Why This Book Actually Matters More Than You Think
I picked up Doughboys: The Great War and the Remaking of America by Jennifer D. Keene a few years ago when I was trying to understand why American military memory works the way it does today. The standard narrative about World War I in the US is that nobody cared, nobody remembered, and then everything got swept under the rug until Vietnam became the first "forgettable" war everyone agreed upon. Keene dismantles that comfortable assumption pretty thoroughly. The central argument is straightforward but not especially comforting. The American Expeditionary Forces were not the disorganized mess most textbooks pretend they were. They were complicated, flawed, deeply racialized, and absolutely central to how modern America structured itself around military service and national identity. The doughboy wasn't some hapless draftee stumbling through the Argonne. He was a product of an entire system that was actively being rebuilt around him.
Doughboys The Great War And The Remaking Of America Jennifer D Keene
The book covers roughly 1917 to the early 1920s, which might sound narrow until you realize Keene uses that period to show how a relatively insular country became something else entirely. She tracks the draft, the training camps, the frontline experience, the home front, and crucially the veteran reintegration. The through-line is that the war remade institutional structures, racial dynamics, and civic expectations in ways that still shape American politics and culture today. One thing beginners often miss reading this genre: the war did not end in 1918 for these men. The veterans' movement of the 1920s, the Bonus Army, the whole infrastructure of American veteranhood originated in this period. Keene makes it clear that the postwar era was not peace followed by forgetting. It was active, noisy, and sometimes violent negotiation over what the war meant and who got to define it.
What Makes This Different From Other WWI Books
Most popular WWI histories focus on Europe. The trenches, the generals, the diplomacy. Keene keeps America at the center and that changes everything about how the story reads. She draws on primary sources that most general readers have never encountered: draft board records, soldiers' letters home, NAACP correspondence about racial incidents in the camps, veterans' organization meeting minutes, FBI files on radical organizers. The racial dimension is where this book gets honest. The American military in WWI was segregated, but the pressure of war created cracks in the system that neither side wanted. Black soldiers demanded full citizenship after fighting for democracy abroad. White officers and politicians panicked. Keene doesn't romanticize either side. She shows the contradictions sitting uncomfortably side by side: the government needed Black labor and soldiers desperately, while simultaneously reinforcing segregation at every level. This tension produced outcomes that rippled far beyond the war. I ran into a specific problem when I was cross-referencing Keene's claims about draft resistance with local records. The federal data and the county-level implementation diverged sharply in certain areas, particularly the rural South. Keene acknowledges this but the granular picture is messier than her narrative allows. My workaround was pulling regional scholarship on Southern draft boards, especially work by Stephen Littlefield and others, which confirmed the broad patterns while filling in the ugly details about intimidation and quota manipulation. If you're using this book for research, don't treat it as the final word on any single locality.
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Key Arguments That Hold Up
Keene's thesis about the state-building function of the war is the strongest part. The Selective Service Act, the Commission on Training Camp Activities, the Committee on Public Information, the Espionage Act, the entire machinery of modern conscription and propaganda was built during these years. The United States government became a different animal because of World War I, and Keene traces that transformation systematically rather than treating it as background noise. The second major argument is about citizenship. Universal male conscription created a new social contract. Military service became tied to political participation, economic opportunity, and national belonging. This directly excluded women, Black citizens, Asian Americans, and Indigenous peoples from the benefits in ways that were both explicit and bureaucratic. The exclusion wasn't an accident. It was baked into the institutional design. On the home front, Keene shows that the war mobilized American society more comprehensively than any conflict before it, but also that the mobilization was deeply unequal. Women entered the workforce in significant numbers but were pushed out afterward. Immigrant communities faced intense assimilation pressure. Labor organizers were arrested under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. The sacrifices were distributed very differently across populations, and the rewards followed the same pattern.
Where the Book Falls Short
No book is perfect and this one has real limitations. Keene covers the military and home front well but the diplomatic and strategic dimensions get short shrift. If you want to understand how American entry into the war changed the balance of forces in Europe, you'll need to read alongside works like Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919 or Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers. The operational military history is also thin. Keene is a social and cultural historian, not a military strategist, and she doesn't pretend to be. The Argonne campaign, the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the actual tactical performance of American troops in combat gets relatively little attention compared to the social consequences. For that you'd want something like H.P. Willmott's The First World War or Fredriksen's more traditional military narratives. The biggest structural weakness is that the book sometimes treats "America" as a monolith even while analyzing its internal divisions. Native American experiences, Latino participation, and Asian American responses get mentioned but not developed. The Chinese exclusion context and the treatment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast during the war period are areas where this book's coverage feels thin.
How to Use This Book Effectively
If you're approaching this for the first time, read the chapters in order. The argument builds cumulatively and jumping around will cost you. The introduction and conclusion are worth reading twice because Keene states her thesis there and then refines it throughout. The endnotes and bibliography are where the real research lives. Many of her source citations point toward primary collections that aren't widely discussed. The American Military History series volumes, the National Archives records on the Selective Service System, and the oral history collections from the Veterans History Project all feed into her argument in ways that are worth following independently. Pair this with broader contextual reading. Keene's work fits into a larger scholarly conversation that started gaining traction in the 1990s when historians like Jay Winter, Samuel Hynes, and others began reassessing World War I's domestic impact. The British and French home front scholarship from the same period complements her American focus nicely. You'll also want David M. Kennedy's Over Here as a foundational counterpoint, though Keene corrects several of his conclusions.
Who Should Read This and Who Should Skip It
Students of American history, particularly those focused on the Progressive Era through the 1920s, will find this essential. Political scientists studying state capacity and wartime governance will get useful framework material. Veterans studies researchers should treat this as required reading because it fundamentally challenges the idea that WWI was irrelevant to American veteran politics. If you're looking for battlefield narratives, trench warfare descriptions, or detailed unit histories, go elsewhere. This is not that book. If you want a gripping personal narrative following individual soldiers through combat, Keene uses personal stories strategically but doesn't sustain them the way Barbara Tuchman or Peter Hart do. This is analytical history written for people who want to understand systems rather than experience the war vicariously. The book remains one of the most important works on American WWI historiography. It changed how I think about the relationship between military service and democratic inclusion in the United States. That question is not historical trivia. It shapes current debates about veterans' benefits, racial equity in military service, and the politics of national memory. The Great War was not forgotten. It just got buried under louder conflicts, and Keene helps you dig it back up.
