Chapter 19 - Safe for Democracy:
The United States and World War I, 1916–1920
Europe – WWI 1914 – 1918
US – WWI 1917 - 1918
•America’s increasing economic and cultural connections with the world led to elevated American
military and political involvement.
•1900 and 1920, many of the principles that guided American foreign policy for the rest of the
twentieth century were formed.
•The “open door” policy that American trade, investment, information, and culture should flow
freely to other nations and markets.
•Americans discussed their foreign policy in terms of freedom. This was expressed in a widespread
belief that America spread its power and influence in the world to promote universal ideals of liberty
and democracy.
•Woodrow Wilson- “liberal internationalism” - Wilson believed that political freedoms would
follow wherever American trade and investment flowed.
•World War I became the test for Wilson’s ideas and the Progressives who supported him and
sought to make the war an opportunity to reform America and the world.
Political Terms
• Sphere of Influence:
A territorial area within which the political
influence or the interests of one nation are held
to be more or less paramount
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sphere%20of%20influence
• Imperialism
A policy or practice by which a country
increases its power by gaining control over the
other areas of the world
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imperialism?show=0&t=1391979139
Map 19.3 Colonial Possessions, 1900
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
American Presidents embrace a spirit of Intervention
and Imperialism for economic growth
Progressive-Era presidents who expanded government power at
home did so abroad as well.
• Initially, their interventions occurred in the Western
Hemisphere, which the United States had made its sphere to
oversee in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.
• Between 1901 and 1920, U.S. Marines landed in Caribbean
countries more than twenty times, usually to secure a better
economic environment for American companies that wanted
safe access to raw materials or bankers who wanted to ensure
that loans were repaid.
Map 19.1 The United States in The Caribbean, 1898-1934
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
An Era of Intervention
TEDDY ROOSEVELT - “I Took the Canal Zone”
TR – pursued a policy of intervention in Central America
•
Roosevelt divided the world into “civilized” and “uncivilized” nations, and he believed the former were obliged
to establish order in a chaotic world.
•
Roosevelt was far more engaged in international diplomacy than his predecessors, and while he disclaimed
any American interest in acquiring overseas territory, he ordered multiple interventions in Central America.
Panama Canal
•
His first major action was engineering the separation of Panama from Colombia in order to build
a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In 1903, when Colombia refused to cede land
for the canal, Roosevelt helped to launch an uprising in Panama, and he deployed American
gunboats to prevent the Colombian army from suppressing it. Having secured Panamanian
independence and a treaty giving the United States the right to construct and operate a canal
and sovereignty over the Canal Zone, Roosevelt launched one of the greatest construction and
engineering projects in history. “I took the Canal Zone,” he later exclaimed. The project, finished
in 1914, facilitated American and world trade by drastically cutting shipping times.
• PBS background on the Panama Canal:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/tr-panama/
• Video (United Streaming: The Unfinished Nation: Warrior to Priest:
Presidents of the Early 1900’s – “The Panama Canal”
• Video (You Tube 10 minutes – “Panama Canal Construction Photos 1907 – 1915”)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoNF7k6ZLJ8
• Video (How Stuff Works – history and present )
http://shows.howstuffworks.com/40473-the-coolest-stuff-on-the-planet-panama-canal-video.htm
Map 19.2 The Panama Canal Lone
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
An Era of Intervention
Roosevelt’s Interventionist Foreign Policy
Roosevelt Corollary
•
Corollary - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corollary something that naturally follows or results from another thing
Roosevelt’s interventionist foreign policy came to be known as the Roosevelt
Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1823) http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=23
***This policy expressed the right of the United States to exercise “an international police
power” in the Western Hemisphere, allowing it to prevent European intervention in
the Americas, as the Monroe Doctrine specified, but also forcibly to intervene
whenever it deemed it necessary.
Original Document http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=56
Big Stick Policy http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/his1005spring2011/2011/03/02/the-roosevelt-corollary/
http://www.campaignforliberty.org/members-posts/teddy-roosevelt-and-his-big-stick/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8XQIJxqzXo
Examples of the Roosevelt Corollary (intervention in Central America)
•
•
•
Roosevelt feared that financial instability in the Americas simply invited European powers to intervene
whenever they felt their investments were threatened.
