Transcript File

James L. Roark ● Michael P. Johnson
Patricia Cline Cohen ● Sarah Stage
Susan M. Hartmann
The American Promise
A History of the United States
Fifth Edition
CHAPTER 22
World War I: The Progressive Crusade
at Home and Abroad,
1914-1920
Copyright © 2012 by Bedford/St. Martin's
I. Woodrow Wilson and the World
A. Taming the Americas
1. A new foreign policy
2. Maintaining the Monroe Doctrine
3. Involvement in Mexico
4. Pancho Villa
• United States welcomed the government of Venustiano Carranza
• prompted a rebellion among desperately poor farmers who believed that the new
Mexican government, aided by American business interests, had betrayed the
revolution’s promise to help the common people
• a rebel army, led by Francisco “Pancho” Villa, attacked Americans and American
interests; caused Wilson to send 12,000 troops to Mexico, only to withdraw them
soon after to prepare for the possibility of fighting in World War I.
B. The European Crisis
1. A complex web of alliances
• potentially destructive forces of nationalism and imperialism; European nations
sought to avoid an explosion by establishing a complex web of military and diplomatic
alliances: the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) opposed the Triple
Entente, or the Allies (Great Britain, France, and Russia)
2. Road to war
• Bosnian Serb terrorist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the AustroHungarian throne, on June 28, 1914
3. A world war
I. Woodrow Wilson and the World
C. The Ordeal of American Neutrality
1. Declaring neutrality
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engaged no vital American interest and involved no significant principle
announced that the United States would remain neutral
would continue normal relations with the warring nations.
2. American sympathies
3. Testing neutrality
England used its navy to set up an economic blockade of Germany;
America protested; Germany retaliated with a submarine blockade of
British ports.
4. The sinking of the Lusitania
May 7, 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the British passenger liner
Lusitania, killing over 1,000 passengers, 128 of them U.S. citizens;
attack provoked a mixed reaction from Americans; some demanded
war, while others pointed out that the Lusitania was carrying munitions
as well as passengers and was therefore a legitimate target
5. Wilson’s middle course
Bryan resigned, predicting the president had placed the nation on a
collision course with Germany
Germany apologized for the civilian deaths on the Lusitania and
tensions subsided
Wilson’s middle-of-the-road strategy between aggressiveness and
pacifism proved helpful in his bid for reelection in 1916; campaigned
under the slogan “He kept us out of the war”
won by only 600,000 popular and 23 electoral votes.
I. Woodrow Wilson and the World
D. The United States Enters the War
1. Siding with the Allies
• accepting the British blockade of Germany, the United
States supplied Britain with 40 percent of their war
materiel; also floated loans to Britain and France.
2. Submarine warfare
• January 1917, the German government—resentful of
neutral ships’ access to Great Britain while Britain’s
blockade starved Germany—resumed unrestricted
submarine warfare
• hoped to win a military victory in France before the United
States entered the war.
3. The Zimmerman telegram
• revealing Germany’s attempt to ally itself with Mexico, it
became increasingly more difficult for Wilson to pursue a
policy of neutrality.
4. Entering the war
• In March, German submarines sank five American vessels
off Britain, killing 66 Americans and prompting Wilson to
ask Congress for a declaration of war
• an overwhelming majority voted in favor on April 5, 1917;
among those voting no was Representative Jeanette Rankin
of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress
II. “Over There”
A. The Call to Arms
1. Struggle in Europe
• Russia, was in turmoil, and the Bolshevik revolutionary
government would eventually withdraw Russia from the war.
2. Raising an army
• May 18, 1917, to meet the demand for fighting men, Wilson
signed a Selective Service Act
• authorized the draft of all young men into the armed forces
• transformed a tiny volunteer armed force into a vast army and
navy
3. Black soldiers
4.8 million men under arms, 370,000 were African Americans
who had put aside their skepticism about the war to serve
• during training, black recruits suffered the same prejudices they
encountered in civilian life, facing abuse, segregation, and
assignment to labor battalions
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4. A progressive war
• Military Draft Act of 1917 prohibited prostitution and alcohol
near training camps
• Wilson chose John “Black Jack” Pershing to command the
American Expeditionary Force
• he was confident and had a morally upstanding reputation
II. “Over There”
B. The War in France
1. Trench warfare
• AEF discovered that the three-year-old war had degenerated into a stalemate
• both the British and French armies had dug hundreds of miles of trenches
across France, where both sides suffered tremendous casualties.
