liberty equality power - higher ed ebooks & … chapter 23: war and society, 1914–1920...

LIBERTY,EQUALITY,

POWERA H I S T O R Y O F T H E A M E R I C A N P E O P L E

V o l u m e I I : S i n c e 1 8 6 3F i f t h E d i t i o n

John M. Murrin Princeton University, Emeritus

Paul E. Johnson University of South Carolina, Emeritus

James M. McPherson Princeton University, Emeritus

Alice FahsUniversity of California, Irvine

Gary Gerstle Vanderbilt University

Emily S. Rosenberg University of California, Irvine

Norman L. Rosenberg Macalester College

Australia • Brazil • Canada • Mexico • Singapore • SpainUnited Kingdom • United States

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Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, Volume II: Since 1863, Fifth EditionJohn M. Murrin, Paul E. Johnson, James M. McPherson, Alice Fahs, Gary Gerstle,

Emily S. Rosenberg, and Norman L. Rosenberg

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War and Society,1914–1920

The Sinking of the LusitaniaOn May 7, 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the British passengerliner Lusitania, killing 1,198 people, 128 of them Americans. The event turnedU.S. opinion sharply against the Germans, especially because the civilians onboard had been given no chance to escape or surrender.

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The First World War broke out in Europe in August 1914.

The Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and

the Ottoman Empire squared off against the Triple Entente

of Great Britain, France, and Russia. The United States

entered the war on the side of the Entente (the Allies, or Allied Powers, as

they came to be called) in 1917. Over the next year and a half, the United

States converted its large, sprawling economy into a disciplined war pro-

duction machine, raised a 5-million-man army, and provided both the

war matériel and troops that helped propel the Allies to victory. The

United States emerged from the war as the world’s mightiest country. In

these and other respects, the war was a great triumph.

But the war also convulsed American society more deeply than any

event since the Civil War. This was the first “total” war, meaning that com-

batants devoted virtually all of their resources to the fight. Thus the U.S.

government had no choice but to pursue a degree of industrial control and

social regimentation that was unprecedented in American history. Needless

to say, this degree of government control was a controversial measure in a

society that had long distrusted state power. Moreover, significant numbers

of Americans from a variety of constituencies opposed the war. To over-

come this opposition, Wilson couched American war aims in disinterested

and idealistic terms: The United States, he claimed, wanted a “peace with-

out victory,” a “war for democracy,” and liberty for the world’s oppressed

peoples. Because these words drew deeply on American political traditions,

Wilson believed that Americans would find them inspiring, put aside their

suspicions, and support him.

Although many people in the United States and abroad responded

enthusiastically to Wilson’s ideals, Wilson needed England and France’s sup-

port to deliver peace without victory, and this support never came. At home,

disadvantaged groups stirred up trouble by declaring that American society

had failed to live up to its democratic and egalitarian ideals.Wilson supported

repressive policies to silence these rebels and to enforce unity and conformity

on the American people. In the process, he tarnished the ideals for which

America had been fighting. Only a year after the war ended, Wilson’s hopes

for peace without victory abroad had been destroyed, and America was being

torn apart by violent labor disputes and race riots at home.

EUROPE’S DESCENT INTO WAR

AMERICAN NEUTRALITYSubmarine WarfareThe Peace MovementWilson’s Vision: “Peace

without Victory” German Escalation

AMERICAN INTERVENTION

MOBILIZING FOR “TOTAL” WAROrganizing IndustrySecuring Workers, Keeping

Labor Peace Raising an ArmyPaying the Bills Arousing Patriotic ArdorWartime Repression

THE FAILURE OF THEINTERNATIONAL PEACE

The Paris Peace Conferenceand the Treaty of Versailles

The League of NationsWilson versus Lodge: The Fight

over Ratification The Treaty’s Final Defeat

THE POSTWAR PERIOD:A SOCIETY IN CONVULSION

Labor-Capital ConflictRadicals and the Red ScareRacial Conflict and the Rise

of Black Nationalism

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686 C H A P T E R 2 3 : Wa r a n d S o c i e t y, 1 9 1 4 – 1 9 2 0

Europe’s Descent into WarEurope began its descent into war on June 28, 1914, inSarajevo, Bosnia, when a Bosnian nationalist assassinatedArchduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarianthrone. This act was meant to protest the Austro-Hungarianimperial presence in the Balkans and to encourage theBosnians, Croatians, and other Balkan peoples to jointhe Serbs in establishing independent nations. Austria-Hungary responded to this provocation on July 28 bydeclaring war on Serbia, holding it responsible for thearchduke’s murder.

The conflict might have remained local if an intricateseries of treaties had not divided Europe into two hostilecamps. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, the so-called Triple Alliance, had promised to come to eachother’s aid if attacked. Italy would soon opt out of thisalliance, to be replaced by the Ottoman Empire. Arrayedagainst the nations of the Triple Alliance were Britain,France, and Russia in the Triple Entente. Russia was obli-gated by another treaty to defend Serbia against Austria-Hungary, and consequently on July 30, it mobilized itsarmed forces to go to Serbia’s aid. That brought Germanyinto the conflict to protect Austria-Hungary from Russianattack. On August 3, German troops struck not at Russiabut at France, Russia’s western ally. To reach France,German troops had marched through neutral Belgium.On August 4, Britain reacted by declaring war on Germany.Within the space of only a few weeks, Europe wasengulfed in war.

Complicated alliances and defense treaties of theEuropean nations undoubtedly hastened the rush towardwar. But equally important was the competition amongthe European powers to build the strongest economies,the largest armies and navies, and the grandest colonialempires. Britain and Germany, in particular, wereengaged in a bitter struggle for European and worldsupremacy. Few Europeans had any idea that these mili-tary buildups might lead to a terrible war that would killnearly an entire generation of young men and expose thebarbarity lurking in their civilization. Historians nowbelieve that several advisers close to the German emperor,Kaiser Wilhelm II, were actually eager to engage Russiaand France in a fight for supremacy on the European con-tinent. They expected that a European war would be swiftand decisive—in Germany’s favor. England and Francealso believed in their own superiority. Millions of youngmen, rich and poor, rushed to join the armies on bothsides and share in the expected glory.

Victory was not swift. The two camps were evenlymatched. Moreover, the first wartime use of machineguns and barbed wire made defense against attack easier

than staging an offensive. (Both tanks and airplanes hadbeen invented by this time, but military strategists onboth sides were slow to put them to offensive use.) Onthe western front, after the initial German attack nar-rowly failed to take Paris in 1914, the two opposingarmies confronted each other along a battle line stretch-ing from Belgium in the north to the Swiss border inthe south. Troops dug trenches to protect themselvesfrom artillery bombardment and poison gas attacks.Commanders on both sides mounted suicidal groundassaults on the enemy by sending tens of thousands ofinfantry, armed only with rifles, bayonets, and grenades,out of the trenches and directly into enemy fire. Barbedwire further retarded forward progress, enabling enemyartillery and machine guns to cut down appalling num-bers of men. In 1916, during one 10-month Germanoffensive at Verdun (France), 600,000 German troopsdied; 20,000 British troops were killed during only thefirst day of an Entente assault on the Somme River (alsoin France). Many of those who were not killed in combatsuccumbed to disease that spread rapidly in the cold,

C H R O N O L O G Y

1914 First World War breaks out (July–August)

1915 German submarine sinks the Lusitania (May 7)

1916 Woodrow Wilson unveils peace initiative • Wilsonreelected as “peace president”

1917 Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare(February) • Tsar Nicholas II overthrown in Russia(March) • U.S. enters the war (April 6) • Committeeon Public Information established • Congress passesSelective Service Act, Espionage Act, ImmigrationRestriction Act • War Industries Board established• Lenin’s Bolsheviks come to power in Russia (Nov.)

1918 Lenin signs treaty with Germany, pulls Russia out ofwar (March) • Germany launches offensive onwestern front (March–April) • Congress passesSabotage Act and Sedition Act • French, British, andU.S. troops repel Germans, advance toward Germany(April–October) • Eugene V. Debs jailed for makingantiwar speech • Germany signs armistice (Nov. 11)

1919 Treaty of Versailles signed (June 28) • Chicago raceriot (July) • Wilson suffers stroke (October 2)• Police strike in Boston • 18th Amendment(Prohibition) ratified

1919–20 Steelworkers strike in Midwest • Red Scare prompts“Palmer raids” • Senate refuses to ratify Treaty ofVersailles • Universal Negro Improvement Associationgrows under Marcus Garvey’s leadership

1920 Anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti convicted of murder

1923 Marcus Garvey convicted of mail fraud

1924 Woodrow Wilson dies

1927 Sacco and Vanzetti executed

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Eu rop e’s D e s c e n t i n t o Wa r 687

wet, and rat-infested trenches. In Eastern Europe, thearmies of Germany and Austria-Hungary squared offagainst those of Russia and Serbia. Although that front didnot employ trench warfare, the combat was no less lethal.By the time the First World War ended, an estimated

8.5 million soldiers had died and more than twice thatnumber had been wounded. Total casualties, both mili-tary and civilian, had reached 37 million. Europe hadlost a generation of young men, as well as its confidence,stability, and global supremacy.

EUROPE GOES TO WAR

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AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

FRANCE

ITALY

MONTENEGRO

SPAIN

ALGERIA (Fr.)

TUNISIA (Fr.)

LIBYA(Fr.)

EGYPT (Br.)

A R A B I A

SPANISHMOROCCO

(Sp.)

MOROCCO(Fr.)

PORTUGAL

GREATBRITAIN

NORWAY

ICELAND

SWEDEN

R U S S I A

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

BULGARIA

ROMANIA

SERBIA

GREECE

NETH.

BELG.

LUX.

GERMANY

SWITZ.

ALBANIA

DENMARK

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

English Channel

AEGEAN SEA

BLACK SEA

NORTHSEA

AD

RIATIC SEA

ATLANTICOCEAN

Bay ofBiscay

BALTIC

SEA

Paris

Sarajevo

Mecca

Rome

Vienna

Berlin

Petrograd(St.Petersburg)

Constantinople

London

BOSNIA andHERZEGOVINA

0

200 400 Kilometers0

200 400 Miles

Central powers andOttoman Empire, 1916

Neutral countries

Trench line, Western front, 1915

British naval blockadeAllied powers andpossessions, 1916

Eastern front, 1915

3July 30Russia begins mobilization

4August 1Germany declares waron Russia

5August 3Germany declares waron France

6August 4Great Britain declares waron Germany

7August 6Russia and Austria-Hungary at war

8August 12Great Britain declares war on Austria-Hungary

2July 28Austria-Hungary declareswar on Serbia

June 28Assassination at Sarajevo

1

THE ROAD TO WAR,SUMMER 1914

Map 23.1 Europe Goes to WarIn the First World War, Great Britain, France, and Russia squared off against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and theOttoman Empire. Most of the fighting occurred in Europe along the western front in France (purple line) or the easternfront in Russia (red line). This map also shows Britain’s blockade of German ports. British armies based in Egypt (thena British colony) clashed with Ottoman armies in Arabia and other parts of the Ottoman Empire.View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin.

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American Neutrality

Why did the U.S. policy of

neutrality fail, and why did the United States

get drawn into war?

Soon after the fighting began, Woodrow Wilson toldAmericans that this was a European war; neither side wasthreatening a vital American interest. The United Stateswould therefore proclaim its neutrality and maintainnormal relations with both sides while seeking to securepeace. Normal relations meant that the United Stateswould continue trading with both camps. Wilson’s neu-trality policy met with lively opposition, especially fromTheodore Roosevelt, who was convinced that the UnitedStates should join the Entente to check German powerand expansionism. Most Americans, however, applaudedWilson’s determination to keep the country out of war.

Neutrality was easier to proclaim than to achieve, how-ever. Many Americans, especially those with economic andpolitical power, identified culturally more with Britainthan with Germany. They shared with the English a lan-guage, a common ancestry, and a commitment to liberty.Wilson revered the British parliamentary system of govern-ment. His closest foreign policy adviser, Colonel Edward M.House, was pro-British, as was Robert Lansing, a trustedcounselor in the State Department. William JenningsBryan, Wilson’s secretary of state, objected to this pro-British tilt, but he was a lone voice in Wilson’s Cabinet.Germany had no such attraction for U.S. policy makers. Onthe contrary, Germany’s acceptance of monarchical rule,the prominence of militarists in German politics, and its

lack of democratic traditions inclined U.S. officials to judgeGermany harshly.

The United States had strong economic ties to GreatBritain as well. In 1914, the United States exported morethan $800 million in goods to Britain and its allies, com-pared with $170 million to Germany and Austria-Hungary(which came to be known as the Central Powers). As soonas the war began, the British and then the French turnedto the United States for food, clothing, munitions, andother war supplies. The U.S. economy, which had beenlanguishing in 1914, enjoyed a boom as a result. Bankersbegan to issue loans to the Allied Powers, further knittingtogether the American and British economies and givingAmerican investors a direct stake in an Allied victory.Moreover, the British navy had blockaded German ports,which damaged the United States’ already limited tradewith Germany. By 1916, U.S. exports to the Central Powershad plummeted to barely $1 million, a fall of more than 99percent in two years.

The British blockade of German ports clearly violatedAmerican neutrality. The Wilson administration protestedthe British navy’s search and occasional seizure of Ameri-can merchant ships, but it never retaliated by suspendingloans or exports to Great Britain. To do so would haveplunged the U.S. economy into a recession. In failing toprotect its right to trade with Germany, however, theUnited States compromised its neutrality and alloweditself to be drawn into war.

Submarine WarfareTo combat British control of the seas and to check the flowof U.S. goods to the Allies, Germany unveiled a terrifying

Focus Question

Gassed, by John Singer SargentAn artist renders the horror of a poison gas attack in the First World War. The Germans were the first to use this new andbrutal weapon, which contributed greatly to the terror of war.

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Am e r i c a n Ne u t ra l i t y 689

new weapon, the Unterseeboot, or U-boat, the first militar-ily effective submarine. Early in 1915, Germany announcedits intent to use its U-boats to sink on sight enemy ships enroute to the British Isles. On May 7, 1915, without warn-ing, a German U-boat torpedoed the British passengerliner Lusitania, en route from New York to London. Theship sank in 22 minutes, killing 1,198 men, women, andchildren, 128 of them U.S. citizens. Americans wereshocked by the sinking. Innocent civilians who had beengiven no warning of attack and no chance to surrenderhad been murdered in cold blood. The attack appeared toconfirm what anti-German agitators were saying: that theGermans were by nature barbaric and uncivilized. The cir-cumstances surrounding the sinking of the Lusitania,however, were more complicated than most Americansrealized.

Before its sailing, the Germans had alleged that theLusitania was secretly carrying a large store of munitionsto Great Britain (a charge later proved true), and that ittherefore was subject to U-boat attack. Germany hadwarned American passengers not to travel on British pas-senger ships that carried munitions. Moreover, Germanyclaimed, with some justification, that the purpose of theU-boat attacks—the disruption of Allied supply lines—was no different from Britain’s purpose in blockadingGerman ports. Because its surface ships were outnum-bered by the British navy, Germany claimed it had noalternative but to choose the underwater strategy. If a sub-marine attack seemed more reprehensible than a conven-tional sea battle, the Germans argued, it was no more sothan the British attempt to starve the German people intosubmission with a blockade.

American political leaders might have used theLusitania incident to denounce both Germany’s U-boatstrategy and Britain’s blockade as actions that violatedthe rights of citizens of neutral nations. Only Secretaryof State Bryan had the courage to say so, however, andhis stand proved so unpopular in Washington that heresigned from office; Wilson chose the pro-BritishLansing to take his place. Wilson denounced the sinkingof the Lusitania and demanded that Germany pledgenever to launch another attack on the citizens of neutralnations, even when they were traveling in British orFrench ships. Germany acquiesced to Wilson’s demand.

The resulting lull in submarine warfare was short-lived, however. In early 1916, the Allies began to arm theirmerchant vessels with guns and depth charges capable ofdestroying German U-boats. Considering this a provoca-tion, Germany renewed its campaign of surprise subma-rine attacks. In March 1916, a German submarine torpe-doed the French passenger liner Sussex, causing a heavyloss of life and injuring several Americans. Again Wilsondemanded that Germany spare civilians from attack. In

the so-called Sussex pledge, Germany once again relentedbut warned that it might resume unrestricted submarinewarfare if the United States did not prevail on GreatBritain to permit neutral ships to pass through the navalblockade.

The German submarine attacks strengthened thehand of Theodore Roosevelt and others who had beenarguing that war with Germany was inevitable and thatthe United States must prepare to fight. By 1916, Wilsoncould no longer ignore these critics. Between Januaryand September of that year, he sought and won congres-sional approval for bills to increase the size of the armyand navy, tighten federal control over National Guardforces, and authorize the building of a merchant fleet.Although Wilson had conceded ground to the pro-waragitators, he did not share their belief that war with Ger-many was either inevitable or desirable. To the contrary,he accelerated his diplomatic initiatives to secure peace,and he dispatched Colonel House to London in January1916 to draw up a peace plan with the British foreign sec-retary, Lord Grey. This initiative resulted in the House-Grey memorandum of February 22, 1916, in whichBritain agreed to ask the United States to negotiate a set-tlement between the Allies and the Central Powers. TheBritish believed that the terms of such a peace settlementwould favor the Allies. They were furious when Wilsonrevealed that he wanted an impartial, honestly negotiatedpeace in which the claims of the Allies and CentralPowers would be treated with equal respect and consid-eration. Britain now rejected U.S. peace overtures, andrelations between the two countries grew unexpectedlytense.

The Peace MovementUnderlying Wilson’s 1916 peace initiative was a vision ofa new world order in which relations between nationswould be governed by negotiation rather than war andin which justice would replace power as the fundamen-tal principle of diplomacy. In a major foreign policyaddress on May 27, 1916, Wilson formally declared hissupport for what he would later call the League ofNations, an international parliament dedicated to thepursuit of peace, security, and justice for all the world’speoples.

Many Americans supported Wilson’s efforts to commitnational prestige to the cause of international peace ratherthan conquest and to keep the United States out of war.Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National AmericanWoman Suffrage Association, and Jane Addams, founderof the Women’s Peace Party, actively opposed the war. In1915, an international women’s peace conference at TheHague (in the Netherlands) had drawn many participants

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from the United States. A substantial pacifist groupemerged among the nation’s Protestant clergy. Midwesternprogressives such as Robert La Follette, William Jen-nings Bryan, and George Norris urged that the UnitedStates steer clear of this European conflict, as did lead-ing socialists such as Eugene V. Debs. In April 1916,many of the country’s most prominent progressives andsocialists joined hands in the American Union AgainstMilitarism and pressured Wilson to continue pursuingthe path of peace.

Wilson’s peace campaign also attracted support fromthe country’s sizable Irish and German ethnic popula-tions, who wanted to block a formal military alliancewith Great Britain. That many German ethnics, whocontinued to feel affection for their native land and cul-ture, would oppose U.S. entry into the war is hardly sur-prising. And the Irish viewed England as an arrogantimperial power that kept Ireland subjugated. That viewwas confirmed when England crushed the Easter Rebel-lion that Irish nationalists had launched on EasterMonday 1916 to win their country’s independence. TheIrish in America, like those in Ireland, wanted to seeBritain’s strength sapped (and Ireland’s prospects forfreedom enhanced) by a long war.

Wilson’s Vision:“Peace without Victory”The 1916 presidential election revealed the breadth ofpeace sentiment. At the Democratic convention, GovernorMartin Glynn of New York, the Irish American speakerwho renominated Wilson for a second term, praised thepresident for keeping the United States out of war. Hisportrayal of Wilson as the “peace president” electrified theconvention and made “He kept us out of war” a campaignslogan. The slogan proved particularly effective againstWilson’s Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes,whose close ties to Theodore Roosevelt seemed to placehim in the pro-war camp. Combining the promise ofpeace with a pledge to push ahead with progressivereform, Wilson won a narrow victory.

Emboldened by his electoral triumph, Wilson intensi-fied his quest for peace. On December 16, 1916, he sent apeace note to the belligerent governments, entreatingthem to consider ending the conflict and, to that end, tostate their terms for peace. Although Germany refused tospecify its terms and Britain and France announced a setof conditions too extreme for Germany ever to accept,Wilson pressed ahead, initiating secret peace negotiationswith both sides. To prepare the American people for whathe hoped would be a new era of international relations,

Wilson appeared before the Senate on January 22, 1917, tooutline his plans for peace. In his speech, he reaffirmed hiscommitment to the League of Nations, but for such aleague to succeed, Wilson argued, it would have to behanded a sturdy peace settlement. This entailed a “peacewithout victory.” Only a peace settlement that refused tocrown a victor or humiliate a loser would ensure theequality of the combatants, and “only a peace betweenequals can last.”

Wilson listed the crucial principles of a lasting peace:freedom of the seas; disarmament; and the right of everypeople to self-determination, democratic self-government,and security against aggression. He was proposing arevolutionary change in world order, one that would allowall of the world’s peoples, regardless of their size orstrength, to achieve political independence and to partici-pate as equals in world affairs. These views, rarelyexpressed by the leader of a world power, stirred the

The Horror of War This cover of the United Mine Workers Journal (1916)presents the Great War in the bleakest possible terms: asgiving the Grim Reaper license to claim the bodies and soulsof Europe’s young men. Progressive labor unions were part ofthe broad coalition in the United States opposed to America’sentry into war.

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Am e r i c a n In t e r v e n t i o n 691

despairing masses of Europe and elsewhere caught indeadly conflict.

German EscalationWilson’s oratory came too late to serve the cause of peace.Sensing the imminent collapse of Russian forces on theeastern front, Germany had decided, in early 1917, tothrow its full military might at France and Britain. Onland it planned to launch a massive assault on thetrenches, and at sea it prepared to unleash its submarinesto attack all vessels heading for British ports. Germanyknew that this last action would compel the United Statesto enter the war, but it was gambling on being able tostrangle the British economy and leave France isolatedbefore significant numbers of American troops couldreach European shores.

On February 1, the United States broke off diplo-matic relations with Germany. Wilson continued to hopefor a negotiated settlement, however, until February 25,when the British intercepted and passed on to the pres-ident a telegram from Germany’s foreign secretary,Arthur Zimmermann, to the German minister in Mexico.The infamous “Zimmermann telegram” instructed theminister to ask the Mexican government to attack theUnited States in the event of war between Germany andthe United States. In return, Germany would pay theMexicans a large fee and regain for them the “lostprovinces” of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Wilson,Congress, and the American public were outraged by thestory.

In March, news arrived that Tsar Nicholas II’s auto-cratic regime in Russia had collapsed and had beenreplaced by a liberal-democratic government under theleadership of Alexander Kerensky. As long as the tsarruled Russia and stood to benefit from the CentralPowers’ defeat, Wilson could not honestly claim thatAmerica’s going to war against Germany would bringdemocracy to Europe. The fall of the tsar and the need ofRussia’s fledgling democratic government for supportgave Wilson the rationale he needed to justify Americanintervention.

Appearing before a joint session of Congress onApril 2, Wilson declared that the United States must enterthe war because “the world must be made safe for democ-racy.” He continued:

We shall fight for the things which we have always carriednearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of thosewho submit to authority to have a voice in their own Gov-ernments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for auniversal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoplesas shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the

world itself at last free. To such a task we dedicate our livesand our fortunes.

Inspired by his words, Congress broke into thunderousapplause. On April 6, Congress voted to declare war by avote of 373 to 50 in the House and 82 to 6 in the Senate.

The United States thus embarked on a grand experi-ment to reshape the world. Wilson had given millions ofpeople around the world reason to hope, both that the ter-rible war would end soon and that their strivings for free-dom and social justice would be realized. Although he wastaking America to war on the side of the Allies, he stressedthat America would fight as an “associated power,” aphrase meant to underscore America’s determination tokeep its war aims separate from and more idealistic thanthose of the Allies.

Still, Wilson understood all too well the risks of hisundertaking. A few days before his speech to Congress, hehad confided to a journalist his worry that the Americanpeople, once at war, will “forget there ever was such a thingas tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, andthe spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibreof our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, thepoliceman on the beat, the man in the street.”

American InterventionThe entry of the United States into the war gave the Alliesthe muscle they needed to defeat the Central Powers, but italmost came too late. Germany’s resumption of unre-stricted submarine warfare took a frightful toll on Alliedshipping. From February through July 1917, German subssank almost 4 million tons of shipping, more than one-third of Britain’s entire merchant fleet. One of every fourlarge freighters departing Britain in those months neverreturned; at one point, the British Isles were down to amere four weeks of provisions. American interventionended Britain’s vulnerability in dramatic fashion. U.S. andBritish naval commanders now grouped merchant shipsinto convoys and provided them with warship escortsthrough the most dangerous stretches of the NorthAtlantic. Destroyers armed with depth charges were partic-ularly effective as escorts. Their shallow draft made theminvulnerable to torpedoes, and their great acceleration andspeed allowed them to pursue slow-moving U-boats. TheU.S. and British navies had begun to use sound waves (latercalled “sonar”) to pinpoint the location of underwatercraft, and this new technology increased the effectiveness ofdestroyer attacks. By the end of 1917, the tonnage of Alliedshipping lost each month to U-boat attacks had declinedby two-thirds, from almost 1 million tons in April to

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350,000 tons in December. The increased flow of suppliesstiffened the resolve of the exhausted British and Frenchtroops.

The French and British armies had bled themselveswhite by taking the offensive in 1916 and 1917 and hadscarcely budged the trench lines. The Germans had beencontent in those years simply to hold their trench positionin the West because they were engaged in a huge offensiveagainst the Russians in the East. The Germans intendedfirst to defeat Russia and then to shift their eastern armiesto the West for a final assault on the weakened British andFrench lines. Their opportunity came in the winter andspring of 1918.

A second Russian revolution in November 1917 hadoverthrown Kerensky’s liberal-democratic governmentand had brought to power a revolutionary socialist gov-ernment under Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party.Lenin pulled Russia out of the war on the grounds that thewar did not serve the best interests of the working classes,that it was a conflict between rival capitalist elites inter-ested only in wealth and power (and indifferent to theslaughter of soldiers in the trenches). In March 1918,Lenin signed a treaty at Brest-Litovsk that added to Ger-many’s territory and resources and enabled Germany toshift its eastern forces to the western front.

Russia’s exit from the war hurt the Allies. Not onlydid it expose French and British troops to a much largerGerman force, but it also challenged the Allied claim thatthey were fighting a just war against German aggression.Lenin had published the texts of secret Allied treatiesshowing that Britain and France, like Germany, had plot-ted to enlarge their nations and empires through war. The

revelation that the Allies were fighting for land and richesrather than democratic principles outraged large num-bers of people in France and Great Britain, demoralizedAllied troops, and threw the French and British govern-ments into disarray.

The treaties also embarrassed Wilson, who hadbrought America into the war to fight for democracy, notterritory. Wilson quickly moved to restore the Allies’ credi-bility by unveiling, in January 1918, a concrete program forpeace. His Fourteen Points reaffirmed America’s commit-ment to an international system governed by laws ratherthan by might and renounced territorial aggrandizementas a legitimate war aim. This document provided the ideo-logical cement that held the Allies together at a criticalmoment. (The Fourteen Points are discussed more fully inthe section “The Failure of the International Peace.”)

In March and April 1918, Germany launched its hugeoffensive against British and French positions, sendingAllied troops reeling. A ferocious assault against Frenchlines on May 27 met with little resistance; German troopsadvanced 10 miles a day—a faster pace than any on thewestern front since the earliest days of the war—untilthey reached the Marne River, within striking distance ofParis. The French government prepared to evacuate thecity. At this perilous moment, a large American army—fresh, well-equipped, and oblivious to the horrors oftrench warfare—arrived to reinforce what remained ofthe French lines.

In fact, these American troops, part of the AmericanExpeditionary Force (AEF) commanded by General JohnJ. Pershing, had begun landing in France almost a yearearlier. During the intervening months, the United States

The Rock of the MarneMal Thompson’s painting shows infantryunits of the U.S. 30th and 38th regimentsfrom the Third Division of the AmericanExpeditionary Force engaging Germantroops in France in July 1918. Although heshows them under fire, Thompson depictsthe soldiers as focused, calm, anddetermined against a landscape desolatedby war.

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Am e r i c a n In t e r v e n t i o n 693

had had to create a modern army from scratch, because itsexisting force was so small, ranking only 17th in the world.Men had to be drafted, trained, and supplied with foodand equipment; ships for transporting them to Europehad to be found or built. In France, Pershing put his troopsthrough additional training before committing them tobattle. He was determined that the American soldiers—or“doughboys,” as they were called—should acquit them-selves well on the battlefield. The army he ordered intobattle to counter the German spring offensive of 1918fought well. Many American soldiers fell, but the Germanoffensive ground to a halt. Paris was saved, and Germany’sbest chance for victory slipped from its grasp.

Buttressed by this show of AEF strength, the Alliedtroops staged a major offensive of their own in late Sep-tember. Millions of Allied troops (including more than amillion from the AEF) advanced across the 200-mile-wideArgonne forest in France, cutting German supply lines. Bylate October, they had reached the German border. Facedwith an invasion of their homeland and with rapidlymounting popular dissatisfaction with the war, Germanleaders asked for an armistice, to be followed by peacenegotiations based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Havingforced the Germans to agree to numerous concessions, theAllies ended the war on November 11, 1918. The carnagewas finally over.

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CantignyMay 28, 1918

Belleau WoodJune 6–June 25, 1918

Château-ThierryMay 31–June 4, 1918

Second Battleof the MarneJuly 18–Aug. 6, 1918

Meuse-ArgonneSept. 26–Nov. 11, 1918

St. MihielSept. 12–16, 1918

Paris

Brussels

Calais

Lille

Ypres

Gent(Ghent)

Antwerp

Liege

Reims

SedanSt.-Quentin

CompiègneRouen

ToulNancy

Metz

Cologne

Verdun

SOMME OFFENSIVE

AUG.–NOV. 1918

OISE-AISNE OFFENSIVE

AUG.–NOV. 1918

YPRES-LYS OFFENSIVEAUG.–NOV. 1918

NETHERLANDS

BELGIUM

FRANCE

GERMANY

GREATBRITAIN

LUXEMBOURG

L

o r r a i n e

Flanders

Al s

ac

e

Ruhr

Valley

ArgonneForest

SeineR

.

Seine R.

Meu

seR

.

Aisne R.

Oise R.

Meuse R.

Lys R.

SommeR.

Marne R.

MoselleR

.

Rhi

neR

.

Maa

sR

.

S traitof D

over

0

25 50 Kilometers0

25 50 Miles

Allied powers

Central powers

Neutral countries

German offensive, May–June 1918 Western front

Limit of German advance, June 1918

Armistice LineNov. 11, 1918

U.S. troop movements,Aug.–Nov. 1918

Allied victories

Map 23.2 America in the First World War: Western Front, 1918In 1918, American forces joined the Allied forces in the climactic battles of the war. The red arrows show the major offensive bythe Germans in the spring of 1918, and the blue arrows the decisive counteroffensive by the Allies in the fall of 1918. Thefighting stopped along the black armistice line on November 11, 1918, after German capitulation.

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Mobilizing for “Total” War

What problems did the United

States encounter in mobilizing for total war,

and how successfully were those problems

overcome?

Compared to Europe, the United States suffered little fromthe war. The deaths of 112,000 American soldiers paled incomparison to European losses: 900,000 by Great Britain,1.2 million by Austria-Hungary, 1.4 million by France, 1.7million by Russia, and 2 million by Germany. The U.S.civilian population was spared most of the war’s ravages—the destruction of homes and industries, the shortages offood and medicine, the spread of disease—that afflictedmillions of Europeans. Only with the flu epidemic thatswept across the Atlantic from Europe in 1919 to claimapproximately 500,000 lives did Americans briefly experi-ence wholesale suffering and death.

Still, the war had a profound effect on American society.Every military engagement the United States had foughtsince the Civil War—the Indian wars, the Spanish-AmericanWar, the American-Filipino War, the Boxer Rebellion, theLatin American interventions—had been limited in scope.Even the troop mobilizations that seemed large at the time—the more than 100,000 needed to fight the Spanish and thenthe Filipinos—failed to tax severely American resources.

The First World War was different. It was a “total”war towhich every combatant had committed virtually all of itsresources. The scale of the effort in the United States becameapparent early in 1917 when Wilson asked Congress for aconscription law that would permit the federal governmentto raise a multimillion-man army. The United States wouldalso have to devote much of its agricultural, transportation,industrial, and population resources to the war effort if itwished to end the European stalemate. Who would organizethis massive effort? Who would pay for it? Would Americansaccept the sacrifice and regimentation it would demand?These were vexing questions for a nation long committed toindividual liberty, small government, and a weak military.

Organizing IndustryAt first, Wilson pursued a decentralized approach to mobi-lization, delegating tasks to local defense councils through-out the country. When that effort failed, however, Wilsoncreated several centralized federal agencies, each chargedwith supervising nationwide activity in its assigned eco-nomic sector.

The success of these agencies varied. The Food Admin-istration, headed by mining engineer and executive HerbertHoover (see Americans Abroad feature in this chapter),substantially increased production of basic foodstuffs and

put in place an efficient distribution system that deliveredfood to millions of troops and European civilians. TreasurySecretary William McAdoo, as head of the U.S. RailroadAdministration, also performed well in shifting the railsystem from private to public control, coordinating densetrain traffic, and making capital improvements that allowedgoods to move rapidly to eastern ports, where they wereloaded onto ships and sent to Europe. At the other extreme,the Aircraft Production Board and Emergency Fleet Corpo-ration did a poor job of supplying the Allies with combataircraft and merchant vessels. On balance, the U.S. economyperformed wonders in supplying troops with uniforms,food, rifles, munitions, and other basic items; it failed badly,however, in producing more sophisticated weapons andmachines such as artillery, aircraft, and ships.

At the time, many believed that the new governmentwar agencies possessed awesome power over the nation’seconomy and thus represented a near revolution in govern-ment. Most such agencies, however, were more powerful onpaper than in fact. Consider, for example, the War Indus-tries Board (WIB), an administrative body established byWilson in July 1917 to harness manufacturing might to mil-itary needs. The WIB floundered for its first nine months,lacking the statutory authority to force manufacturers andthe military to adopt its plans. Only the appointment ofWall Street investment banker Bernard Baruch as WIBchairman in March 1918 turned the agency around. Ratherthan attempting to force manufacturers to do the govern-ment’s bidding, Baruch permitted industrialists to chargehigh prices for their products. He won exemptions fromantitrust laws for corporations that complied with hisrequests. In general, he made war production too lucrativean activity to resist; however, he did not hesitate to unleashhis wrath on corporations that resisted WIB enticements.

Baruch’s forceful leadership worked reasonably wellthroughout his nine months in office. War productionincreased, and manufacturers discovered the financialbenefits of cooperation between the public and privatesectors. But Baruch’s approach created problems, too.His favoritism toward large corporations hurt smallercompetitors. Moreover, the cozy relationship between gov-ernment and corporation that he encouraged violated theprogressive pledge to protect the people against the “inter-ests.” Achieving cooperation by boosting corporate profits,finally, was a costly way for the government to do business.The costs of the war soared to $33 billion, a figure morethan three times expectations.

Securing Workers, KeepingLabor PeaceThe government worried as much about labor’s cooper-ation as about industry’s compliance, for the best-laid

Focus Question

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Mob i l i z i n g f o r “ To t a l ” Wa r 695

production plans could be disrupted by a labor shortageor an extended strike. War increased the demand forindustrial labor while cutting the supply. Europeanimmigrants had long been the most important source ofnew labor for American industry, and during the warthey stopped coming. Meanwhile, millions of workers

already in America were conscripted into the militaryand thus lost to industry.

Manufacturers responded to the labor shortage byrecruiting new sources of labor from the rural South; ahalf million African Americans migrated to northerncities between 1916 and 1920. Another half million white

From the time that he graduated from Stanford in 1897at the age of 22 until he returned to America after the

First World War, Herbert Hoover largely lived abroad,chiefly in Australia, China, and England. No other presi-dent, with the possible exception of Thomas Jefferson,brought such an impressive international résumé to theWhite House. Unlike Jefferson, Hoover had gone abroadnot for culture or diplomacy but to seek his fortune as abusinessman. He would be enormously successful in thisquest.

Soon after graduating from Stanford with a geologydegree, Hoover was sent by his employer, Bewick, Moreing,and Company of London, to Australia to look for gold.Enterprising, hardworking, and bold, he quickly made aname for himself by persuading Bewick to purchase amine, known as the Sons of Gwalia, that would yield animmense amount of gold. “Boy Hoover,” “Boy Wonder,”and “Chief,” as he came to be known, had already madehis company and himself a fortune.

Bewick next sent Hoover to China, where he shiftedfrom gold to coal exploration. When the Boxer Rebellionbroke out in 1900 (see chapter 22), Hoover took charge ofthe colony of Europeans, Americans, and Christian Chi-nese at Tientsin, to which the Boxers had laid siege. Hooverplayed a critical role in keeping his colony fed, united, andin good spirits until the rebellion had dissipated.

In 1901, Hoover moved to London, which wouldremain his base until the First World War. Working firstfor Bewick and then on his own, Hoover built a multina-tional mining business that, by the First World War, wasextracting minerals on each of the world’s continents.Increasingly, Hoover turned his attention to politics.Raised a Quaker, he had always possessed a strong com-mitment to public service. He was particularly intriguedwith American progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt,who were attempting to help the United States find asolution to the turmoil of industrialization.

Hoover’s opportunity came in the First World War.When war broke out in 1914, he took charge of getting

the many Americans stranded in London home. Then heheaded up the Committee for Relief in Belgium, some-how getting both the Allies and the Central Powers tosupport his efforts to get food to the Belgian people andthereby save them from starvation. Finally, he becamehead of Woodrow Wilson’s Food Administration, chargedwith organizing the production and distribution ofAmerican foodstuffs to feed millions of Allied soldiersand European civilians. He performed this task brilliantly,continuing his efforts into the postwar period to stop thespread of famine in Europe.

In 1920, Hoover returned to America for good,becoming President Harding’s secretary of commerce(see chapter 23). But for the misfortune of becomingpresident in 1929 just before the Great Depression struck,Hoover might be celebrated today as one of the mostversatile men ever to occupy the Oval Office.

AMERICANS ABROADHerbert C. Hoover: International MiningEngineer, Businessman, and Public Servant

Herbert Hoover, Lou Henry Hoover, and Friends in China, 1900This photograph was taken shortly after Hoover had helped secure thesafety of the European-American colony in Tientsin during the BoxerRebellion. Hoover is standing on the far right in the back row, and hiswife, Lou Henry Hoover, is seated on the left in the first row. They aresurrounded by friends who, like Hoover, had graduated from StanfordUniversity.

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southerners followed the same path during that period.Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans fled their revolution-ridden homeland for jobs in the Southwest and Midwest.Approximately 40,000 northern women found work asstreetcar conductors, railroad workers, metalworkers,munitions makers, and in other jobs customarily reservedfor men. The number of female clerical workers doubledbetween 1910 and 1920, with many of these women find-ing work in the government war bureaucracies. Alto-gether, a million women toiled in war-related industries.

These workers alleviated but did not eliminate thenation’s labor shortage. Unemployment, which had hov-ered around 8.5 percent in 1915, plunged to 1.2 percent in

1918. Workers were quick to recognize the benefits of thetight labor market. They quit jobs they did not like andtook part in strikes and other collective actions inunprecedented numbers. From 1916 to 1920, more than 1million workers went on strike every year. Union mem-bership almost doubled, from 2.6 million in 1915 to 5.1million in 1920. Workers commonly sought higher wagesand shorter hours through strikes and unionization.Wages rose an average of 137 percent from 1915 to 1920,although inflation largely negated these gains. The averageworkweek declined in that same period from 55 to 51hours. Workers also struck in response to managerialattempts to speed up production and tighten discipline.

When jobs became available in the Northduring the First World War, African Amer-

icans from the South began journeying north in recordnumbers. Between 1916 and 1920, 500,000 made thejourney, a population movement so large it becameknown as the Great Migration. That so many wentnorth in such a brief period demonstrates how toughlife was in the South for most African Americans andhow ready they were to seize an opportunity toimprove their situation. Many of the migrants wererural folk—tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricul-tural laborers—whose skills were not easily transfer-able to the urban and industrial economies of northerncities. They thus had to enter northern labor forces atthe bottom—as unskilled industrial or service employ-ees. But the Great Migration also counted educatedAfrican Americans in its ranks, as this excerpt from aletter sent to the Chicago Defender, a prominentblack newspaper, demonstrates. The four letter writ-ers were educated women from Florida who hadbeen teachers in black schools and were now lookingfor jobs as domestic servants with well-off Chicagofamilies. We do not know whether the ChicagoDefender responded to this particular letter, but wedo know that in general the newspaper played a keyrole in facilitating migration by providing importantinformation to southern migrants and northernemployers.

W e have several times read your noted newspaperand we are delighted with the same because it is

a thorough Negro paper. There is a storm of our peopletoward the North and especially to your city. We havewatched your want ad regularly and we are anxiousfor location with good families (white) where we can becared for and do domestic work. We want to engage ascook, nurse, and maid. We have had some educationaladvantages, as we have taught in rural schools for fewyears but our pay so poor we could not continue. Wecan furnish testimonial of our honesty and integrityand moral standing. Will you please assist us in securingplaces as we are anxious to come but want jobs beforewe leave. Our chance here is so poor.

1. What, if anything, can we learn about these fourpotential migrants from this letter excerpt? In partic-ular, how desperate were they to leave the South?

2. What steps had they taken to prepare for goingnorth?

3. What risks were they willing to endure for the sakeof gaining an opportunity for a better life?

For additional sources related to this feature, visit theLiberty, Equality, Power Web site at:

http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin

“A Storm of Our People toward the North”

L I N K T O T H E P A S T

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As time passed, increasing numbers of workers beganto wonder why the war for democracy in Europe hadno counterpart in their factories at home. “Industrialdemocracy” became the battle cry of an awakened labormovement.

Wilson’s willingness to include labor in his 1916 pro-gressive coalition reflected his awareness of labor’s poten-tial power (see chapter 21). In 1918, he bestowed prestigeon the newly formed National War Labor Board (NWLB)by appointing former president William Howard Taft tobe co-chair alongside Samuel Gompers, president of theAmerican Federation of Labor. The NWLB brought

together representatives of labor, industry, and the publicto resolve labor disputes.

Raising an ArmyTo raise an army, the Wilson administration committeditself to conscription—the drafting of most men of a cer-tain age, irrespective of their family’s wealth, ethnic back-ground, or social standing. The Selective Service Act ofMay 1917 empowered the administration to do just that.By war’s end, local Selective Service boards had registered24 million young men age 18 and older and had drafted

The Migration of the Negro, Panel 40:“The Migrants Arrived in GreatNumbers,” by Jacob Lawrence (1940–41)

This panel illustrates the rural origins of theblack migrants who came north during the FirstWorld War.

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Clerks (except in stores)

Stenographers and typists

Bookkeepers, cashiers, and accountants

Saleswomen and clerks in stores

Teachers

Nurses

Waitresses

Telephone operators

Semiskilled operatives (manufacturing)

Laborers (manufacturing)

19101920

(in thousands)

1,3001,2001,1001,0009008007006005004003002001000

Occupations with Largest Increase in Women, 1910–20Source: Joseph A. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870–1920, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Monograph no. 9(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1929), p. 33.

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nearly 3 million of them into the military; another 2 mil-lion volunteered for service.

Relatively few men resisted the draft, even amongrecently arrived immigrants. Foreign-born men consti-tuted 18 percent of the armed forces—a percentage greaterthan their share of the total population. Almost 400,000African Americans served, representing approximately 10percent of armed forces, the same as the percentage ofAfrican Americans in the total population.

The U.S. Army, under the command of Chief ofStaff Peyton March and General John J. Pershing, facedthe difficult task of fashioning these ethnically andracially diverse millions into a professional fighting

force. Teaching raw recruits to fight was hard enough,Pershing and March observed; the generals refused thetask of teaching them to put aside their prejudices.Rather than integrate the armed forces, they segregatedblack soldiers from white. Virtually all African Ameri-cans were assigned to all-black units and barred fromcombat. Being stripped of a combat role was particularlygalling to blacks, who, in previous wars, had proventhemselves to be among the best American fighters. Per-shing was fully aware of the African American contribu-tion. He had commanded African American troops inthe 10th Cavalry, the all-black regiment that had distin-guished itself in the Spanish-American War (chapter 22).

Detroit

Philadelphia

Norfolk

Cincinnati

ChicagoCleveland

Pittsburgh

New York

St. Louis

Indianapolis

ATLANTICOCEAN

PACIFICOCEAN

Gulf ofMexico

MAINEN.H.

MASS.

CONN.R.I.

VT.

NEWYORK

+83,334

PENN.+153,407

N.J.+59,923

DEL.

VIRGINIA–195,515

MD.–20,915

N.C.–113,716TENN.

–63,557 S.C.–152,423

GEORGIA–121,576

FLA.+62,653

ALA.–134,344MISS.

–139,178

L.A.–52,784

ARK.+106,639

MISSOURI

ILL.+116,476

IOWA

WIS.MICH.+42,374

MINN.

NORTHDAKOTA

SOUTHDAKOTA

NEBRASKA

KANSAS

OKLAHOMA+69,994

TEXAS

NEWMEXICO

COLORADO

WYOMING

MONTANA

IDAHO

UTAH

ARIZONA

NEVADA

CALIF.

OREGON

WASH.

W.VA.

OHIO+95,465

IND.+39,270

KY.–68,432

C A N A D A

M E X I C O

Cities with Greatest Increase in African American Population, 1910–1920

Detroit, MI

Cleveland, OH

Chicago, IL

Norfolk, VA

New York, NY

Indianapolis, IN

Philadelphia, PA

St. Louis, MO

Cincinnati, OH

Pittsburgh, PA

40,838

8,448

109,458

43,392

152,467

34,678

134,229

69,854

30,079

37,725

35,097

26,003

65,355

18,353

60,758

12,862

49,770

25,894

10,440

12,102

611.3

307.8

148.2

73.3

66.3

59.0

58.9

58.9

53.2

47.2

African AmericanPopulation, 1920

City Increase in African American Pop. Since 1910Number Percent

States with greatest increase in population

States with the greatest decrease in population 0

250 500 Kilometers0

250 500 Miles

Map 23.3 African American Migration, 1910–20Most southern states lost 50,000 to 200,000 African Americans each during the years of the Great Migration, whilemany northern states, in the industrial belt stretching from Illinois through New York, gained 40,000 to 150,000 apiece.The table inset on the map shows the cities posting the biggest gains.

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Pershing’s military reputation had depended so heavilyon the black troops who fought for him that he hadacquired the nickname Black Jack.

For a time, the military justified its intensified dis-crimination against blacks by referring to the results ofrudimentary IQ (intelligence quotient) tests administeredby psychologists to 2 million AEF soldiers. These testsallegedly “proved” that native-born Americans and immi-grants from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinaviawere well endowed with intelligence, whereas AfricanAmericans and immigrants from Southern and Eastern

Europe were poorly endowed. The tests were scientificallyso ill-conceived, however, that their findings revealed noth-ing about the true distribution of intelligence in the soldierpopulation. Their most sensational revelation was thatmore than half of the soldiers in the AEF—white andblack—were “morons,” men who had failed to reach themental age of 13. After trying to absorb the apparent newsthat most U.S. soldiers were feeble-minded, the militarysensibly rejected the pseudo-science on which these intelli-gence findings were based. In 1919, it discontinued the IQtesting program.

Women Doing “Men’s Work”Labor shortages during the war allowedthousands of women to take industrialjobs customarily reserved for men. Herewomen operate pneumatic hammers atthe Midvale Steel and OrdnanceCompany, Nicetown, Pennsylvania, 1918.

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Recruiting Poster, First World War, 1917The government plastered public institutions with recruiting posters. This one represents navy work as glamorous,masculine, and brave, as a way of enticing more young men to join up.

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Given the racial and ethnic differences among Amer-ican troops and the short time Pershing and his staff hadto train recruits, the AEF’s performance was impressive.The United States increased the army from a mere100,000 to 5 million in little more than a year. The Ger-mans sank no troop ships, nor were any soldiers killedduring the dangerous Atlantic crossing. In combat, U.S.troops became known for their sharpshooting skills. Themost decorated soldier in the AEF was Sergeant Alvin C.York of Tennessee, who captured 35 machine guns, took132 prisoners, and killed 17 German soldiers with 17 bul-lets. York had learned his marksmanship hunting wildturkeys in the Tennessee hills. “Of course, it weren’t no

trouble no how for me to hit them big [German] armytargets,” he later commented. “They were so much biggerthan turkeys’ heads.” One of the most decorated AEFunits was New York’s 369th Regiment, a black unitrecruited in Harlem. Bowing to pressure from civil rightsgroups to allow some black troops to fight, Pershinghad offered the 369th to the French army. The 369thentered the French front line, served in the forward Alliedtrenches for 191 days (longer than any other U.S. regi-ment), and scored several major successes. In gratitudefor its service, the French government decorated theentire unit with one of its highest honors—the Croix deGuerre (War Cross).

Year

Mem

bers

hip

(in m

illio

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1900 19201905 1910 1915

5

4

3

2

1

0

Total Membership of American Trade Unions, 1900–20Source: Leo Wolman, The Growth of American Trade Unions, 1880–1923 (New York: National Bureau of EconomicResearch, 1924), p. 33.

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The 369th Returns to New YorkDenied the opportunity to fight in the U.S.Army, this unit fought for the French. For thelength and distinction of its service in thefront lines, this entire unit was awarded theCroix de Guerre (War Cross) by the Frenchgovernment.

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Paying the BillsThe government incurred huge debts buying food, uni-forms, munitions, weapons, vehicles, and sundry otheritems for the U.S. military. To help pay its bills, it sharplyincreased tax rates. The new taxes hit the wealthiest Ameri-cans the hardest: The richest were slapped with a 67 percentincome tax and a 25 percent inheritance tax. Corporationswere ordered to pay an “excess profits” tax. Proposed bythe Wilson administration and backed by Robert La Fol-lette and other congressional progressives who feared thatthe “interests” would use the war to enrich themselves,these taxes were meant to ensure that all Americans wouldsacrifice something for the war.

Tax revenues, however, provided only about one-thirdof the $33 billion that the government ultimately spent onthe war. The rest came from the sale of Liberty Bonds.These 30-year government bonds offered individual pur-chasers a return of 3.5 percent in annual interest. The gov-ernment offered five bond issues between 1917 and 1920,and all quickly sold out, thanks, in no small measure, to a

high-powered sales pitch, orchestrated by Treasury Sec-retary William G. McAdoo, that equated bond purchaseswith patriotic duty. McAdoo’s agents blanketed thecountry with posters, sent bond “salesmen” into virtuallyevery American community, enlisted Boy Scouts to godoor-to-door, and staged rallies at which movie stars suchas Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplinstumped for the war.

Arousing Patriotic ArdorThe Treasury’s bond campaign was only one aspect of anextraordinary government effort to arouse public supportfor the war. In 1917, Wilson set up a new agency, theCommittee on Public Information (CPI), to popularizethe war. Under the chairmanship of George Creel, a mid-western progressive and a muckraker, the CPI distributed75 million copies of pamphlets explaining U.S. war aims inseveral languages. It trained a force of 75,000 “Four-MinuteMen” to deliver succinct, uplifting war speeches to numer-ous groups in their home cities and towns. It paperedthe walls of virtually every public institution (and manyprivate ones) with posters, placed advertisements in mass-circulation magazines, sponsored exhibitions, and pep-pered newspaper editors with thousands of press releaseson the progress of the war.

Faithful to his muckraking past (see chapter 21), Creelwanted to give the people the facts of the war, believingthat well-informed citizens would see the wisdom ofWilson’s policies. He also saw his work as an opportunityto achieve the progressive goal of uniting all Americansinto a single moral community. Americans everywherelearned that the United States had entered the war “tomake the world safe for democracy,” to help the world’sweaker peoples achieve self-determination, and to bring ameasure of justice into the conduct of internationalaffairs. Americans were asked to affirm those ideals bydoing everything they could to support the war.

This uplifting message affected the American people,although not necessarily in ways anticipated by CPI pro-pagandists. It imparted to many a deep love of countryand a sense of participation in a grand democratic exper-iment. Among others, particularly those experiencingpoverty and discrimination, it sparked a new spirit ofprotest. Workers, women, European ethnics, and AfricanAmericans began demanding that America live up to itsdemocratic ideals at home as well as abroad. Workers ral-lied to the cry of “industrial democracy.” Women seized onthe democratic fervor to bring their fight for suffrage to asuccessful conclusion (see chapter 21). African Americansbegan to dream that the war might deliver them fromsecond-class citizenship. European ethnics believed thatWilson’s support of their countrymen’s rights abroad

Ann

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tions

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mill

ions

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25,000

20,000

15,000

10,000

5,000

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The First World War and the Federal BudgetSource: Data from Statistical Abstract of the United States,1919 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920),p. 681.

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would improve their own chances for success in theUnited States.

Although the CPI had helped to unleash it, this newdemocratic enthusiasm troubled Creel and others in theWilson administration. The United States, after all, wasstill deeply divided along class, ethnic, and racial lines.Workers and industrialists regarded each other with suspi-cion. Cultural differences compounded this class division,for the working class was overwhelmingly ethnic in com-position, and the industrial and political elites consistedmainly of the native-born whose families had been Amer-icans for generations. Progressives had fought hard toovercome these divisions. They had tamed the power ofcapitalists, improved the condition of workers, encour-aged the Americanization of immigrants, and articulated anew, more inclusive idea of who could belong to theAmerican nation.

But their work was far from complete when the warbroke out, and the war opened up new social and culturaldivisions. German immigrants still formed the largest for-eign-born population group at 2.3 million. Another 2.3million immigrants came from some part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and more than 1 million Americans—native-born and immigrants—supported the SocialistParty and the Industrial Workers of the World, both ofwhich had opposed the war. The decision to authorize theCPI’s massive unity campaign indicates that the progres-sives understood how widespread the discord was. Still,they had not anticipated that the promotion of demo-cratic ideals at home would exacerbate, rather than lessen,the nation’s social and cultural divisions.

Wartime RepressionBy early 1918, the CPI’s campaign had developed a darker,more coercive side. Inflammatory advertisements calledon patriots to report on neighbors, coworkers, and ethnicswhom they suspected of subverting the war effort. Propa-gandists called on all immigrants, especially those fromCentral, Southern, and Eastern Europe, to pledge them-selves to “100 percent Americanism” and to repudiate allties to their homeland, native language, and ethnic cus-toms. The CPI aroused hostility toward Germans byspreading lurid tales of German atrocities and encourag-ing the public to see movies such as The Prussian Cur andThe Beast of Berlin. The Justice Department arrested thou-sands of German and Austrian immigrants whom it sus-pected of subversive activities. Congress passed the Trad-ing with the Enemy Act, which required foreign-languagepublications to submit all war-related stories to post officecensors for approval.

German Americans became the objects of popularhatred. American patriots sought to expunge every trace

of German influence from American culture. In Boston,performances of Beethoven’s symphonies were banned,and the German-born conductor of the Boston SymphonyOrchestra was forced to resign. Although Americanswould not give up the German foods they had grown tolove, they would no longer call them by their Germannames. Sauerkraut was rechristened “liberty cabbage,” andhamburgers became “liberty sandwiches.” Librariesremoved works of German literature from their shelves,and Theodore Roosevelt and others urged school districtsto prohibit the teaching of the German language. Patrioticschool boards in Lima, Ohio, and elsewhere burned theGerman books in their districts.

German Americans risked being fired from work,losing their businesses, and being assaulted on the street. ASt. Louis mob lynched an innocent German immigrantwhom they suspected of subversion. After only 25 minutesof deliberation, a St. Louis jury acquitted the mob leaders,who had brazenly defended their crime as an act of patri-otism. German Americans began hiding their ethnic iden-tity, changing their names, speaking German only in theprivacy of their homes, and celebrating their holidays onlywith trusted friends. This experience devastated the once-proud German American community; many would neverrecover from the shame and vulnerability they experi-enced in those years.

The anti-German campaign escalated into a generalanti-immigrant crusade. Congress passed the Immigra-tion Restriction Act of 1917, over Wilson’s veto, whichdeclared that all adult immigrants who failed a reading testwould be denied admission to the United States. The actalso banned the immigration of laborers from India,Indochina, Afghanistan, Arabia, the East Indies, and sev-eral other countries within an Asiatic Barred Zone. This

RENAMED GERMAN AMERICAN WORDS

Original German Name Renamed “Patriotic” Name

hamburger salisbury steak, libertysteak, liberty sandwich

sauerkraut liberty cabbage

Hamburg Avenue, Brooklyn, Wilson Avenue, Brooklyn,New York New York

Germantown, Nebraska Garland, Nebraska

East Germantown, Indiana Pershing, Indiana

Berlin, Iowa Lincoln, Iowa

pinochle liberty

German shepherd Alsatian shepherd

Deutsches Hans of Indianapolis Athenaeum of Indiana

Germania Maennerchor of Chicago Lincoln Club

Kaiser Street Maine Way

Source: From La Vern J. Rippley, The German Americans (Boston:Twayne, 1976), p. 186; and Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson andWorld War I, 1917–1921 (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 205–206.

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legislation marked the beginning of a movement in Con-gress that, four years later, would close the immigrationdoor to virtually all transoceanic peoples.

Congress also passed the 18th Amendment to theConstitution, which prohibited the manufacture and dis-tribution of alcoholic beverages (see chapter 21). The cru-sade for prohibition was not new, but anti-immigrant feel-ings generated by the war gave it added impetus.Prohibitionists pictured the nation’s urban ethnic ghettosas scenes of drunkenness, immorality, and disloyalty. Theyalso accused German American brewers of operating a“liquor trust” to sap people’s will to fight. The statesquickly ratified the 18th Amendment, and in 1919, Prohi-bition became the law of the land.

More and more, the Wilson administration relied onrepression to achieve domestic unity. In the Espionage, Sab-otage, and Sedition Acts passed in 1917 and 1918, Congressgave the administration sweeping powers to silence andimprison dissenters. These acts went far beyond outlawing

behavior that no nation at war could be expected to toler-ate, such as spying for the enemy, sabotaging war produc-tion, and calling for the enemy’s victory. Now citizens couldbe prosecuted for writing or uttering any statement thatcould be construed as profaning the flag, the Constitution,or the military. These acts constituted the most drasticrestrictions of free speech at the national level since theAlien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (see chapter 8).

Government repression fell most heavily on the IWWand the Socialist Party. Both groups had opposed interven-tion before 1917. Although they subsequently muted theiropposition, they continued to insist that the true enemies ofAmerican workers were to be found in the ranks of Ameri-can employers, not in Germany or Austria-Hungary. Thegovernment responded by banning many socialist materialsfrom the mails and by disrupting socialist and IWW meet-ings. By spring 1918, government agents had raided count-less IWW offices and had arrested 2,000 IWW members,including its entire executive board. Many of those arrestedwould be sentenced to long jail terms. William Haywood,the IWW president, fled to Europe and then to the SovietUnion rather than go to jail. Eugene V. Debs, the head of theSocialist Party, received a 10-year jail term for making anantiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, in summer 1918.

This federal repression, carried out in an atmosphereof supercharged patriotism, encouraged local govern-ments and private citizens to initiate their own antiradicalcrusades. In the mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, a sheriffwith an eager force of 2,000 deputized citizens kidnapped1,200 IWW members, herded them into cattle cars, anddumped them onto the New Mexico desert with little foodor water. Vigilantes in Butte, Montana, chained an IWWorganizer to a car and let his body scrape the pavement asthey drove the vehicle through city streets. Next, theystrung him up to a railroad trestle, castrated him, and lefthim to die. The 250,000 members of the American Protec-tive League, most of them businessmen and professionals,routinely spied on fellow workers and neighbors. Theyopened mail and tapped phones and otherwise harassedthose suspected of disloyalty. Attorney General ThomasGregory publicly endorsed the group and sought federalfunds to support its “police” work.

The spirit of coercion even infected institutions thathad long prided themselves on tolerance. In July 1917,Columbia University fired two professors for speaking outagainst U.S. intervention in the war. The National Ameri-canization Committee, which before 1917 had pioneered ahumane approach to the problem of integrating immi-grants into American life, now supported surveillance,internment, and deportation of aliens suspected of anti-American sentiments.

Wilson bore responsibility for this climate of repres-sion. He did attempt to block certain pieces of repressive

The Campaign of FearBy 1918, the government’s appeal to Americans’ bestaspirations—to spread liberty and democracy—had beenreplaced by a determination to arouse fear of subversion andconquest. Here the German enemy is depicted as a terrifyingbrute who violates Lady Liberty and uses his kultur club todestroy civilization.

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legislation; for example, he vetoed both the ImmigrationRestriction Act and the Volstead Act (the act passed toenforce Prohibition), only to be overridden by Congress.But Wilson did little to halt Attorney General Gregory’sprosecution of radicals or Postmaster General Burleson’scampaign to exclude Socialist Party publications from themail. He ignored pleas from progressives that he intervenein the Debs case to prevent the ailing 62-year-old fromgoing to jail. His acquiescence in these matters cost himdearly among progressives and socialists. Wilson believed,however, that once the Allies, with U.S. support, won thewar and arranged a just peace in accordance with the Four-teen Points, his administration’s wartime actions would beforgiven and the progressive coalition would be restored.

The Failure of theInternational Peace

What were Woodrow Wilson’s

peace proposals, and how did they fare?

In the month following Germany’s surrender on Novem-ber 11, 1918, Wilson was confident about the prospects ofachieving a just peace. Both Germany and the Allies had

publicly accepted the Fourteen Points as the basis fornegotiations. Wilson’s international prestige was enor-mous. People throughout the world were inspired by hisdream of a democratic, just, and harmonious world orderfree of poverty, ignorance, and war. Poles, Lithuanians,and other Eastern Europeans whose pursuit of nation-hood had been frustrated for 100 years or more nowbelieved that independence might be within their reach.Zionist Jews in Europe and the United States dared todream of a Jewish homeland within their lifetimes. Count-less African and Asian peoples imagined achieving theirfreedom from colonial domination.

To capitalize on his fame and to maximize the chancesfor a peace settlement based on his Fourteen Points,Wilson broke with diplomatic precedent and decided tohead the American delegation to the Paris Peace Confer-ence in January 1919. Enormous crowds of enthusiasticEuropeans turned out to hail Wilson’s arrival on the Con-tinent in December. Some 2 million French citizens—thelargest throng ever assembled on French soil—lined theparade route in Paris to catch a glimpse of “Wilson, le juste[the just].” In Rome, Milan, and La Scala, Italiansacclaimed him “The Savior of Humanity” and “The Mosesfrom Across the Atlantic.”

In the Fourteen Points, Wilson had translated hisprinciples for a new world order into specific proposals for

Focus Question

“The Savior of Humanity”Wherever he went in Europe, Woodrow Wilson was greeted by huge crowds eager to thank him for endingEurope’s terrible war and to endorse his vision of a peaceful, democratic world. Here millions of Italiansgreet Wilson’s arrival in Milan.

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international peace and justice. The first group of pointscalled for all nations to abide by a code of conduct thatembraced free trade, freedom of the seas, open diplomacy,disarmament, and the resolution of disputes throughmediation. A second group, based on the principle of self-determination, proposed redrawing the map of Europe togive the subjugated peoples of the Austro-Hungarian,Ottoman, and Russian empires national sovereignty. Thelast point called for establishing the League of Nations, anassembly in which all nations would be represented and inwhich all international disputes would be given a fair hear-ing and an opportunity for peaceful solutions.

The Paris Peace Conferenceand the Treaty of VersaillesAlthough representatives of 27 nations began meeting inParis on January 12, 1919, to discuss Wilson’s FourteenPoints, negotiations were controlled by the “Big Four”:Wilson, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of GreatBritain, Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, andPrime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy. When Orlandoquit the conference after a dispute with Wilson, the BigFour became the Big Three. Wilson quickly learned thathis negotiating partners’ support for the Fourteen Pointswas much weaker than he had believed. The cageyClemenceau mused: “God gave us the Ten Command-ments, and we broke them. Wilson gives us FourteenPoints. We shall see.” Clemenceau and Lloyd Georgerefused to include most of Wilson’s points in the peacetreaty. The points having to do with freedom of the seasand free trade were omitted, as were the proposals foropen diplomacy and Allied disarmament. Wilson wonpartial endorsement of the principle of self-determina-tion: Belgian sovereignty was restored, Poland’s status as anation was affirmed, and the new nations of Czechoslova-kia, Yugoslavia, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estoniawere created. In addition, some lands of the formerOttoman Empire—Armenia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, andSyria—were to be placed under League of Nations’trusteeships with the understanding that they wouldsomeday gain their independence. Wilson failed in hisefforts to block a British plan to transfer former Germancolonies in Asia to Japanese control, an Italian plan toannex territory inhabited by 200,000 Austrians, and aFrench plan to take from Germany its valuable Saar coalmines.

Nor could Wilson blunt the drive to punish Germanyfor its wartime aggression. In addition to awarding theSaar basin to France, the Allies gave portions of northernGermany to Denmark and portions of eastern Germanyto Poland and Czechoslovakia. Germany was stripped of

virtually its entire navy and air force, and forbidden toplace soldiers or fortifications in western Germany alongthe Rhine. It was allowed to keep an army of only 100,000men. In addition, Germany was forced to admit itsresponsibility for the war. In accepting this “war guilt,”Germany was, in effect, agreeing to compensate the victorsin cash (reparations) for the pain and suffering it hadinflicted on them.

Lloyd George and Clemenceau brushed off the protestsof those who viewed this desire to prostrate Germany as acruel and vengeful act. That the German people, after theirnation’s 1918 defeat, had overthrown the monarch (KaiserWilhelm II) who had taken them to war, and had recon-stituted their nation as a democratic republic—the firstin their country’s history—won them no leniency. OnJune 28, 1919, Great Britain, France, the United States,Germany, and other European nations signed the Treatyof Versailles. In 1921, an Allied commission notified theGermans that they were to pay the victors $33 billion, asum well beyond the resources of a defeated and econom-ically ruined Germany.

Wilson in Paris, 1919This photograph shows President Wilson (on right), recentlyarrived in Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, stridingconfidently and comfortably alongside his two allies, BritishPrime Minister Lloyd George (on left) and French PremierClemenceau (in center). In the negotiations themselves, LloydGeorge and Clemenceau would prove to be as muchadversaries as allies to Wilson.

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The League of NationsThe Allies’ single-minded pursuit of self-interest disillu-sioned many liberals and socialists in the United States,but Wilson seemed undismayed. He had won approval ofthe most important of his Fourteen Points—that whichcalled for the creation of the League of Nations. TheLeague, whose structure and responsibilities were set forthin the Covenant attached to the peace treaty, would usherin Wilson’s new world order. Drawing its membershipfrom the signatories to the Treaty of Versailles (except, for

the time being, Germany), the League would function asan international parliament and judiciary, establishingrules of international behavior and resolving disputesbetween nations through rational and peaceful means.A nine-member executive council—the United States,Britain, France, Italy, and Japan would have permanentseats on the council, while the other four seats wouldrotate among the smaller powers—was charged withadministering decisions.

Wilson believed that the League would redeem thefailures of the Paris Peace Conference. Under its auspices,

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Border of GermanEmpire in 1914

Border of Austrian-Hungarian Empire in 1914

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Border of OttomanEmpire in 1914New boundaries as aresult of postwar treaties

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Map 23.4 Europe and the Near East After the First World WarThe First World War and the Treaty of Versailles changed the geography of Europe and the Near East. Nine nations inEurope, stretching from Yugoslavia in the south to Finland in the north, were created (or reformed) out of the defeatedAustro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. In the Near East, meanwhile, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraqwere carved out of the Ottoman Empire, placed under British or French control, and promised eventual independence.

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free trade and freedom of the seas would be achieved, repa-rations against Germany would be reduced or eliminated,disarmament of the Allies would proceed, and the principleof self-determination would be extended to peoples outsideEurope. Moreover, the Covenant (Article X) would endowthe League with the power to punish aggressor nationsthrough economic isolation and military retaliation.

Wilson versus Lodge:The Fight over RatificationThe League’s success, however, depended on Wilson’s abil-ity to convince the U.S. Senate to ratify the Treaty of Ver-sailles. Wilson knew that this would not be easy. TheRepublicans had gained a majority in the Senate in 1918,and two groups within their ranks were determined tofrustrate Wilson’s ambitions. One group was a caucus of 14midwesterners and westerners known as the “irreconcil-ables.” Most of them were conservative isolationists whowanted the United States to preserve its separation fromEurope, but a few were prominent progressives—RobertLa Follette, William Borah, and Hiram Johnson—whohad voted against the declaration of war in 1917. The self-interest displayed by England and France at the peaceconference convinced this group that the Europeans wereincapable of decent behavior in international matters.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts led thesecond opposition group. Its members rejected Wilson’sbelief that every group of people on earth had a right toform their own nation; that every state, regardless of itssize, its economic condition, and the vigor and intelligenceof its people, should have a voice in world affairs; and thatdisputes between nations could be settled in open, demo-cratic forums. They subscribed instead to Theodore Roo-sevelt’s vision of a world controlled by a few great nations,each militarily strong, secure in its own sphere of influ-ence, and determined to avoid war through a carefullynegotiated balance of power. These Republicans preferredto let Europe return to the power politics that had pre-vailed before the war rather than experiment with a newworld order that might constrain and compromise U.S.power and autonomy.

This Republican critique was a cogent one that mer-ited extended discussion. Particularly important werequestions that Republicans raised about Article X, whichgave the League the right to undertake military actionsagainst aggressor nations. Did Americans want to author-ize an international organization to decide when theUnited States would go to war? Was this not a violation ofthe Constitution, which vested war-making power solelyin the Congress? Even if the constitutional problem couldbe solved, how could the United States ensure that it

would not be forced into a military action that mightdamage its national interest?

It soon became clear, however, that several Republi-cans, including Lodge, were as interested in humiliatingWilson as in developing an alternative approach to foreignpolicy. They accused Wilson of promoting socialismthrough his wartime expansion of government power.They were angry that he had failed to include any distin-guished Republicans, such as Lodge, Elihu Root, orWilliam Howard Taft, in the Paris peace delegation. Andthey were still bitter about the 1918 congressional elec-tions, when Wilson had argued that a Republican victorywould embarrass the nation abroad. Although Wilson’selectioneering had failed to sway the voters (the Republi-cans won a majority in both Houses), his suggestion that aRepublican victory would injure national honor had infu-riated Theodore Roosevelt and his supporters. Rooseveltdied in 1919, but his close friend Lodge kept his rage alive:“I never thought I could hate a man as much as I hateWilson,” Lodge conceded in a moment of candor.

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Com-mittee, charged with considering the treaty before report-ing it to the Senate floor, Lodge did everything possible to

Henry Cabot Lodge, Wilson’s AdversaryRepublican Senator Lodge led the fight in the Senate againstratifying the Treaty of Versailles.

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obstruct ratification. He packed the committee with sena-tors who were likely to oppose the treaty. He delayedaction by reading every one of the treaty’s 300 pages aloudand by subjecting it to endless criticism in six long weeksof public hearings. When his committee finally reportedthe treaty to the full Senate, it came encumbered withnearly 50 amendments whose adoption Lodge made a pre-condition of his support. Some of the amendmentsexpressed reasonable concerns—namely, that participa-tion in the League not diminish the role of Congress indetermining foreign policy, compromise American sover-eignty, or involve the United States in an unjust or ill-advised war—but many were meant only to complicatethe task of ratification.

Despite Lodge’s obstructionism, the treaty’s chancesfor ratification by the required two-thirds majority of theSenate remained good. Many Republicans were preparedto vote for ratification if Wilson indicated his willingnessto accept some of the proposed amendments. Wilsoncould have salvaged the treaty and, along with it, U.S. par-ticipation in the League of Nations, but he refused to com-promise with the Republicans and announced that hewould carry his case directly to the American peopleinstead. In September 1919, Wilson undertook a whirl-wind cross-country tour that covered more than 8,000miles with 37 stops. He addressed as many crowds as hecould reach, sometimes speaking for an hour at a time,four times a day.

On September 25, after giving a speech at Pueblo, Col-orado, Wilson suffered excruciating headaches throughoutthe night. His physician ordered him back to Washington,where on October 2 he suffered a near-fatal stroke. Wilson

hovered near death for two weeks and remained seriouslydisabled for another six. His condition improved some-what in November, but his left side remained paralyzed,his speech was slurred, his energy level low, and his emo-tions unstable. Wilson’s wife, Edith Bolling Wilson, and hisdoctor isolated him from Congress and the press, with-holding news they thought might upset him and prevent-ing the public from learning how much his body andmind had deteriorated.

Many historians believe that the stroke impairedWilson’s political judgment. He refused to consider any ofthe Republican amendments to the treaty, even after it hadbecome clear that compromise offered the only chance ofwinning U.S. participation in the League of Nations.When Lodge presented an amended treaty for a ratifica-tion vote on November 19, Wilson ordered SenateDemocrats to vote against it; 42 (of 47) Democratic sena-tors complied, and with the aid of 13 Republican irrecon-cilables, the Lodge version was defeated. Only momentslater, the unamended version of the treaty—Wilson’s ver-sion—received only 38 votes.

The Treaty’s Final DefeatAs the magnitude of the calamity became apparent, sup-porters of the League in Congress, the nation, and theworld urged the Senate and the president to reconsider.Wilson would not budge. A bipartisan group of senatorsdesperately tried to work out a compromise without con-sulting him. When that effort failed, the Senate put to avote, one more time, the Lodge version of the treaty.Because 23 Democrats, most of them southerners, still

WOODROW WILSON’S FOURTEEN POINTS, 1918: RECORD OF IMPLEMENTATION

1. Open covenants of peace openly arrived at Not fulfilled

2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas in peace and war Not fulfilled

3. Removal of all economic barriers to the equality of trade among nations Not fulfilled

4. Reduction of armaments to the level needed only for domestic safety Not fulfilled

5. Impartial adjustments of colonial claims Not fulfilled

6. Evacuation of all Russian territory; Russia to be welcomed into the society of free nations Not fulfilled

7. Evacuation and restoration of Belgium Fulfilled

8. Evacuation and restoration of all French lands; return of Alsace-Lorraine to France Fulfilled

9. Readjustment of Italy’s frontiers along lines of Italian nationality Compromised

10. Self-determination for the former subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire Compromised

11. Evacuation of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro; free access to the sea for Serbia Compromised

12. Self-determination for the former subjects of the Ottoman Empire; secure sovereignty for Turkish portion Compromised

13. Establishment of an independent Poland with free and secure access to the sea Fulfilled

14. Establishment of the League of Nations to secure mutual guarantees of independence and territorial integrity Compromised

Source: From G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, The Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles, Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs, no. 6 (1939), pp. 8–34;and Thomas G. Paterson et al., American Foreign Policy: A History, 2nd ed. (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 282–93.

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refused to break with Wilson, this last-ditch effort at rati-fication failed on March 8, 1920, by a margin of sevenvotes. Wilson’s dream of a new world order died that day.The crumpled figure in the White House seemed to bearlittle resemblance to the hero who, barely 15 monthsbefore, had been greeted in Europe as the world’s savior.Wilson filled out his remaining 12 months in office as aninvalid, presiding over the interment of progressivism. Hedied in 1924.

The judgment of history lies heavily on these events,for many believe that the flawed treaty and the failure ofthe League contributed to Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germanyand the outbreak of a second world war more devastatingthan the first. It is necessary to ask, then, whether Ameri-can participation in the League would have significantlyaltered the course of world history.

The mere fact of U.S. membership in the League wouldnot have magically solved Europe’s postwar problems. TheU.S. government was inexperienced in diplomacy andprone to mistakes. Its freedom to negotiate solutions tointernational disputes would have been limited by thelarge number of American voters who remained stronglyopposed to U.S. entanglement in European affairs. Even ifsuch opposition could have been overcome, the UnitedStates would still have confronted European countriesdetermined to go their own way.

Nevertheless, one thing is clear: No stable internationalorder could have arisen after the First World War withoutthe full involvement of the United States. The League ofNations required American authority and prestige in orderto operate effectively as an international parliament. Wecannot know whether the League, with American involve-ment, would have offered the Germans a less humiliatingpeace, allowing them to rehabilitate their economy and sal-vage their national pride; nor whether an American-ledLeague would have stopped Hitler’s expansionism before itescalated into full-scale war in 1939. Still, it seems fair tosuggest that American participation would have strength-ened the League and improved its ability to bring a lastingpeace to Europe.

The Postwar Period: A Societyin Convulsion

What issues convulsed

American society in the immediate aftermath

of war, and how were they resolved?

The end of the war brought no respite from the forcesconvulsing American society. Workers were determined toregain the purchasing power they had lost to inflation.

Employers were determined to halt or reverse the wartimegains labor had made. Radicals saw in this conflict betweencapital and labor the possibility of a socialist revolution.Conservatives were certain that the revolution had alreadybegun. Returning white servicemen were nervous aboutregaining their civilian jobs and looked with hostility onthe black, Hispanic, and female workers who had beenrecruited to take their places. Black veterans were in nomood to return to segregation and subordination. Thefederal government, meanwhile, uneasy over the cen-tralization of power during the war, quickly dismantledsuch agencies as the War Industries Board and theNational War Labor Board. By so doing, it deprived itselfof mechanisms that might have enabled it to intervenein social conflicts and keep them from erupting intorage and violence.

Labor-Capital ConflictNowhere was the escalation of conflict more evident than inthe workplace. In 1919, 4 million workers—one-fifth ofthe nation’s manufacturing workforce—went on strike. InJanuary 1919, a general strike paralyzed the city of Seattlewhen 60,000 workers walked off their jobs. By August, walk-outs had been staged by 400,000 eastern and midwesterncoal miners, 120,000 New England textile workers, and50,000 New York City garment workers. Then came twostrikes that turned public opinion sharply against labor. InSeptember, Boston policemen walked off their jobs afterthe police commissioner refused to negotiate with theirnewly formed union. Rioting and looting soon broke out.Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, outraged by thepolicemen’s betrayal of their sworn public duty, refused tonegotiate with them, called out the National Guard torestore order, and fired the entire police force. His toughstand would bring him national fame and the Republicanvice presidential nomination in 1920.

Hard on the heels of the policemen’s strike came astrike by more than 300,000 steelworkers in the Midwest.No union had established a footing in the steel industrysince the 1890s, when Andrew Carnegie had ousted theironworkers’ union from his Homestead, Pennsylvania,mills. Most steelworkers labored long hours (the 12-hourshift was still standard) for low wages in dangerous work-places. The organizers of the 1919 steel strike had somehowmanaged to persuade steelworkers with varied skill levelsand ethnic backgrounds to put aside their differences anddemand an eight-hour day and union recognition. Whenthe employers rejected those demands, the workers walkedoff their jobs. The employers responded by procuringarmed guards to beat up the strikers and by hiringnonunion labor to keep the plants running. In manyareas, local and state police prohibited union meetings,

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ran strikers out of town, and opened fire on those whodisobeyed orders. In Gary, Indiana, a confrontationbetween unionists and armed guards left 18 strikers dead.To arouse public support for their antiunion campaign,industry leaders portrayed the strike leaders as dangerousand violent radicals bent on the destruction of politicalliberty and economic freedom. They succeeded in arous-ing public opinion against the steelworkers, and the strikecollapsed in January 1920.

Radicals and the Red ScareThe steel companies succeeded in putting down the strikeby fanning the public’s fear that revolutionary sentimentwas spreading among workers. Radical sentiment wasindeed on the rise. Mine workers and railroad workers hadbegun calling for the permanent nationalization of coalmines and railroads. Longshoremen in San Francisco andSeattle refused to load ships carrying supplies to the White

Russians who had taken up arms against Lenin’s Bolshevikgovernment. Socialist trade unionists mounted the mostserious challenge to Gompers’s control of the AFL in 25years. In 1920, nearly a million Americans voted for theSocialist presidential candidate Debs, who ran his cam-paign from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Small groupsof anarchists contemplated, and occasionally carried out,bomb attacks on businessmen and public officials.