1904, Roosevelt invaded the Dominican Republic to ensure that its customs houses repaid debts to European
and American investors.
1906, he sent troops to Cuba to ensure stability after a disputed election; they stayed until 1909.
Dollar Diplomacy – Taft
Dollar Diplomacy: http://millercenter.org/president/taft/essays/biography/5
Taft Biography: http://www.biography.com/people/william-howard-taft-9501184
Dollar Diplomacy –
• President Taft sent Marines to Nicaragua to protect a
government friendly to American economic interests,
but he emphasized economic investment and loans
from banks, rather than direct military intervention,
as the best means to spread American influence.
• This policy, known as Dollar Diplomacy, took shape
in Taft’s efforts to shape the economies of Honduras,
Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and even
Liberia.
• Video (United Streaming – Taft and Foreign Policy: Dollar Diplomacy)
An Era of Intervention – Woodrow Wilson
Wilson Biography:
http://www.biography.com/people/woodrow-wilson-9534272
Moral Imperialism - the export of American manufactured goods and investments went hand in
•
•
•
hand with the spread of democratic ideals
http://millercenter.org/president/wilson/essays/biography/5
The highly moralistic Woodrow Wilson brought a missionary zeal and sense of his own and America’s
righteousness to foreign policy. He made William Jennings Bryan, an anti-imperialist, his secretary of state,
and he repudiated Dollar Diplomacy and promised to respect Latin American independence and free it from
economic domination.
But Wilson believed the United States had a duty to instruct other nations in democracy and that American
exports and investments spread American political ideals.
For Wilson, American economic influence served a purpose higher than profit, and his “moral imperialism”
made for more military interventions than any president before or since. He sent Marines to Haiti in 1915 and
the Dominican Republic in 1916 to protect American financial interests; they stayed in the latter country until
1924, and in the former, until 1934.
• Wilson and Mexico
•
•
Wilson was most involved in Mexico, where a 1911 revolution led by Francisco Madero overthrew Porfirio
Diaz’s longstanding dictatorship. In 1913, without Wilson’s knowledge but with the support of the U.S.
ambassador and America companies controlling Mexico’s oil and mines, military commander Victoriano
Huerta assassinated Madero and seized power.
Wilson was outraged, would not extend recognition, and vowed to “teach” Latin Americans “to elect good
men.” When civil war erupted and Wilson sent troops to Vera Cruz to prevent arms shipments, they were met
as invaders and attacked by Mexican troops. In 1916, after Mexican troops led by Pancho Villa killed
Americans in a New Mexico town close to the border, Wilson ordered 10,000 American troops to invade
northern Mexico to apprehend Villa.
Wilson and Mexico
https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/world-war-i-1914-1919/the-wilson-administration/intervention-in-mexico/
• Wilson was most involved in Mexico, where a 1911 revolution led by
Francisco Madero overthrew Porfirio Diaz’s longstanding dictatorship. In
1913, without Wilson’s knowledge but with the support of the U.S.
ambassador and American companies controlling Mexico’s oil and mines,
military commander Victoriano Huerta assassinated Madero and seized
power.
• Wilson was outraged, would not extend recognition, and vowed to “teach”
Latin Americans “to elect good men.” When civil war erupted and Wilson
sent troops to Vera Cruz to prevent arms shipments, they were met as
invaders and attacked by Mexican troops.
• In 1916, after Mexican troops led by Pancho Villa killed Americans in a New
Mexico town close to the border, Wilson ordered 10,000 American troops to
invade northern Mexico to apprehend Villa; it was unsuccessful.
• Can the United States intervene in Latin America and dominate?
The Great War
What are the causes of war?
Before 1914 • Imperialism: European nations competed for
colonies in Africa/Asia & other parts of the world
Map – (National Archives) http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/first-world-war/aglobal-view/
Colonial Empires - http://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/imperialism/
• Nationalism: European powers believed that
their country deserved more success than
others and held great sense of pride
Nationalism and WWI (2:38) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzCe4qg8K0E
The Great War
What are the causes of war?
Before 1914 –
• Militarism:
Nations like Great Britain and Germany build up
their Navy and Army to compete for land,
resources, and dominance
• An arms race ensues
Technology & Weapons images:
http://www.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/wwi/wwitech/
Technology of WWI video (3:00):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7v3cq1ZJjM
Life in a Trench video (3:15):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G4ZY66BG38
The Great War
What are the causes of war?
