In an interview shortly before America's entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson revealed his anxieties about the likely disruptive social effects of the war on the American people. To Frank Cobb, the editor of the New York World, he observed, “Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.” Shortly thereafter, on April 4, 1917, the conservative Republican senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, offered his own views on the imminent American involvement in the war:

These reflections on the pending American war effort from two major — albeit hostile — political figures offered prescient projections about the nature and consequences the Great War in the American experience. Although they were antagonists in their political philosophies, Wilson and Lodge shared the view that victory required decisive, full-scale warfare. Wilson, however, who was a trained historian and political scientist, was keenly aware of the disruptions that had been inflicted on American society by earlier wars, and he foresaw that “making the world safe for democracy” might come at the expense of democratic institutions and practices at home.

In January 1871, shortly before the proclamation of the Second Reich at Versailles, the American poet Charles Goethe Baylor dedicated a poem to Germany that illustrates the prevailing sentiment in the United States toward Germany during this time. “America to Germany” begins

Germany had fought for national unity against an imperial French aggressor, and it had been one of the few friends of the North during the American Civil War. German immigrants had participated, particularly in the Northern armies, in numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the total population, and in so doing had partially liberated themselves from the “foreign” stigma that American nativists attached to them before the war. In 1871 most Americans considered Germany a world leader in cultural pursuits, a land of poets, musicians, writers, philosophers, and scholars.

WARFARE IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE, 1861-71

With these words, the conservative Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke and the left-wing military analyst Friedrich Engels, clearly two very different characters, summed up their impressions of the German Wars of Unification and of the American Civil War, respectively. They were both talking of wars that had taken place in the same decade (1861 to 1871) but on two different continents, for very different reasons, and apparently under very different circumstances. Yet, both men used the same term - people's war - to characterize these military conflicts. We may therefore ask to what extent were there structural similarities between the German Wars of Unification and the American Civil War. Never mind the large differences between these wars; there should have been similarities if such otherwise opposing personalities such as Moltke and Engels looked at them in the same way.

It is certainly true that the war in North America was a civil war caused by the break-up of a nation, whereas the Franco-Prussian War was fought between two more or less clearly distinct nations. To compare these two conflicts is therefore a problematic task.

In the turbulent and challenging year of 1863, when morale was low and disillusionment high in the North, an anonymous pamphlet writer expressed for many Americans, both in and out of uniform, a deeply rooted concern about the meaning of the paramount social, political, and military conflict facing the nation.

This pamphlet writer realized that the meaning of loyalty was central to the conflict, and this held true for both the North and South. In every modern war, the inclusion of the civilian population is essential for the war effort, and loyalty becomes the psychological touchstone on which to base national cohesiveness and the ability to motivate civilians to become soldiers, to leave their families, homes, friends, and communities, and to risk the ultimate sacrifice-death-for a cause, a nation, or both combined. Without the home front, loyal and committed to a cause, politicians in a democratic state hesitate to support a war, and ultimately the battle front collapses. The question of loyalty is intimately connected to patriotism, nationalism, and ideology. Disloyalty-or dissent-endangers the national consensus on the home front and is detrimental to the war effort.

In January 1892, the eminent historian Heinrich von Sybel, one of the main representatives of the Prussian school of political historians, advised his friend and colleague Hermann Eduard von Hoist to accept a position with the newly founded University of Chicago:

Sybel's coaxing recommendation, with its terms “production” and “market” reverberating with notions of cultural imperialism, had its effect on Hoist. He accepted the call from the University of Chicago, but it was not the first attempt on the part of an American university to win Hoist as a history professor. Other universities had already recognized that Hoist would make an invaluable contribution to the development of their still nascent history departments.