Welfare, Reform and World War I *

ONLY A DECADE AGO HISTORIANS WERE SATISFIED WITH THE SIMPLE generalization that World War I killed the progressive movement, or that the crusade to make the world safe for democracy absorbed the reform—ing zeal of the progressive era and compounded the disillusionment that followed. “Participation in the war put an end to the Progressive move—ment,” Richard Hofstadter announced. “Reform stopped dead,” Eric Goldman decided. ¹ It is now obvious that the relationship between social reform and World War I is more complex. Henry May has demonstrated that some of the progressive idealism had cracked and begun to crumble even before 1917, ² while Arthur Link and Clarke Chambers have discovered that a great deal of progressivism survived into the 1920s. ³ At the same time several historians have shown that for the intellectuals