Before1914 –
• Alliances: They constructed alliances or
friendships seeking military domination in
Europe.
Alliances snowball and into a World War –
http://www.firstworldwar.com/origins/causes.htm
Alliance history video (4:54):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyg8CgKo7Do
The Great War
SPARK
• Archduke Ferdinand Assassinated by a Serbian terrorist, Gavrilo
Princip, in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
•Ferdinand was heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
• Set off a chain of events - Military intervention by world powers due to
treaties and alliances brought about the Great War or WWI
June 28, 1914 –
• Serbian, Gavrilo Princip, shoots Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand
• The Black Hand, terrorist organization, planned this to usurp the
power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that dominated the region
July 28, 1914 - Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia
WWI – How did it Start? (Video 2:16)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njINCi9iIrA
The Great War - Alliances
July 29, 1914 - Due to her Alliance, Russia mobilizes
to support Serbia
August 1, 1914 Due to the alliances, Germany
declares war on Russia
August 3, 1914 Germany declared war on France
August 4,1914 Germany invaded Belgium w/ the
Schlieffen Plan. Britain declares war on Germany
to support Belgium
August 5, 1914
Austro-Hungary declared war on Russia
August 12, 1914
France and Britain declare war on Austro-Hungary
Great War
• The alliance system led to the following sides:
Allied Forces / Triple EntenteBritain, France, Russia, Serbia, Italy, Japan, and
eventually the United States April 6, 1917
Central Powers / Triple Alliance - Germany, AustriaHungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire (which
included modern-day Turkey and much of the Middle
East)
Overview: http://www.kidzworld.com/article/5701-overview-of-world-war-i
http://aenet.esuhsd.org/citizenship_lessons/connie/wwI_q.html
All Countries who fought in WWI http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-war-i/countries-involved.html
America
and
the
Great
War
WWI – at war with new military technology
•
After initial German victories, the war became mired in a long stalemate of bloody
and indecisive battles.
• New technologies submarines, airplanes, machine guns, tanks, and poison gas,
produced unprecedented slaughter.
• 1916 - Battle of Verdun in 55 months, some 600,000 French and German soldiers
died: 10 million soldiers and uncounted civilians, perished in the conflict, which was
immediately followed by a global influenza epidemic that killed 21 million more.
https://www.pbs.org/greatwar/maps/maps_verdun.html
•
The Great War inflicted a blow on the optimism and self-confidence of western
civilization, whose philosophers and statesmen had long celebrated reason and
progress. The war also shocked the socialist and labor movements, which had
valued international working-class solidarity over nationalism, only to see workers of
different nations kill each other for their national governments.
US Neutrality and Preparedness
Americans were deeply divided over the war.
Americans Divided:
•
•
•
•
Many Americans sided with Britain, associating it with liberty and democracy and Germany with repressive
and aristocratic government.
German and Irish-Americans, opposed supporting the British.
Immigrants from Russia, especially Jews, also did not want America to support Russia and its czar, and the
despotic Russia’s alliance with Britain and France made it hard to believe that the war was a conflict between
democracy and autocracy.
Many feminists, pacifists, and social reformers believed peace was necessary for reform at home, and they
opposed American involvement.
Wilson declares Neutrality:
• Wilson at first proclaimed U.S. neutrality, but naval warfare disrupted American
commerce and threatened America’s neutral stance.
May 1915 Lusitania – forces the US to prepare for war & public support for war grows
http://www.pbs.org/lostliners/lusitania.html
•
•
German submarines sank the British liner Lusitania, killing nearly 1,200 passengers,
including 124 Americans. Wilson protested strongly, and Americans were outraged,
giving support to those who urged America to prepare for war.
Advocates of preparedness including Theodore Roosevelt and businessmen with ties
to Britain, America’s greatest trading partner and recipient of more than $2 billion in
wartime loans from U.S. banks. Wilson was strongly pro-British and called Germany
a natural enemy of liberty, and by the end of 1915 ordered preparedness to begin.
