950s repeated this narrative of “initial chaos giving way to eventual success,” while acknowledging the increased influence of business in governmental affairs. The firsthand accounts of wartime administrators reinforced the narrative of Americans pulling together voluntarily to win the war, downplaying issues of war profiteering or business inflexibility. In this shifting historiography, economic historians evaluated the efficacy of wartime economic mobilization and assessed the legacy of the federally managed economic mobilization. foreign policy, came in the midst of another unpopular war during the 1960s and 1970s, and again following the 2003 Iraq War. Scholars’ renewed attention to the war’s domestic and diplomatic impact, as well as Wilsonianism’s influence on U.S. Although the desire to derive economic and diplomatic lessons from the war ignited an interest in scholarly study of the war during the 1930s, it quickly waned in the wake of World War II. In the immediate post-war period, military and political accounts established an enduring narrative of the American war experience.
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