“The American home front was not a lawless frontier, a police state, or a great big meeting of the Elks Club,” writes Christopher Capozzola in his penetrating study of citizenship in World War I, Uncle Sam Wants You. “But it looked a little like all of these” (12). The extremes of World War I seem difficult to reconcile: soaring rhetoric championing a war for democracy “over there,” coupled with mob violence and brutal repression back home; all the vigorous dissent and cultural pluralism the Progressive era could muster, locked in a losing battle with war fever and 100 percent Americanism. The reason for these and other apparent paradoxes of the times, the author argues, was that they were produced by a momentous shift from a polity organized by vigilance and obligation, to a new system of political coercion centered on a bureaucratic national state and a rule of law that stood above the people.

The familiar episodes of World War I look different when seen through the lens of obligation. Rather than being anomalous eruptions of jingoism, the slacker raids to enforce the draft were simply the most extreme outbursts of the coercive voluntarism that characterized the whole of the home front. The American Protective League may have been unprecedented in its size and national scope, but it merely agglomerated groups operating everywhere in American society. These voluntary associations were vital to the home front effort. In a sense, they were the mobilization itself. This helps explain the timing of women's suffrage. Women's myriad contributions—organized by “voluntary” associations that ranged from local knitting circles to the Red Cross—were essential to the war effort, and so proved fitness for citizenship. Associational traditions of self-government also sustained dissent: in churches, Mennonite and Amish communities, German-speaking societies, and black militias steeped in traditions of resistance that dated back to Reconstruction and earlier.

As World War I brought vigilance to a fevered pitch, it created a crisis whose resolution would ultimately undermine some of the coercions of vigilance. Public discourse eventually gained new protections under the First Amendment, rather than being left to the judgment of local citizens wary of anything that threatened their idea of responsible speech. Deportations became the preserve of the Justice Department, rather than the prerogative of overweening sheriffs in places like Bisbee, Arizona. These shifts were part of a long process of relocating sovereignty from the communities and voluntary associations in which the people had governed themselves to the agencies and experts who would rule on their behalf. Vigilance still had a long run ahead of it. Big government and the rights revolution still lay decades away. Yet the die had been cast.

Though it became clear to the Wilson administration that it had to shut down the American Protective League and its ilk if it were to maintain control, the monopoly on violence came at a price. Vigilant citizens who banded together for the commonweal, however despotic they might become in times of crisis, were “the law” under the old regime. Under the new system, vigilance assumed the aspect of intolerable vigilantism, unless subordinated to the designs and prerogatives of the state and its newly bureaucratized “rule of law.” By the same logic, the plural political obligations of the prewar years, based as they were on the overlapping social ties of local communities and groups in which Americans exercised membership, gave way to a unitary national loyalty. Just as the statism impelled by World War I hardened the boundaries around the nation through measures such as passports, immigration control, and border policing, so too did it require an inner cementing of identification within the self, with no room for multiple allegiances or divided conscience. Beneath the strident rhetoric of 100 percent Americanism there was a quiet surrender. Silent compliance and legalistic procedure, rather than muscular self-government, became the new grounds for “law and order” and good citizenship.

By focusing on obligation, Capozzola has opened up fresh new methodological ground. Here is a way to study the social foundations of politics and law—grounded as they were in the everyday functioning of associations, churches, townships, lodges, societies, and other corporate bodies—without succumbing to the dead abstractions of formalism or the overdetermined mechanics of structuralism. Here, too, one can observe concrete practices of political coercion without totalizing them into a Gorgon-like “state” whose despotic powers swept everything before it. Whether the law was understood to be the people or the state, we cannot fully understand the way it worked without attending to the manner of its enforcement in daily life. This pioneering book demonstrates forcefully the analytic payoff of such an approach, deepening and historicizing our grasp of the origins of modern law and politics.