America and the Great War
The Road to War for the United States (1917 – 1918)
May 1916 – Germany suspended submarine warfare on US
• Wilson’s preparedness policy seemed to have worked, as Germany suspended submarine
warfare against noncombatants, allowing Americans to trade and travel freely without requiring
military action.
• “He kept us out of the war” became Wilson’s campaign slogan in the 1916 presidential election.
The Republican Party was reunited, and its candidate, Charles Evan Hughes (Republican), lost
to Wilson (Democrat) by only a narrow margin.
January 22, 1917, Wilson called for “peace without victory” in Europe, and expressed his vision of a
world order including freedom of the seas, restrictions on armaments, and self-determination for
all nations, large and small.
Feb. 1917 - German submarine warfare resumes
•
Germany resumed its submarine warfare against ships sailing to or from Great Britain and
sunk several American merchant ships, gambling that it could starve Britain into submission
before America intervened militarily. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/unrestricted_submarine_warfare.htm
March 1917 – Zimmermann Telegram
• British spies made public the Zimmermann Telegram, a message by German foreign secretary
Arthur Zimmerman to Mexico asking it to declare war against the United States and regain its
territory lost in the Mexican War.
VIDEO (4:15) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKhgrCDkm0s
March 1917 - Russian Revolution
• A revolution in Russia that deposed the czar and established a constitutional republic made it
seem plausible to believe the United States would be fighting for democracy.
April 2, 1917 – US DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY
• Wilson asked the Congress to declare war against Germany (which it did with a small minority
of dissenters), in order to make the world “safe for democracy.”
1917 Russian Revolution
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/peoplescentury/episodes/redflag/description.html
• By the spring of 1918, when American
troops arrived in Europe, the communist
revolution led by Vladimir Lenin in Russia
in November 1917 had led to the
withdrawal of Russia from the war. Lenin
also exposed secret treaties by which the
Allies had agreed to divide conquered
territory after the war, embarrassing
Wilson.
1917 Russian Revolution
• In response to the Russian Revolution, the US
pursued a policy of anticommunism that would
remain at the center of American foreign policy
during the 20th century
• Red Scare: Officials blamed labor strikes on the
Russian Rev., felt they were somehow
connected, government deported 100's of
radicals, propelled J Edgar Hoover's career as
an anticommunist government agent, and
destroyed the labor union IWW and the Socialist
Party
The Fourteen Points
in order to make the world “safe for democracy.”
• January 1918, Wilson reassured the public that the war was a
righteous cause by issuing the Fourteen Points, stating war
aims and providing his vision of a new international order.
• 14 Points involved –
–
–
–
self-determination for all nations,
freedom of the seas, free trade
open diplomacy, the adjustment of colonial claims with the colonized
the establishment of a “general association of nations” to preserve
peace.
• Wilson believed this organization, which became the League of Nations,
would act like the kinds of reforms Progressives had established in America
for ensuring social harmony and protecting the weak.
US in WWI and its END:
• By September 1918, nearly 1 million Americans helped turn the tide of the
war and pushed German forces in retreat.
• On November 9, the German Kaiser abdicated the throne, and two days
later, Germany sued for peace.
• Over 100,000 Americans died, only 1 % of the 10 million killed in the war.