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2. Black troops’ success in battle
Except for the 92nd Division of black troops, which was integrated into the
French army and fought for 191 days, American troops saw almost no combat
in 1917; instead, they continued to train and explore places most of them
otherwise could never have hoped to see.
3. Americans enter combat
the Germans launched a massive offensive aimed at French ports on the
Atlantic, causing 250,000 casualties on each side;
the French agreed to General Pershing’s terms of a separate American
command and in May 1918 assigned the Americans to the central sector
4. Ending the war
the summer of 1918, the Allies launched a massive counteroffensive that would
end the war, routing German forces along the Marne River
German defenses held for six weeks; on November 11, 1918, an armistice was
signed and the adventure of the AEF was over.
5. The death toll
112,000 AEF soldiers perished from wounds and disease, while another
230,000 suffered casualties but survived; much worse for European nations:
2.2 million Germans, 1.9 million Russians, 1.4 million French, and 900,000
Britons.
III. The Crusade for Democracy at Home
A. The Progressive Stake in the War
1. War as agent for reform
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Bernard Baruch headed the War Industries Board and Herbert Hoover led the Food
Administration.
2. The war and the economy
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Industrial leaders were encouraged by the tripling of corporate profits achieved by
feats of production and efficiency
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some working people also had cause to celebrate: Wartime agencies enacted the
eight-hour workday, a living minimum wage, and collective bargaining
rights in some industries
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wages increased, but prices did as well.
3. Prohibition
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prohibitionists eventually succeeded in securing the passage of a constitutional ban
on alcohol, the Eighteenth Amendment, which went into effect on January 1, 1920.
B. Women, War, and the Battle for Suffrage
1. Wartime opportunities
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more than 25,000 women served in France as nurses, ambulance drivers, canteen
managers, and war correspondents
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at home, long-standing barriers against hiring women fell when millions of working
men became soldiers and few immigrant workers made it across the Atlantic
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tens of thousands of women found work in defense plants and with the railroads.
2. Picketing the White House
3. The Nineteenth Amendment
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Republican and Progressive parties endorsed woman suffrage in 1916; in 1918,
Wilson gave his support to suffrage, calling the amendment “vital to the winning of
the war”
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by August 1920, the states had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, granting woman
suffrage.
III. The Crusade for Democracy at
Home
C. Rally around the Flag—or Else
1. Calling for peace through victory
2. Encouraging patriotism
• he created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) under the
direction of muckraking journalist George Creel, who cheered on
America’s war effort; sent the “Four-Minute Men” around the
country to give brief pep talks.
3. Demonizing the Germans
4. Suppressing dissent
• Espionage Act, the Trading with the Enemy Act, and the Sedition
Act, which gave the government sweeping powers to punish
opinions or activities it considered “disloyal, profane, scurrilous or
abusive”
• contrasted sharply with the war’s aim of defending democracy.
5. Wartime politics
• elections of 1918, Republicans won a narrow victory in both
houses of Congress, ending Democratic control, suspending any
possibility for further domestic reform, and dividing the
leadership as U.S. forces advanced toward military victory.
IV. A Compromised Peace
A. Wilson’s Fourteen Points
1. A blueprint for a new world order
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January 8, 1918, President Wilson delivered a speech to Congress that revealed his vision of a generous
peace; his Fourteen Points provided a blueprint for a new democratic world order; the first five points
affirmed basic liberal ideas, and the next eight supported the right to self-determination of peoples who had
been dominated by Germany.
2. A League of Nations
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provide “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike”
B. The Paris Peace Conference
1. Wilson in Paris
2. Compromised ideals
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To the Allied leaders, Wilson appeared a naïve and impractical moralist; he did not understand hard European
realities;
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Wilson was forced to make drastic compromises: in return for French moderation of territorial claims, Wilson
agreed to support an article that assigned war guilt to Germany; many Germans felt as if their nation had
been betrayed.
3. Self-determination
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in Asia and Africa, but the Allies who had taken over the colonies during the war only allowed the League of
Nations a mandate to administer them.
4. Racial equality rejected
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peace conference refused to endorse Japan’s proposal for a clause in the treaty proclaiming the principle of
racial equality; Wilson’s belief in the superiority of whites and his apprehension about how Americans would
react to such a clause led him to reject the clause.
5. League of Nations
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he was unwilling to see the world return to the old strategy of balance of power; Wilson proposed a League of
Nations that would provide collective security and order; he was overjoyed when the Allies agreed to the
League; to many Europeans and Americans whose hopes had been stirred by Wilson’s lofty aims, the
Versailles treaty came as a bitter disappointment; the president dealt in compromise like any other politician;
still, without Wilson’s presence, the treaty surely would have been more vindictive.
IV. A Compromised Peace
C. The Fight for the Treaty
1. Critics of the Versailles Treaty
2. Congressional opposition
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Wilson faced stiff opposition in the Senate from “irreconcilables,” who
condemned the treaty for entangling the United States in world affairs,
and from Republicans, who feared that membership in the League of
Nations would jeopardize the nation’s independence.
3. Lodge’s reservations
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts; used his position as
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to air his complaints
out of committee hearings came several amendments, or “reservations,”
that sought to limit the consequences of American involvement in the
League
it became clear that ratification of the treaty depended on the acceptance
of Lodge’s reservations, which the senator had appended to the treaty;
but Wilson refused to accept the amendments.
4. Appeal to the people
embarked on an ambitious speaking tour; but he after three weeks he
collapsed and had to return to Washington, where he suffered a massive
stroke.
5. A defeated treaty
before the full Senate in March 1920, it came up six votes short of the
two-thirds majority needed for passage; the nations of Europe went about
organizing the League of Nations at Geneva, Switzerland, but the United
States never became a member.
V. Democracy at Risk
A. Economic Hardship and Labor Upheaval
1. The peacetime economy
2. Rising unemployment and inflation
• than 3 million soldiers were released from the military,
causing the unemployment rate to soar; at the same time,
consumers went on a spending spree, causing inflation to
soar
• in 1919, prices rose 75 percent over prewar levels.
3. Worker militancy
• 1919, there were 3,600 strikes involving 4 million workers
• included a general strike in Seattle, the largest work
stoppage in American history
• a strike by Boston policemen brought out postwar hostility
toward labor militancy in the public sector
• labor strife reached its peak in the grim steel strike of
1919, where 18 strikers were killed
• the strike collapsed, initiating a sharp decline in the
fortunes of the labor movement, a trend that would
continue for almost twenty years.
V. Democracy at Risk
B. The Red Scare
1. Homegrown causes –Red Scare
2. Influenza epidemic-Spanish flu-40 million died
3. Rise of communism
4. Palmer raids
• Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer led an assault on alleged subversives
• targeted those men and women who harbored what Palmer considered
ideas that could lead to violence, even though they may have done
nothing illegal
• in January 1920, Palmer ordered a series of raids that netted 6,000
alleged subversives
• effort to rid the country of alien radicals was matched by efforts to crush
troublesome citizens
• though he found no revolutionary conspiracies, he nonetheless ordered
500 noncitizen suspects, including Emma Goldman, deported.
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5. A public attack on civil liberties
public institutions, including schools, libraries, and state legislatures,
joined the attack on civil liberties
the Supreme Court acted to restrict free speech with its decision on
Schenck v. United States.
6. Backlash
provoked the creation of the American Civil Liberties Union, which
championed the targets of Palmer’s campaign; but in the end, the Red
scare lost credibility and collapsed in its excesses once warnings of
revolution never materialized
V. Democracy at Risk
C. The Great Migrations of African Americans and Mexicans
1. Escaping the South
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1900, nine out ten blacks still lived in the South, where disfranchisement, segregation,
and violence dominated their lives
World War I provided African Americans with the opportunity to escape the South’s
cotton fields and kitchens; as the number of European immigrants fell, between 1915
and 1920, half a million blacks boarded trains for the industrial cities in the North.
2. Life in the North
3. Mexican immigration
Between 1910 and 1920, the Mexican-born population in the United States more than
doubled
American racial stereotypes made Mexican immigrants prospects for manual labor but
not for citizenship
by 1920, ethnic Mexicans made up about three-fourths of California’s farm laborers and
were crucial to the Texas economy
Mexican immigrants in the Southwest dreamed of a better life in America; they found
both opportunity and disappointment
D. Postwar Politics and the Election of 1920
1. Continuing Wilsonian policy
2. A “return to normalcy”
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Republican candidate, Ohio senator Warren G. Harding, showed little political aptitude
but a great facility for connecting with the common people
won the election with the campaign promise to return the country to “normalcy”;
achieved the largest presidential victory ever: 60.5 percent of the popular vote and 404
out of 531 electoral votes.