One of the best lines in all of American World War I literature appears in John Dos Passos's 1919, the second volume of the U.S.A. trilogy. After Dick Savage, a volunteer ambulance driver with the American Red Cross, is charged with making unpatriotic remarks, he appears before a “baldheaded official” in Paris, who harangues him as follows: “Young man … your opinions, while showing a senseless and cowardly turn of mind, don't matter. The American people is out to get the Kaiser … Don't monkey with the buzzsaw.”Footnote ¹ Don't monkey with the buzzsaw – although Dos Passos didn't invent this phrase (it was, in fact, a popular idiom during the early 1900s, even used as the title of a film comedy released in 1914), the words perfectly convey the toothy ferocity of the expanded wartime state. As the official implies, anyone foolish enough to question the wisdom of the American war effort will, thanks to repressive measures like the federal Espionage and Sedition Acts, run afoul of a dangerously supercharged machine with a whirling, out-of-control blade.

However, in his study World War One, American Literature, and the Federal State, Mark Whalan (University of Oregon) suggests that the buzzsaw, if you will, cut both ways: the federal government's extended reach menaced individual freedom but also offered new visions of citizenship and identity, as well as cultural fuel for literary modernism. Whalan acknowledges works, such as Upton Sinclair's Jimmie Higgins (1919) and E. E. Cummings's The Enormous Room (1922), that focus on governmental tyranny; however, he is much more interested in treatments of the wartime state that are nuanced, conflicted, or multilayered. He finds these in some surprising corners, including Poetry magazine, an avant-garde home to free verse that sought “to align modernist experimentation with state expansion” (53); the epistolary fiction of Ring Lardner, which drew its humor from the incongruities of state-sponsored wartime correspondence; the regional novel, as represented here primarily by Willa Cather's One of Ours (1922) and Zane Grey's The Desert of Wheat (1919); and post-World War I discourses of physical rehabilitation.

A leading scholar of American literature and culture of the 1910s and 1920s, Whalan packs this densely written book with historical background on everything from the Committee on Public Information and the propaganda arm of Woodrow Wilson's wartime government to the early twentieth-century growth of the US Post Office, the “most visible institution of the federal state” (65). However, he never allows context to overshadow close reading. Two examples of the latter stand out. Whalan's analysis of John Dos Passos's U.S.A., which takes up an entire chapter, brilliantly approaches the work as a study of the omnipresent but invisible “petroculture” that resulted from collusion between Big Government and Big Oil, a development accelerated by American mobilization during World War I. This is one of the freshest takes on the trilogy to appear in years. Equally fine is the extended discussion of Laurence Stallings's Plumes (1924) as a novel that responds – quite angrily in places – to the federal government's expectation that disabled former doughboys would overcome their pain and impairment, reenter the work force, and shed their reliance on government charity (in marked contrast to the comfortable pensions bestowed upon wounded Civil War veterans).

Also worth highlighting is Whalan's compelling treatment of One of Ours. Here, he parts company from critics who perceive a consistent pattern of irony in Cather's novel and embraces the text's contradictions and messiness, interpreting its “disorienting stylistic shifts” (a source of bafflement for many readers) as “transitions between different scales of political geography, as Claude [the novel's hero] moves from local, to national, and then to international vantage points” (123). Ultimately, Whalan contends, One of Ours traces Claude's evolution from Nebraskan to “modern federated citizen,” an evolution the novel simultaneously celebrates and deplores (123).

World War One, American Literature, and the Federal State stands with Keith Gandal's War Isn't the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature (2018), Tim Dayton's American Poetry and the First World War (1918), and David Davis's World War I and Southern Modernism (2017) as one of the top critical studies occasioned by the American World War I centennial of 2017–18. Informed by Whalan's encyclopedic knowledge of social, political, and literary history, this impressive book is a must-read for anyone studying the myriad ways in which the buzzsaw of state expansion cut across American culture in the late 1910s, forever changing American life and letters.