Map 19.4 World War I: The Western Front
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
The War at Home
Federal Government in WWI: federal powers expanded greatly
1- Selective Service Act (May 1917): require 24 million men to register with the
draft http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/us-congress-passes-selective-service-act
2- Federal Agencies created to regulate industry, transportation, labor,
agriculture
•
War Industries Board - oversee war production, organize resources to support war;
ranked industries, so that those most critical to the war effort received raw materials
before nonessential businesses (Gilder Lehrman.org)
http://personal.ashland.edu/~jmoser1/warindustriesboard.htm
•
Railroad Administration - control nations transportation system during war
•
Fuel Agency - rationed resources like coal and oil
•
Food Administration - educated farmers on modern cultivation for more output and
promoted efficient meal preparation to prevent waste; began food conservation
campaign to save food for the troops- "food will win the war" which promoted
wheatless Mondays, meatless Tuesdays, porkless Saturdays
The War at Home
Propaganda:
Due to American division to get involved in war and opposition
from groups such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
and the Socialist Party ("a crime against the people of the
United States"), government had to market the war
Committee on Public Information (CPI) - created by Wilson and
directed by George Creel, its purpose was to gain public
support for the war http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/gallery/posters.html
• Four Minute Men - gave pro-war speeches to audiences in movie theaters,
schools and other public areas (named for the time it took to change reels
for silent movies)
• Patriotic posters, pamphlets, films used
The War at Home
Women - Suffrage:
women make a push for voting rights, while some also oppose war
1- Jeannette Rankin - 1st woman to serve as a member of
Congress (Montana); pacifist (voted against WWI, WWII,
protests Vietnam at age of 85)
http://www.biography.com/people/jeannette-rankin-9451806
2- National Women's Party - militant tactics used by collegeeducated activists, Alice Paul (leader) compared Wilson to the
Kaiser for not providing democracy to women and ladies
chained bodies to White House fence - led to arrest
http://www.sewallbelmont.org/learn/national-womans-party/
http://www.loc.gov/collection/women-of-protest/about-this-collection/
3- 19th Amendment - 1920, gave women the right to vote
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/amendment_19/
The War at Home
Prohibition:
Progression era types of reform carried into the wartime with a
movement to ban intoxicating liquor
• Who supported this movement:
- Employers - create more disciplined labor force
- Urban Reformers - create more orderly city environment & undermine
political machines that used saloons as places to organize
- Women - reduce domestic abuse & save money spent at saloons
• State Campaigns led the movement with success in 18 south and midwestern states by 1915
• 18th Amendment - 1919
Video (3:19) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiYqFXmVAFg
•
http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol/Controversies/The-Eighteenth-Amendment.html#.UvrKQlfNuM8
Map 19.5 Prohibition, 1915
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
The War at Home
Liberty in Wartime:
What is the balance between security and liberty?
WWI repressed civil liberties
• Restriction on Freedom of Speech (1st Amendment):
- Espionage Act (1917) - prohibit spying
- interfering w/ the draft
- "false statements" that hinder military success
- Sedition Act (1918) - prohibit spoken or printed statements
that criticize the government or the war effort
• Eugene V. Debs: arrested for anti-war speech
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/peopleevents/p_debs.html
•
VIDEO (3:19): Espionage and Sedition Act, Palmer Raids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq97oBAu5nY
•
Patriotism:
state governments and private groups enforced extreme measures of repression
Flags:
- Kiss the Flag - prove loyalty
- Red and Black Flags banned - represent communism and anarchism
https://flagspot.net/flags/su.html
https://flagspot.net/flags/qt-a_%28a%29.html
•
"Critical Syndicalism" outlawed in 23 states - advocacy of unlawful acts for political
change
•
Teachers required to sign loyalty oaths & classes endorse patriotism
•
American Protective League (APL) - assist Justice Dept. identify radicals and critics
of war
http://library.sewanee.edu/content.php?pid=518030&sid=4262506
- Spy on Neighbors
- Slacker Raids - thousands stopped to show draft card
•
IWW crushed - labor strikes suppressed by government and employers
- Bisbee, AZ (1917)- 1,200 strikers from copper mines forced into railroad boxcars and
abandoned in the desert
- Butte, MT (1917) - Frank Little (IWW leader) lynched
- IWW offices all over country raided by federal agents, arrest 100's of leaders
Who Is an American?
The “Race Problem”
•
Progressivism anticipated in many ways major twentieth-century developments,
including the New Deal, the Great Society, and the socially active state. But by
accepting “race” as a permanent and defining characteristic of individuals and groups,
Progressives were more like nineteenth-century thinkers than twentieth-century
liberals.
•
What was called the “race problem” was a major subject of debate before World War
I, and it referred to more than just relations between blacks and whites. In 1911, the
U.S. Immigration Commission listed in one of its publications forty-five different
immigrant “races,” each with its own alleged innate characteristics, ranging from
Anglo-Saxons at the top of the racial hierarchy down to Hebrews, Northern Italians,
and at the bottom, southern Italians—those apparently most violent, undisciplined,
and incapable of assimilation. Popular writers asserted that the wave of new
immigration and white women’s declining birthrate threatened American civilization.
The new science of eugenics, the study of the alleged mental traits of different races,
lent scientific legitimacy to the new nativism.
