Date
4-17-2024
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
Carey Roberts
Keywords
world war I, first world war, woodrow wilson, progressivism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, murray rothbard, ralph raico, albert jay nock, randolph bourne, ludwig von mises, albert burleson, newton baker, william gibbs mcadoo, thomas gregory, a. mitchell palmer, george creel
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Schearer, Michael, "Our Enemy, the State: Liberty versus Power on the American Home Front during the First World War" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 5337.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/5337
Abstract
World War I marked a significant shift in the structure and practice of the federal government. The key feature of this shift was the centralization of national power in the federal government and a burgeoning bureaucracy. This increase in the centralization of power led to an escalation of conflicts between the expanded assertions of national power and the civil liberties of American citizens. While this relationship between state power and civil liberties has been the focus of extensive scholarly research, much less has been written about a mostly forgotten perspective that viewed war as destructive to human flourishing beyond the dictates of court-defined civil liberties. Based upon a classical liberal tradition, shaped by the experiences of those who lived through the war and adapted by a subsequent generation of libertarian scholars, this study examines the transformation of social power into state power during the First World War through this perspective. American participation in the war redistributed power from the voluntary interactions within society to the coercive hand of the state. The war apparatus on the home front played upon existing prejudices and invented new ones by co-opting social institutions into state-endorsed mechanisms of coercion. Ultimately, the war unleashed a major acceleration in the transformation of social power into state power. This transformation represented a fundamental shift from a society that placed great emphasis on voluntarism to one centered on the use of the force of the state to achieve political aims. In this post-war statism, war became the health of the state, and its long-lasting effects are felt even today.
