Reformers and War

The subject of this book is the confrontation between the American reform tradition, historically inward-looking, and the first of the world conflicts in which the United States has been involved in the 20th century. It focuses upon those writers and journals most prominently associated with the progressive movement and examines their response to the First World War and the effect of the war on their thinking. During the progressive era a number of journalists and authors had acquired national reputations as social critics or as spokesmen for reform. Among these were Herbert Croly, Frederic C. Howe, Waiter Lippmann, Amos Pinchot, Walter Weyl, and William Allen White as well as some of the former muckrakers such as Ray Stannard Baker, Charles Edward Russell, and Lincoln Steffens. Studying these men as a group shows that, for all the diversity emphasized in much recent historical writing on progressivism, there were certain common commitments which distinguished progressives from conservatives. These commitments, and the assumptions and aspirations on which they were based, did much to shape responses to the war.