Who Is an American?
Americanization and Pluralism
•
The nationalization of politics and the economy seemed to elevate consciousness of ethnic and
racial difference and caused some to call for “Americanization”—the creation of a more
homogenous national culture. A 1908 play, The Melting Pot, gave a popular name to the process
by which immigrants were expected to merge their identity with American nationality. Public and
private leaders, including teachers, employers, union leaders, social reformers, and public officials
all engaged in Americanization efforts. The Ford Motor Company famously created a sociological
department that entered immigrant workers’ homes to examine their clothes, furniture, and food,
enrolled them in English-language courses, and fired those who failed to Americanize themselves.
A few Progressives criticized Americanization and demanded that Americans respect immigrant
cultures. Reformers at Hull House encouraged immigrants to value their European backgrounds,
and Randolph Bourne wrote in a 1916 essay, “Trans-National America” that there was “no
distinctive American culture.”
The Anti-German Crusade
•
Americanization efforts took on a new urgency and became more extreme during World War I,
and it especially affected German-Americans, who numbered 9 million by 1914. Before the war,
many American admired German culture, including its music, literature, and philosophy. But when
America declared war, the German language and German culture became a target of pro-war
organizations. German was banned in schools, German music was banned in many communities,
and German terms became Americanized (“hamburger” became “liberty sandwich”). By 1920,
German culture had been stigmatized and had receded from its previous prominence.
Who Is an American?
Toward Immigration Restriction
•
Even while Americanization efforts sought to assimilate immigrants, the war reinforced the idea that certain kinds
of undesirables ought to be excluded from the country. Some argued that the new immigrants appreciated
democracy less than Anglo-Saxons, as they seemed more likely to embrace radical doctrines like socialism and
anarchism, while others argued that immigrants’ and blacks’ lower scores on “intelligence quotient” (IQ) scores,
invented in 1916 for examining army recruits, required restrictions. In 1917, Congress, over Wilson’s veto, required
that immigrants be literate in English or another language. Ten years later, the Supreme Court upheld laws
authorizing doctors to sterilize the mentally ill to prevent them from reproducing; “three generations of imbeciles
are enough,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Groups Apart: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and
Asian-Americans
•
Americanization assumed that European immigrants, and especially their children, could eventually adjust to
American life, adopt American ideals, and become citizens who enjoyed America’s freedoms. This assumption did
not apply to non-white immigrants or blacks, who faced persistent exclusion. Wartime labor demands increased
the immigration of Mexicans, who were exempted from 1917 literacy rules. But though Mexicans were legally
considered white, state and local officials in the Southwest discriminated against Mexicans in a system of
segregation that affected schools, hospitals, and theaters, not unlike Jim Crow in the South. Although Puerto
Ricans were conferred citizenship by Congress on the eve of World War I, and Puerto Rican men became subject
to the draft and served in the war, Puerto Ricans were still not allowed to vote for president or have representation
in Congress. Most restrictive were policies toward Asian-Americans. In 1907, Roosevelt negotiated a Gentlemen’s
Agreement in which Japan agreed to end further Japanese migration, except for the wives and children of men
already in the country. In 1913, California banned all aliens incapable of becoming naturalized citizens (e.g.,
Asians) from owning or leasing land.
Who Is an American?
The Color Line
•
African-Americans, members of the larges non-white group in America, were
excluded from almost all Progressive ideas of freedom. They were disenfranchised in
the South, barred from most unions and skilled jobs, most black women worked
outside of the home for low wages in jobs not covered by new state-level protections
for working women, and most blacks, who were desperately poor, could not
participate in the new consumer economy. Nearly all Progressive intellectuals, social
scientists, labor reformers, and suffrage advocates were unconcerned by conditions
facing black Americans.
Roosevelt, Wilson, and Race
•
The Progressive presidents shared dominant racial attitudes regarding blacks.
Theodore Roosevelt’s celebration of Anglo-Saxon supremacy led him to call Indians
savages and state that blacks were unfit to exercise the suffrage. Not even Jane
Addams, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), resisted the abandonment of a civil rights plank in the 1912
Progressive Party platform. Woodrow Wilson, a Virginia native, celebrated the
South’s “genuine representative government.” He imposed racial segregation in
federal agencies in Washington, D.C., fired black federal employees, and screened at
the White House the premier of Birth of a Nation, a film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as
having defended white civilization during Reconstruction.
