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Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. By christopher capozzola. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 352 pp. $35.00 (cloth).
On 5 June 1917, 9.6 million American men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty registered in compliance with the new Selective Service Act at about four thousand locations around the country. This massive occurrence is perhaps the key event in Capozzola's study of the myriad ways the Great War changed the meanings of American citizenship. But the author, an associate professor of history at MIT, goes far beyond the direct military obligations placed on Americans and addresses many other forms of wartime obligation, some voluntary but many others, such as draft registration and eventual conscription, often much more coercive in their execution. Through discussions of the many ways American society and government, at all levels, dealt with wartime conscription, conscientious objectors, women's volunteerism and political activism, home policing and vigilantism, restrictions on free speech and expression, and treatment of German Americans and enemy aliens, Capozzola attempts to show that the Great War was "a crucial moment in the history of American political culture," and one that not only restructured "the relationship between Americans and state power" but even altered "the basic terms of American citizenship itself " (p. 209).
Capozzola attempts to make his case by focusing on...