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Crusader Nation: The United States in Peace and the Great War: 1898-1920
In this absorbing history of progressive-era America, acclaimed historian David Traxel paints a vivid picture of a tumultuous time of change that was the foundation for the twentieth century.. With WWI on the horizon, the struggles to end child labor, improve public health, advance education, win votes for women, and rid cities of corrupt political machines brought forth passionate responses from millions of Americans. There was a demand for reform and a desire for a more efficient and compassionate society. From wide-eyed dreamers to hard-line politicians, seasoned reporters to diary keeping soldiers, these crusaders–Jack Reed, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and “Mother” Jones to name a few–come alive in these pages.
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 24, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 17, 2021
Honestly, I picked this up from a bargain table and expected (particularly with a review quote from Doris Kearns Goodwin) it to be an endless drumbeat of "reformers = angels, opposing viewpoints = devils. But this author, in addition to having a VERY engaging writing style and extensive researching, did a remarkable job of including ALL facets of American life with a very even-handed approach. Every character was given equitable treatment regarding both their foibles and admirable qualities and the only outright bad guys were the Kaiser's government in WWI. It was a very easy and enjoyable read!
July 23, 2025
Really probably a 3.5, good opportunity for me to understand more about a period of US history I have not read as much about. Interesting to think about Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt being Progressive Crusaders from different parties, though I don't feel like this book covered Wilson's racist policies coexisting with that with enough detail. Also interesting to read about isolationism and the tensions of whether to enter WW1, how corporate interests benefit from wars, and discrimination against immigrants in the context of war.
October 23, 2013
David Traxel’s engagingly written narrative history of the United States in the early twentieth century offers some of the pleasures and frustrations of having your garrulous, opinionated grandfather take you through his old scrapbooks. At times you catch flashes of the past as people actually lived it, with the color and vitality that textbooks rarely convey, but you also sense that you’re getting an impressionistic and selective view of the era.
The period from 1898 to 1920 was one of the most transformative in American history, as the country became an imperialist power, undertook major social and political reform under the banner of progressivism, fizzed with cultural ferment, and threw itself into the mechanized slaughter of the Great War. As Traxel writes, the country “was awash in newness,” including “a New Music, New Theater, New Art, New Psychology, New Morals, New Immigration. A New Man strutted along the boulevards, accompanied, or on occasion brushed aside, by a New Woman.”
Traxel tries to bring the many strands of the time together in the persons of presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (who opposed each other in the 1912 election that pitted Roosevelt’s New Nationalism against Wilson’s New Freedom), radical journalist John Reed, and automaker Henry Ford. This central cast allows him to relate the political drama through Wilson and TR, and industrial development and the antiwar movement through Ford (who sponsored a journey of peace activists to Europe in 1915 in a forlorn attempt to end the war). Reed’s story encompasses bohemianism, labor unrest, Mexican insurgency, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The book also includes cameos of other representative figures ranging from social worker Jane Addams to composer Irving Berlin to General John Pershing.
Traxel constructs his survey largely by combing through older histories and memoirs, with a magpie sense for eye-catching detail. He leavens the narrative with excerpts from novels, doggerel, jokes, songs, gossip, and even a nude photograph of Louise Bryant in the dunes of Provincetown, where she was simultaneously the lover of Reed and playwright Eugene O’Neill. He presents illuminating vignettes of the 1913 Madison Square Garden pageant in support of striking mill workers, the sinking of the Lusitania, and Pancho Villa’s border raids, and offers up curios like the fact that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (which touched off World War I) attracted much less attention at the time than the trial of a French politician’s wife accused of killing a conservative journalist.
Crusader Nation ultimately provides an enjoyable but idiosyncratic and incomplete portrait of the era. Nine-tenths of the book takes place in the six-year period 1912-18, and neglects important subjects such as the Philippine War, the Triangle fire, the eugenics movement, the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, and Upton Sinclair’s consumer-revolting novel The Jungle, to name a few.
The book’s title suggests that crusading defines the American character, a provocative charge to make in 2005 given that much of the world considered the U.S. occupation of Iraq to be an ideologically-driven crusade. Traxel also offers the tantalizing implication that in progressive efforts to “stop child labor and other exploitive employer practices, extend democracy through votes for women, rein in irresponsible plutocrats, expel corrupt big-city machines, and prohibit the social evil of alcohol” there may be lessons for our own politically polarized debates. Reformers and their opponents alike, he notes, had “faith in their particular visions of society and fought to establish these with a passionate intensity that often blinded them to other points of view.”
But Traxel doesn’t penetrate deeply enough into the movements of the era – he devotes a page or two to the campaigns for temperance and women’s suffrage, as opposed to thirty-five pages on events in Mexico – to distinguish between reform and zealotry. It’s true that the government proclaimed American participation in the Great War to be a holy crusade to save civilization and democracy, even going so far as to produce a documentary entitled Pershing’s Crusaders. But the government had to resort to propaganda to make this claim precisely because so many citizens were opposed to the war, and in any case the European belligerents were no less crusade-minded than the Americans.
