![]() ![]() In bringing the United States into the war, Wilson created a sunny myth of the nation as uniquely virtuous: peace-loving, despite its violent origins, and selfless, despite the hand-over-fist profits that the war was already bringing to American factories. The most prominent figure in this story is Woodrow Wilson, who enjoyed a benign-to-heroic reputation for most of the twentieth century. Back they came to more cheering crowds, and then it was the Roaring Twenties.Īdam Hochschild’s new book, American Midnight, explores “what’s missing between those two chapters”-an enraging, gruesome, and depressingly timely story about the fragility of American democracy, as both institution and concept. Despite their belated RSVP, the well-fed, well-bred American soldiers arrived in Europe as liberators, marched cheerfully into the protracted slaughter, and quickly put paid to the Hun. In the history-textbook summary, the country remained above the fray until German submarine attacks forced President Wilson to renege on his 1916 election promise to keep the country out of the war. There are few episodes in national history as blithely misunderstood as America’s participation in World War I. ![]()
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