This radical surge did not mean, however, that left-ists had fashioned themselves into a single movement orpolitical party. On the contrary, the Russian Revolutionhad split the American Socialist Party. One faction,which would keep the name Socialist and would con-tinue under Debs’s leadership, insisted that radicalsfollow a democratic path to socialism. The other group,which would take the name Communist, wanted toestablish a Lenin-style “dictatorship of the proletariat.”Small groups of anarchists, some of whom advocatedcampaigns of terror to speed the revolution, representedyet a third radical tendency.

Few Americans noticed the disarray in the radicalcamp. Most assumed that radicalism was a single, coordi-nated movement bent on establishing a communist govern-ment on American soil. They saw the nation’s immigrantcommunities as breeding grounds for Bolshevism. Begin-ning in 1919, this perceived “red scare” prompted govern-ment officials and private citizens to embark on yet anothercampaign of repression.

The postwar repression of radicalism closely resem-bled the wartime repression of dissent. Thirty statespassed sedition laws to punish those who advocated rev-olution. Numerous public and private groups intensifiedAmericanization campaigns designed to strip foreignersof their subversive ways and remake them into loyal citi-zens. Universities fired radical professors, and vigilantegroups wrecked the offices of socialists and assaultedIWW agitators. A newly formed veterans’ organization,the American Legion, took on the American ProtectiveLeague’s role of identifying seditious individuals andorganizations and ensuring the public’s devotion to “100percent Americanism.”

The Red Scare reached its climax on New Year’s Day1920, when federal agents broke into the homes and meet-ing places of thousands of suspected revolutionaries in 33cities. Directed by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer,these widely publicized “Palmer raids” were meant toexpose the extent of revolutionary activity. Palmer’s agentsuncovered three pistols, no rifles, and no explosives. Nev-ertheless, they arrested more than 4,000 people and keptmany of them in jail for weeks without formally chargingthem with a crime. Finally, those who were not citizens(approximately 600) were deported and the rest werereleased.

The Red ScareThis cartoon by W.A. Rogers, c. 1919, illustrates the feargripping America that a mob-like army of radical workers andBolshevik sympathizers were poised to topple the U.S.government and establish communist rule and terror onAmerican soil. The radicals closest to the machine gun aredepicted as foreign or beastly, reflecting popular belief thatthey were un-American in thought and deed and deserved tobe treated harshly.

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T h e Po s t w a r Pe r i o d : A S o c i e t y i n Co nv u l s i o n 711

n this epic film, Warren Beatty, producer, director,and screenplay cowriter, attempts to integrate the

history of the American Left in the early 20th cen-tury with a love story about two radicals of that era,John “Jack” Reed and Louise Bryant. Reed was awell-known radical journalist whose dispatchesfrom Russia during its 1917 revolution were pub-lished as a book, Ten Days That Shook the World,that brought him fame and notoriety. Bryant neverdeveloped the public reputation that Reed enjoyed,but she was an integral member of the radical cir-cles that gathered in apartments and cafés in NewYork’s Bohemian Greenwich Village before andduring the First World War.

At times, the love principals in this movie seemto resemble Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton morethan they do the historical figures they are meant torepresent. In general, however, the movie keepslove and politics in balance and thus successfullyconveys an important and historically accurate mes-sage about the American Left, especially before theFirst World War: namely, that its participants wantedto revolutionize the personal as well as the political.Thus equality between men and women, women’sright to enjoy the same sexual freedom as men, and

marriage’s impact on personal growth and adventurewere issues debated with the same fervor as build-ing a radical political party and accelerating the tran-sition to socialism. (See the section entitled, TheNew Sexuality and the Rise of Feminism,” in chap-ter 20.)

Reds is also an exceptionally serious film aboutpolitical parties and ideologies. The film follows thearc of John Reed’s and Louise Bryant’s lives fromtheir prewar days as discontented members of thePortland, Oregon, social elite, through their flight tothe freedom and radicalism of Greenwich Village, tothe hardening of their radicalism as a result ofrepression during the First World War at home andthe Bolshevik triumph in November 1917. In thismovie, Beatty has recreated detailed and complexstories about internal fights within the Left both inthe United States and Russia, through which heseeks to show how hopes for social transformationwent awry. To give this film added historical weight,Beatty introduces “witnesses,” individuals whoactually knew the real Reed and Bryant and whoappear on screen periodically to share their memo-ries, both serious and whimsical, about the storiedcouple and the times in which they lived. n

I

H I S T O R Y T H R O U G H F I L MR E D S ( 1 9 8 1 )

Directed by Warren Beatty.

Starring Warren Beatty (John Reed), Diane Keaton (Louise Bryant), Edward Herrmann(Max Eastman), Jerzy Kosinski (Grigory Zinoviev), Jack Nicholson (Eugene O’Neill),

and Maureen Stapleton (Emma Goldman).

Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant and Warren Beatty as John Reed, together in Russia in the midst of thatcountry’s socialist revolution.

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Palmer’s failure to expose a revolutionary plot bluntedsupport for him in official circles, but, undeterred, Palmernow alleged that revolutionaries were planning a series ofassaults on government officials and government build-ings for May 1, 1920. When nothing happened on thatdate, his credibility suffered another blow.

As Palmer’s exaggerations of the Red threat becameknown, many Americans began to reconsider their near-hysterical fear of dissent and subversion. Even so, the polit-ical atmosphere remained hostile to radicals, as the Saccoand Vanzetti case revealed. In May 1920, two Italian-born

anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, werearrested in Brockton, Massachusetts, and charged witharmed robbery and murder. Both men proclaimed theirinnocence and insisted that they were being punished fortheir political beliefs. Their foreign accents and their defi-ant espousal of anarchist doctrines in the courtroominclined many Americans, including the judge whopresided at their trial, to view them harshly. Despite theweak case against them, they were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Their lawyersattempted numerous appeals, all of which failed. Angerover the verdicts began to build among Italian Americans,radicals, and liberal intellectuals. Protests compelled thegovernor of Massachusetts to appoint a commission toreview the case, but no new trial was ordered. On August23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, still insistingthey were innocent.

Racial Conflict and the Riseof Black NationalismThe more than 400,000 blacks who served in the armedforces believed that a victory for democracy abroad wouldhelp them achieve democracy for their people at home. Atfirst, despite the discrimination they encountered in themilitary, they maintained their conviction that they wouldbe treated as full-fledged citizens upon their return. Manybegan to talk about the birth of a New Negro—independentand proud. Thousands joined the National Association forthe Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an orga-nization at the forefront of the fight for racial equality. By1918, 100,000 African Americans subscribed to theNAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, whose editor, W. E. B. DuBois, had urged them to support the war.

This wartime optimism made the postwar discrim-ination and hatred African Americans encountered dif-ficult to endure. Many black workers who had foundjobs in the North were fired to make way for returningwhite veterans. Returning black servicemen, mean-while, had to scrounge for poorly paid jobs as unskilledlaborers. In the South, lynch mobs targeted black veter-ans who refused to tolerate the usual insults and indig-nities; 10 of the 70 blacks lynched in the South in 1919were veterans.

The worst anti-black violence that year occurred inthe North, however. Crowded conditions during the warhad forced black and white ethnic city dwellers intouncomfortably close proximity. Many white ethnicsregarded blacks with a mixture of fear and prejudice.They resented having to share neighborhoods, trolleys,parks, streets, and workplaces with blacks. Many also

The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, by Ben ShahnThe 1920 trial and 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco andBartolomeo Vanzetti became the passion of many immigrants,liberal intellectuals, and artists (such as Ben Shahn), whowere convinced that the two anarchists had been unfairlytried and convicted.

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Co n c l u s i o n 713

wanted African Americans barred from unions, seeingthem as threats to their job security.

Racial tensions escalated into race riots. The deadliestexplosion occurred in Chicago in July 1919, when a blackteenager who had been swimming in Lake Michigan waskilled by whites after coming too close to a whites-onlybeach. Rioting soon broke out, with white mobs invadingblack neighborhoods, torching homes and stores, andattacking innocent residents. Led by war veterans, some ofwhom were armed, blacks fought back, turning the borderareas between white and black neighborhoods into battlezones. Fighting raged for five days, leaving 38 dead (23black, 15 white) and more than 500 injured. Race riotingin other cities pushed the death toll to 120 beforesummer’s end.

The riots made it clear to blacks that the North was notthe Promised Land. Confined to unskilled jobs and to seg-regated neighborhoods with substandard housing andexorbitant rents, black migrants in Chicago, New York, andother northern cities suffered economic hardship through-out the 1920s. The NAACP carried on its campaign forcivil rights and racial equality, but many blacks no longershared its belief that they would one day be accepted as

first-class citizens. They turned instead to a leader fromJamaica, Marcus Garvey, who gave voice to their bitter-ness: “The first dying that is to be done by the black manin the future,” Garvey declared in 1918, “will be done tomake himself free. And then when we are finished, if wehave any charity to bestow, we may die for the white man.But as for me, I think I have stopped dying for him.”

Garvey called on blacks to give up their hopes forintegration and to set about forging a separate blacknation. He reminded blacks that they possessed a rich cul-ture stretching back over the centuries that would enablethem to achieve greatness as a nation. Garvey’s ambitionwas to build a black nation in Africa that would bringtogether all of the world’s people of African descent. In theshort term, he wanted to help American and Caribbeanblacks to achieve economic and cultural independence.

Garvey’s call for black separatism and self-sufficiency—or black nationalism, as it came to be known—elicited afavorable response among African Americans. In the early1920s, the Universal Negro Improvement Association(UNIA), which Garvey had founded, enrolled millions ofmembers in 700 branches in 38 states. His newspaper, theNegro World, reached a circulation of 200,000. The NewYork chapter of UNIA undertook an economic develop-ment program that included the establishment of grocerystores, restaurants, and factories. Garvey’s most visible eco-nomic venture was the Black Star Line, a shipping companywith three ships flying the UNIA flag from their masts.

This black nationalist movement did not endure forlong. Garvey entered into bitter disputes with other blackleaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois, who regarded him as aflamboyant, self-serving demagogue. Garvey sometimesshowed poor judgment, as when he expressed support forthe Ku Klux Klan on the grounds that it shared his pes-simism about the possibility of racial integration. Inexpe-rienced in economic matters, Garvey squandered UNIAmoney on abortive business ventures. The U.S. govern-ment regarded his rhetoric as inflammatory and sought tosilence him. In 1923, he was convicted of mail fraudinvolving the sale of Black Star stocks and was sentencedto five years in jail. In 1927, he was deported to Jamaica,and the UNIA folded. Nevertheless, Garvey’s philosophyof black nationalism endured.

Conclusion

T he resurgence of racism in 1919 and the consequentturn to black nationalism among African Americans

were signs that the high hopes of the war years had beendashed. Industrial workers, immigrants, and radicals alsofound their pursuit of liberty and equality interrupted

Marcus Garvey, Black NationalistThis portrait was taken in 1924, after Garvey’s conviction onmail fraud charges.

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by the fear, intolerance, and repression unleashed by thewar. They came to understand as well that Wilson’scommitment to these ideals counted for less than didhis administration’s and Congress’s determination todiscipline a people whom they regarded as dangerouslyheterogeneous and unstable. Of the reform groups,only woman suffragists made enduring gains—espe-cially the right to vote—but, for the feminists in theirranks, these steps forward failed to compensate for thecollapse of the progressive movement and, with it, theirprogram of achieving equal rights for women acrossthe board.

A similar disappointment engulfed those who hadembraced and fought for Wilson’s dream of creating anew and democratic world order. The world in 1919appeared as volatile as it had been in 1914. More andmore Americans—perhaps even a majority—were

coming to believe that U.S. intervention had been amistake.

In other ways, the United States benefited a great dealfrom the war. By 1919, the American economy was by farthe world’s strongest. Many of the nation’s leading corpo-rations had improved productivity and managementduring the war. U.S. banks were poised to supplant thoseof London as the most influential in international finance.The nation’s economic strength triggered an extraordinaryburst of growth in the 1920s, and millions of Americansrushed to take advantage of the prosperity that this“people’s capitalism” had put within their grasp. But evenaffluence failed to dissolve the class, ethnic, and racial ten-sions that the war had exposed. And the failure of thepeace process added to Europe’s problems, delayed theemergence of the United States as a leader in world affairs,and created the preconditions for another world war.

Questions for Review and CriticalThinking

Review

1. Why did the U.S. policy of neutrality fail, and why did theUnited States get drawn into war?

2. What problems did the United States encounter in mobilizingfor total war, and how successfully were the problems over-come?

3. What were Woodrow Wilson’s peace proposals, and how didthey fare?

4. What issues convulsed American society in the immediateaftermath of war, and how were they resolved?

Critical Thinking

1. Did the First World War do more to enhance or interrupt thepursuit of liberty and equality on the home front?

2. Do you think that the chances of a second world war breakingout in Europe in the late 1930s would have been substantiallylessened had Woodrow Wilson prevailed on the U.S. Senate toratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, thereby bringing theUnited States into the League of Nations?

Identifications

Review your understanding of the following key terms, people,and events for this chapter (terms are defined or described in theGlossary at the end of the book).