Traxel’s book is a brave attempt to recapture the grand sweep of the past in all its richness and strangeness, an effort more often undertaken these days by historical novelists than academics – and it’s telling that Crusader Nation’s bibliography lists only half a dozen histories produced in the last five years. But better still would be to combine Traxel’s storytelling ability with more scholarly analysis to emerge with a synthesis that speaks more directly to who we were, and are, as a nation.
The period from 1898 to 1920 was one of the most transformative in American history, as the country became an imperialist power, undertook major social and political reform under the banner of progressivism, fizzed with cultural ferment, and threw itself into the mechanized slaughter of the Great War. As Traxel writes, the country “was awash in newness,” including “a New Music, New Theater, New Art, New Psychology, New Morals, New Immigration. A New Man strutted along the boulevards, accompanied, or on occasion brushed aside, by a New Woman.”
Traxel tries to bring the many strands of the time together in the persons of presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (who opposed each other in the 1912 election that pitted Roosevelt’s New Nationalism against Wilson’s New Freedom), radical journalist John Reed, and automaker Henry Ford. This central cast allows him to relate the political drama through Wilson and TR, and industrial development and the antiwar movement through Ford (who sponsored a journey of peace activists to Europe in 1915 in a forlorn attempt to end the war). Reed’s story encompasses bohemianism, labor unrest, Mexican insurgency, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The book also includes cameos of other representative figures ranging from social worker Jane Addams to composer Irving Berlin to General John Pershing.
Traxel constructs his survey largely by combing through older histories and memoirs, with a magpie sense for eye-catching detail. He leavens the narrative with excerpts from novels, doggerel, jokes, songs, gossip, and even a nude photograph of Louise Bryant in the dunes of Provincetown, where she was simultaneously the lover of Reed and playwright Eugene O’Neill. He presents illuminating vignettes of the 1913 Madison Square Garden pageant in support of striking mill workers, the sinking of the Lusitania, and Pancho Villa’s border raids, and offers up curios like the fact that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (which touched off World War I) attracted much less attention at the time than the trial of a French politician’s wife accused of killing a conservative journalist.
Crusader Nation ultimately provides an enjoyable but idiosyncratic and incomplete portrait of the era. Nine-tenths of the book takes place in the six-year period 1912-18, and neglects important subjects such as the Philippine War, the Triangle fire, the eugenics movement, the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, and Upton Sinclair’s consumer-revolting novel The Jungle, to name a few.
The book’s title suggests that crusading defines the American character, a provocative charge to make in 2005 given that much of the world considered the U.S. occupation of Iraq to be an ideologically-driven crusade. Traxel also offers the tantalizing implication that in progressive efforts to “stop child labor and other exploitive employer practices, extend democracy through votes for women, rein in irresponsible plutocrats, expel corrupt big-city machines, and prohibit the social evil of alcohol” there may be lessons for our own politically polarized debates. Reformers and their opponents alike, he notes, had “faith in their particular visions of society and fought to establish these with a passionate intensity that often blinded them to other points of view.”
But Traxel doesn’t penetrate deeply enough into the movements of the era – he devotes a page or two to the campaigns for temperance and women’s suffrage, as opposed to thirty-five pages on events in Mexico – to distinguish between reform and zealotry. It’s true that the government proclaimed American participation in the Great War to be a holy crusade to save civilization and democracy, even going so far as to produce a documentary entitled Pershing’s Crusaders. But the government had to resort to propaganda to make this claim precisely because so many citizens were opposed to the war, and in any case the European belligerents were no less crusade-minded than the Americans.
Traxel’s book is a brave attempt to recapture the grand sweep of the past in all its richness and strangeness, an effort more often undertaken these days by historical novelists than academics – and it’s telling that Crusader Nation’s bibliography lists only half a dozen histories produced in the last five years. But better still would be to combine Traxel’s storytelling ability with more scholarly analysis to emerge with a synthesis that speaks more directly to who we were, and are, as a nation.
July 16, 2008
This is one of the best books I've read on the history of the United States from 1898 to 1920.
Traxell weaves a wonderfully rich narrative that reads more like an historical novel than an historical work of non-fiction. It's a very engrossing read that connects the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Emma Goldman, Woodrow Wilson, Bill Haywood, Gen. Jack Pershing, and an entire cast of various characters that formed the history of this country during that time.
Very entertaining history book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in history during that period.
Traxell weaves a wonderfully rich narrative that reads more like an historical novel than an historical work of non-fiction. It's a very engrossing read that connects the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Emma Goldman, Woodrow Wilson, Bill Haywood, Gen. Jack Pershing, and an entire cast of various characters that formed the history of this country during that time.
Very entertaining history book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in history during that period.
August 19, 2007
Good overview of the progressive era and its end. It seems that the era of reform came and ended with the power of the corporation. This highlights both the value of the progressive movement and its failings--flawed people, naivity, lack of organizating, the Russian Revolution and its effect on American Society, and world War I and the brutality that caused people to reposition. Its sadly an echo to today, where we can see the progressives start to rise again.
September 30, 2014
Was reminded of this one when watching Ken Burns' "The Roosevelts." Though it's not all that memorably written, it's a good overview of TR's period and a good source of information on many of the main figures of the era.
February 8, 2014
Appreciated this book more the second time around for portrayal of Wilson and impact of WWI on progressive movement
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews