Transcript The War at Home

The War at Home
Over There vs My Little Wet Home
Which one is a more accurate picture of the War?
Over There
My Little Wet Home
 Tone:
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 Audience:
 Audience:
 Message:
 Message:
Paying for the War
 US spent $35.5 billion on the war effort
Raised one-third through taxes
 Made the other two-thirds through bonds

 Victory Loans // Liberty Loans
 Propaganda helps raise money through the selling of
bonds
Anti-Immigrant Hysteria
 “Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget
there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight
you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of
ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of
our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the
policeman on the beat, the man in the street.
Conformity would be the only virtue, and every
man who refused to conform would have to pay the
penalty.”

Woodrow Wilson
Anti-Immigrant Hysteria
 Immigrants were targeted – especially Germans
and Austrians
Didn’t matter if they were born there / were just of
German descent
 Americans with German names lost their jobs

 Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms were not
played anymore
 Towns with German names changed them
 Schools stopped teaching German
Anti-Immigrant Hysteria
 German-Americans were tarred and feathered,
as well as flogged and lynched
 German measles  liberty measles
 Hamburger  Salisbury steak or liberty sandwich
 Sauerkraut  liberty cabbage
 Dachshunds  liberty pups
 Does this still happen?
 Freedom Fries?????
Espionage and Sedition Acts
 Passed in 1917 and 1918 by Congress
 People could be fined up to $10,000 and sentenced
to 20 years in jail for interfering with the war
effort or saying anything disloyal
 Does this violate the 1st Amendment? (yes)
Espionage and Sedition Acts
 People also lost jobs, were deported, and were
targeted
 Targets especially socialists and labor leaders
Eugene V Debs is thrown in jail for 10 years
 Emma Goldman is deported to Russia
 Leaders of the IWW are jailed/deported and the union
disappears

Great Migration
 Large scale movement of African Americans from the
South to the North
 Began before the war, but accelerated wildly
 Why did they move?
Escape racial discrimination in the South
 Natural disasters in the South
 Jobs in the North! Factories! War industries!
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