Suggested Readings

On America’s neutrality and road to war, consult Arthur S. Link,Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War and Peace (1979), and JohnMilton Cooper Jr., The Vanity of Power: American Isolationismand the First World War, 1914–1917 (1969). Roland C. Marchand,The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898–1918(1972), reconstructs the large and influential antiwar movement,while John W. Chambers, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes toModern America (1987), analyzes American efforts to prepare forwar by raising a multimillion-man fighting machine. DavidKennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society(1980), is a superb account of the effects of war on American soci-ety. For details on industrial mobilization, consult Robert D. Cuff,The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations duringWorld War I (1973). David Montgomery, The Fall of the House ofLabor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism,1865–1925 (1987), expertly reconstructs the escalation of labor-management tensions during the war, but it should be read along-side Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle forIndustrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern Labor Relations,1912–1921 (1997).

For a pioneering effort to situate U.S. domestic politics duringthe war in an international context, see Alan Dawley, Changing theWorld: American Progressives in War and Revolution (2003). Onthe migration of African Americans to northern industrial centersand the movement of women into war production, see Joe William

Triple AllianceTriple EntenteneutralityLusitania“peace without victory”Zimmermann telegram

John J. Pershingtotal warWar Industries BoardNational War Labor BoardNew York’s 369th RegimentLiberty bonds

Committee on PublicInformation

Immigration Restriction Actof 1917

Espionage, Sabotage, andSedition Acts

Fourteen Points

irreconcilablesHenry Cabot LodgeArticle X of the Covenant1919 steel strikeRed ScareSacco and Vanzetti Case (1920)Marcus Garvey

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Co n c l u s i o n 715

Trotter Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: NewDimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (1991), and Maurine W.Greenwald, Women, War and Work (1980). Stephen Vaughn,Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and theCommittee on Public Information (1980), is an important accountof the CPI, the government’s central propaganda agency. Harry N.Scheiber, The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties,1917–1921 (1960) and Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: FreeSpeech in War Time from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War onTerrorism (2004), analyze the repression of dissent.

On Wilson, Versailles, and the League of Nations, consultThomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and theQuest for a New World Order (1992); Arno Mayer, The Politicsand Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevo-lution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (1967); Lloyd C. Gardner, Safefor Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution,1913–1923 (1984); John Milton Cooper, Jr., Breaking the Heart ofthe World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League ofNations (2001); and Katherine A. S. Siegel, Loans and Legitimacy:The Evolution of Soviet-American Relations, 1919–1933 (1996).On Republican opposition to the League of Nations, see William C.Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an AmericanForeign Policy (1980).

Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The UnitedStates, 1877–1919 (1987), offers a good overview of the class andracial divisions that convulsed American society in 1919. On theRed Scare, consult Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study inNational Hysteria (1955). William Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicagoin the Red Summer of 1919 (1970), examines race conflict afterthe First World War, while Judith Stein, The World of MarcusGarvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (1986), explores theemergence of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improve-ment Association.

D O I N G H I S T O R Y O N L I N E

The Sinking of the Lusitania

When a German submarine sank the British passenger linerLusitania, U.S. citizens were killed and Woodrow Wilson wasoutraged. The strong stand that he took in response to thisincident increased the likelihood of U.S. involvement in war ifGermany chose to resume its submarine attacks. Go to theweb site and read the documents gathered there. Then answerthe questions posed about the sinking of the Lusitania.

Debs v. United States

In 1917 and 1918, freedom of speech was severely cur-tailed, especially as it pertained to criticisms about U.S.involvement in the war. Nevertheless, some Americanscontinued to speak out against the war, risking arrest andimprisonment. In this repressive climate, Eugene V. Debs,perennial Socialist candidate for president, delivered aspeech in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, defending socialism,attacking capitalism, and criticizing the war. He wasarrested, tried, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Even inthe courtroom, facing the sentencing judge, Debs contin-ued to express his views and to defend his right to freespeech. Go to the web site and read the documents gath-ered there. Then answer the questions posed about theDebs case.

Visit the ThomsonNOW Web site atwww.thomsonedu.com/login/ to access primary sources

and answer questions related to these topics. Theseexercise modules allow students to e-mail their responses

directly to professors from the Web site.

Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to this textbook:http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin

Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is an integrated online suite of services and resourceswith proven ease of use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want—NOW!

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FrontmatterWinslow Homer, Sunday Morning in Virginia, 1877. CincinnatiArt Museum John J. Emery Fund. Acc.#1924.247

Chapter 17p. 510: Winslow Homer, Sunday Morning in Virginia, 1877.Cincinnati Art Museum John J. Emery Fund. Acc.#1924.247;p. 513: Courtesy Chicago Historical Society; p. 515 (left): Libraryof Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 515 (right):Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 517(top): Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division;p. 517 (bottom): Photographs and Prints Division, SchomburgCenter for Research in Black Culture, The New York PublicLibrary, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; p. 518: Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 519 (left): © StockMontage, Inc.; p. 519 (right): Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division; p. 521: Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division; p. 524: © CORBIS; p. 528: © CORBIS;p. 529: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 531: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 533: © The Granger Collection, New York

Chapter 18p. 538: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 546: Erwin E. Smith Collection ofthe Library of Congress on deposit at the Amon Carter Museum,Fort Worth; p. 547: TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox FilmCorp. All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection; p. 548:Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas; p. 550: Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 555 (top): © 2006Harvard University, Peabody Museum Photo 2004.24.30439A;p. 555 (bottom): © 2006 Harvard University, Peabody MuseumPhoto 2004.24.30440A; p. 556 (top): Smithsonian Institution,Bureau of American Ethnology; p. 556 (bottom): © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 560: © The Granger Collection, New York

Chapter 19p. 566: © 2006 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; p. 569:Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 573:© Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 574: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 576: TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Edith Minturn PhelpsStokes ( Mrs. I.N.), 1938 (38.104) Photograph © 1992 TheMetropolitan Museum of Art; p. 579: Library of Congress, Printsand Photographs Division; p. 585: North Wind Picture Archive;p. 587: The Kansas State Historical Society Topeka, Kansas; p. 590:© The Granger Collection, New York

Chapter 20p. 594: John Sloan, The City from Greenwich Village, 1922.National Gallery of Art. Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1970.I. I.;p. 597: © Lake County Museum/CORBIS p. 600: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 601: © Hulton Archive/ Getty Images; p. 604: BrownUniversity Archives; p. 607: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 608: © Museumof the City of New York/CORBIS; p. 611: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 613: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 616: A’Lelia Bundles/WalkerFamily Collection/www.madamcjwalker.com; p. 617: © CORBIS;p. 618 (top): Underwood Photo Archives; p. 618 (bottom): © The

Granger Collection, New York; p. 619: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 620: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Chapter 21p. 624: Culver Pictures; p. 627: Culver Pictures; p. 628: GeorgeBellows, “Cliff Dwellers” 1913. Oil on canvas. Los Angeles CountyMuseum of Art, Los Angeles County Fund; p. 629: ColumbiaUniversity Library; p. 630: Brown Brothers; p. 631: © CORBIS;p. 634: © Hulton Archive/Getty Images; p. 638: © CORBIS;p. 640: Wisconsin Historical Society; p. 642: 20th CenturyFox/THE KOBAL COLLECTION; p. 643: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 646: © Private Collection/© Christie’s Images/The BridgemanArt Library; p. 648: Brown Brothers; p. 649: Library of Congress,Prints and Photographs Division; p. 652: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Chapter 22p. 656: Culver Pictures; p. 659: State Historical Society ofWisconsin; p. 660: Smithsonian Institution Photo No. 85-14366;p. 662: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 663: ChicagoHistorical Society; p. 665 (left): Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division; p. 665 (top right): © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 665 (bottom right): © The Granger Collection, New York;p. 668: © CORBIS; p. 669: “A Philippine Album: American EraPhotographs” by Jonathan Best. (Bookmark, Manila 1998);p. 671: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress;

p. 672: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 676: © Underwood &Underwood/CORBIS; p. 677: North Wind Picture Archive;p. 680: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Chapter 23p. 684: © Mary Evans Picture Library/The Image Works; p. 688:Imperial War Museum, London; p. 690: Wisconsin HistoricalSociety; p. 692: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 695:© CORBIS; p. 697: Digital Image © The Museum of ModernArt/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY; p. 699 (top): NationalArchives; p. 699 (bottom): Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division; p. 700: National Archives; p. 703: ImperialWar Museum, London; p. 704: New York Times, 1919; p. 705:© Bettmann/ CORBIS; p. 707: © CORBIS; p. 710: Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 711: © ParamountPictures/Courtesy: Everett Collection. ; p. 712: Art © Estate of BenShahn/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Collection of WhitneyMuseum of American Art (gift of Edith and Milton Lowenthal inmemory of Juliana Force); p. 713: Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division

Chapter 24p. 716: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 721: The ArtArchive/Bodleian Library Oxford; p. 722 © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 723: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division;p. 725: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS; p. 726: © CORBIS;p. 728: © CORBIS; p. 729: Brown Brothers; p. 730: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 734 (top): Brown Brothers; p. 734 (bottom): Libraryof Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 735: © TheGranger Collection, New York; p. 738 –739: Mural: The Scopes

Photo Credits

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Trial; Vanderbilt University Law School; Artist: J. William Myers,Nashville TN; p. 740: © John Springer Collection/CORBIS; p. 741:© National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource,NY; p. 743: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 745: Security PacificCollection/Los Angeles Public Library; p. 746: © Leonard deSelva/CORBIS; p. 747: © The Granger Collection, New York

Chapter 25p. 750: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 753: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 755: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 758: © The GrangerCollection, New York; p. 760: Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs; p. 761: FDR Library; p. 762: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 764: © Lester Lefkowitz/CORBIS; p. 766: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 767: © The Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/The Bridgeman ArtLibrary; p. 770: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 774 (top):Photo © Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington,DC/Art Resource, NY. Art © Estate of Moses Soyer/Licensed byVAGA, New York, NY; p. 774 (bottom): AP Images; p. 775: TheMichael Barson Collection; p. 776: Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division; p. 779: Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division

Chapter 26p. 786: Courtesy Northwestern University Library; p. 790:© Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 793: © The Granger Collection, NewYork; p. 795: San Diego Historical Society; p. 802: NationalArchives #127-N-69559-A; p. 805 (top): © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 805 (bottom): © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 807: National Archives;p. 808: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 809: Library of Congress, Printsand Photographs Division; p. 813: Everett Collection;p. 814: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 815: © CORBIS;p. 817: © Universal Pictures/ Courtesy: Everett Collection;p. 818: FDR Library

Chapter 27p. 824: The Michael Barson Collection; p. 827: © The GrangerCollection, New York; p. 829: Courtesy of the George C. MarshallResearch Library, Lexington, Virginia; p. 830: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 834: Courtesy of the Truman Library; p. 839 (top):© Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 839 (bottom): Library of Congress,Prints and Photographs Division; p. 840: © SUNSET BOULE-VARD/CORBIS SYGMA; p. 846: © Margaret Bourke-White/TimeLife Pictures/Getty Images; p. 847: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 849:The Michael Barson Collection; p. 850: © Hulton Archive/GettyImages; p. 853: The Michael Barson Collection

Chapter 28p. 856: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 859: AP Images;p. 865 (top): © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 865 (bottom): © Elliott

Erwitt/Magnum Photos, Inc.; p. 866: No credit necessary; p. 867:© Joe Munroe/Photo Researchers, Inc. ; p. 870: Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 871: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 875: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 877: © Don Cravens/TimeLife Pictures/Getty Images; p. 884: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 890:© Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos, Inc. ; p. 891: AP Images/BillHudson; p. 892: WARNER BROS/THE KOBAL COLLECTION;p. 893: Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House, in the JohnF. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Chapter 29p. 896: © Joseph Sohm; ChromoSohm Inc./CORBIS; p. 899 (left):George Tames/ NYT Pictures; p. 899 (right): George Tames/ NYTPictures; p. 906: AP Images/Eddie Adams; p. 908: © The GrangerCollection, New York; p. 912: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 913:Everett Collection; p. 914: © Express/Express/ Getty Images/HultonArchive; p. 920: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 921: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 926: AP Images; p. 928: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Chapter 30p. 936: © MCA/Universal Pictures - Courtesy: Everett Collection;p. 941: © Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images; p. 942:© Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 947: © Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos, Inc.;p. 949: © Galen Rowell/CORBIS; p. 950: © Bettmann/CORBIS ;p. 955: © Owen Franken/CORBIS; p. 960: Reprinted by permis-sion of Ms. Magazine, © 1972; p. 962: © Reuters/CORBIS; p. 964:© Gary A. Conner/PhotoEdit; p. 965: © Andre Jenny/The ImageWorks; p. 967: © Ralf-Finn Hestoft/CORBIS; p. 969: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Chapter 31p. 972: © Richard T. Nowitz/CORBIS; p. 977: © RichardCummins/CORBIS; p. 980 (top): California Department ofTransportation; p. 980 (bottom left): California Department of Transportation; p. 980 (bottom right): California Departmentof Transportation; p. 982: © Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS; p. 983:© Keren Su/CORBIS; p. 988: Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox/THEKOBAL COLLECTION; p. 990: TM and Copyright © 20thCentury Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved./ The EverettCollection; p. 993: © Rebecca Cook/Reuters/CORBIS

Chapter 32p. 996: © Lee Snider/Photo Images/CORBIS; p. 1003: © Reuters/CORBIS; p. 1006: AP Images/Gary I. Rothstein; p. 1007: APImages/Pablo Martinez Monsivais; p. 1008: AP Images/DennisPaquin; p. 1010: AP Images/Khalid Mohammed; p. 1012: © TedSoqui/CORBIS; p. 1015 (top): © Smiley N. Pool/Dallas Morning News/CORBIS; p. 1015 (bottom): © Jason Reed/Reuters/CORBIS

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