Industries were nationalized, prices fixed, production mandated or forbidden. It was the first time that the federal government recognized just how completely it could mobilize society to achieve an external objective.Īrmed with unprecedented war powers to command social and economic life, Woodrow Wilson declared that “It is not an army we must shape and train for war, it is a nation.” With the War Industries Board, the War Labor Policies Board, the Food Administration, and a host of other bureaucratic agencies, Wilson took command of American economic life. But Nisbet makes the case that it was a defining turning point. The Great War hardly registers a blip on the historical consciousness of most Americans. If you were to ask conservatives where American politics went wrong, you might expect any number of answers: Barack Obama? The cultural revolution of the 1960s? The Warren Court? The New Deal? The Civil War? Nisbet offers an answer that probably does not come immediately to mind: World War I.
It makes for a grim diagnosis with no obvious prescription for recovery. All are applied to the experience of twentieth-century America. Here one finds the major themes of Nisbet’s career: the breakdown of authority and of small-scale community, the imposition of centralized power, the appeal of political monism, the attempt to develop “national community,” the rise of the detached, “loose” individual. Rather, in one form or another, it has come to define American political and social life.
In this short “how-did-we-get-here” survey republished by Liberty Fund in 2003, Nisbet shows how war is not just a problem that has cropped up from time to time over the last century. Robert Nisbet’s 1988 The Present Age would offer an unwelcome, but probably necessary, bucket of cold water. After the disastrous and painful end to the War in Afghanistan, one may dare to hope that what have come to be known as the “forever wars” are over.
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