ABSTRACT
Among the drivers of isolationism between the wars were the revisionist histories produced by American scholars and the literature of the “Lost Generation” of writers. While all histories are “revisionist” in that they are influenced by and fashioned for a particular time and place, histories of the interwar period tended to be wildly at odds with the actual facts, especially concerning the Great War. Revisionists set about rehabilitating Wilhelmine Germany, shifting the blame for starting the war and arguing that the Central Powers were no less moral in their actions than the Allies and, in the most extreme interpretations, the moral superiors of the Allies. As for American involvement in the war, the revisionists contended that the American public was the hapless victim of British propaganda that the United States went to war to protect the investments of an economic elite. None of this was true, but it found an extremely receptive audience in an America disillusioned by the war. If revisionist histories established the logic for isolationism, the novels and poems of the Lost Generation provided the passion. This chapter looks at the writings of Americans who had first-hand experience of the Great War, including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Laurence Stallings, and many others. While styles varied, there was a consistency among these writers in their portrayals of the war as pointless, brutal, and dehumanizing, and in the ridicule they heaped upon sentiments of religion and patriotism. Both American historians and American novelists and poets remained isolationists in their politics until very late.
