Review
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Title: Utah and the Great War: The Beehive State and the World War I Experience.
Editor: Allan Kent Powell
Publisher: Utah State Historical Society and the University of Utah Press
Genre: Social History—“Home Front” History
Year: 2016
Pages: 421
Binding: Paperback
ISBN-13: 9781607815105
Price: $24.95
Reviewed by Greg Seppi for the Association for Mormon Letters
Ably edited by Utah State Historical Society “veteran” Allan Kent Powell, this recent book collects the best articles on the relationship between Utah and the Great War published by the Utah Historical Quarterly over the last 40 years (from 1978-2016). Few events in American history have had as much impact as World War I, or the Great War, and fewer significant events receive less coverage from the press and the entertainment industry.
While America’s pivot to isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s caused the U.S. to squander the outsized influence the country acquired when, by coming into the war at a key moment, ultimately assuring victory for the Allied nations, the long-term impact on colonialism and the old empires of Europe cannot be overstated—the war led to both the slow but steady disintegration of European colonial power and caused the immediate downfall of the Russian, German, Austria-Hungarian, and Turkish empires.
While this book sometimes touches on that larger context, the articles focus instead on a corner of America that will be familiar to many Mormons—Utah. Given that the book is limited to articles published in a single periodical, one might expect it to suffer somewhat in quality, but this is not the case. Indeed, a college course on the history of Utah would almost certainly include this text in its syllabus, and it will likely serve as a useful resource for researchers investigating both the history of early 20th century Utah in general and the situation of Utah’s Mormons in the United States after the Manifesto (post-1890).
While Mormonism isn’t the focus of the book, few of the contributors fail to mention the LDS Church and its members’ responses to the war, especially given the significant German and Scandinavian Mormon populations in Utah.
While each essay includes a short assessment of its contribution to the history of Utah in World War I, the introductions do not include one of the most important facets of historiography—the date the article was originally published. That information is instead pushed to the end of the essays, just before the endnotes. This oversight presents a slight stumbling block to a reader’s understanding of how “dated” an article may be. In history, as in any discipline, the relevance of any scholarly production relates to how old it is.
The use of endnotes instead of footnotes is also not preferable. Beyond these editorial decisions, however, the articles within the book do represent some of the best scholarship on early 20th century Utah and its residents’ actions in World War I. The text is well-supported by an extensive index.
From Leonard Arrington and Powell himself to John Sillito and Miriam B. Murphy, many of the authors of the articles in this book are or were well-known Utah historians. Indeed, Murphy’s article on Utah women who served on the Front during World War I is an exceptional piece that highlights the way that wartime service disrupted the lives of those women who served as ambulance drivers and nurses. The inclusion of substantial accounts from period diaries makes this article the finest in the book, and practically worth the price of admission on its own.
Richard C. Robert’s 1978 article covers the run-up to 1917, when the U.S. joined the war against Germany, showing how Utah soldiers’ 1916 excursions along the Mexican border helped the state prepare for the much greater contributions its citizens would be required to make only a year later.
While the first seven essays in the book seem to stress a unified and patriotic response to the outbreak of war, the five essays that follow thereafter deal with reactions and perceptions of minority communities within Utah. Helen Z. Papanikolas’ “Immigrants, Minorities, and the Great War” explores the reactions of the large Scandinavian and Greek contingents in Utah to accusations of pro-German sentiments. Immigration was at least as controversial in 1917 as it is today; perhaps far more so, due to fears about Communist subversion as well as race-based denigration of non-Anglo Europeans.
Powell follows Papanikolas’ article with his own essay on German-Americans in Utah before, during, and immediately following the Great War, and the spotlight he shines on that community’s often unfair treatment during the war is a reminder, if we needed it, that America is not always a nation where individuals are judged according to what they have actually done. His article dovetails nicely into Joerg A. Nagler’s study of the internment of Germans and German-Americans at Fort Douglas during the war.
Following Nagler’s intriguing study, David L. Wood contributes a wonderful piece, “Gosiute-Shoshone Draft Resistance, 1917-1918.” Though he finds that many Utah Native Americans (or American Indians, as some prefer) did provide significant support for the war, he traces the vociferous resistance to selective service registration arranged by Annies Tommy and Willie Ottogary in Gosiute settlements in a well-researched and interesting article.
Longtime LDS historian Leonard Arrington’s essay, “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918-19 in Utah,” is a well-crafted blend of reporting and analysis, though hardly his best work. That being said, the so-called “Spanish flu” certainly affected communities in Utah at least as much as the war, and its spread was intrinsic to the way World War I brought individuals from across the globe together.
The essays that wrap up the book provide overviews of Utah’s responses to the League of Nations proposal, Communism, and the struggle over the establishment of memorials.
If one has an interest in the “home front” during World War I, one could do far worse than this book. More a work of social than military history, it may not appeal to those who like their history to involve more heroics and machine-guns, but the book does signal the significant contributions that historians of Utah have made to our understanding of the Great War. While the Utah response is, in the main, not examined within the broader American or world context, certainly the essays included in this book have added significantly to our understanding of American life on the home front during the Great War.
I would recommend that those who teach Utah state history at any level pick this book up. Those who are interested in post-Manifesto Mormonism will not find too much Mormon-specific content, but as readers, we should note that a desire to prove their American credentials played heavily into the LDS Church’s support for the war, so a reader interested in that angle should give this book a look.