Who Is an American?
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Revival of Black Protest
•
Black leaders in this period tried to renew America’s Reconstruction-era commitment to racial
equality. No other leader did more to renew the movement for black freedom than scholar and
activist W. E. B. Du Bois, a Massachusetts native and Harvard graduate. In his book, The Souls of
Black Folk (1903), he called on blacks to reject the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington.
Du Bois believed that educated African-Americans like himself were a “talented tenth” who could
use their education and talent to fight inequality. In 1905, Du Bois gathered black leaders at
Niagara Falls in Canada and launched the Niagara movement, which demanded the restoration of
black rights to vote, an end to segregation, and complete equality in economic and educational
opportunities—the agenda of black struggles for racial justice for the rest of the twentieth century.
In 1909, Du Bois joined with mostly white reformers to organize the NAACP, which launched a
legal strategy to win the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that at first
accomplished little.
Closing Ranks
•
Among black Americans, wartime talk of freedom sparked hopes for radical changes in race
relations. Most black leaders saw American participation in the war as an opportunity to win
freedom for blacks at home. Du Bois himself called on African-Americans to “close ranks” and
enlist in the army, believing that blacks’ sacrifices would earn them rights upon returning to
America. But this did not happen, as the navy barred blacks entirely and the segregated army
assigned most of the 400,000 black soldiers who served to supply units rather than combat.
Who Is an American?
The Great Migration and the “Promised Land”
•
•
•
The war sparked social changes that transformed American race relations. Increased war production and a sharp
decline in European immigration made available thousands of industrial jobs to blacks for the first time, inspiring a
mass migration from South to North. When the war began, 90 percent of American blacks lived in the South, and
most northern cities had small black populations. Between 1910 and 1920, half a million blacks left the South,
moving to large cities like New York and Chicago and smaller cities such as Akron, Buffalo, and Trenton. The
desire for work and higher wages, education, an escape from the threat of violence, and the vote motivated
African-Americans to migrate. Yet these migrants encountered considerable disappointments, including limited
employment opportunities, exclusion from unions, housing segregation, and outbreaks of violence.
Racial Violence, North and South
Dozens of blacks were killed in a 1917 riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, where blacks had been recruited to weaken
unions. In 1919, more than 250 people died in riots in northern cities, most notably in Chicago. But racial violence
also exploded in the South where, in the year after the war, dozens were lynched, including black veterans who
wore their uniforms, and striking black sharecroppers were massacred by white vigilantes. The worst race riot in
American history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, where more than 300 blacks were killed and thousands
made homeless by a white mob including police and National Guard, after black veterans tried to prevent the
lynching of a youth who had accidentally tripped and fallen on a white female elevator operator, sparking rumors of
rape.
The Rise of Garveyism
Racial violence during the war inspired a new spirit of militancy among African-Americans. In northern cities, many
blacks supported the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a movement for African independence and black
self-reliance launched by Marcus Garvey, a recent immigrant from Jamaica. The Garveyites’ idea of freedom was
self-determination for blacks, who should enjoy the same international recognition as a nation as other peoples
after the war. While Du Bois and other black leaders viewed Garvey as a dangerous demagogue and welcomed
Garvey’s deportation after his conviction for mail fraud, the Garveyite movement demonstrated blacks’ sense of
betrayal in the postwar period.
1919
A Worldwide Upsurge
•
Fervent hopes for social change and disappointment with the war’s aftermath went beyond the
black community. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union as Russia was
renamed after the revolution, Lenin’s government nationalized landholdings, banks, and factories,
and was proclaimed a workers’ state. The Russian revolution and democratic longings unleashed
by World War I sent hope and fear throughout the world. The year 1919, like 1848 and 1968, was
a year of global social and political unrest. Inspired by Lenin’s call for revolution, communist-led
governments came to power in Bavaria (part of Germany and Hungary), and general strikes
demanding wartime promises of “industrial democracy” shook Belfast, Glasgow, and Winnipeg.
Anarchist peasants seized land in Spain, and Indian crowds challenged British imperial rule, as
did nationalist movements in other European colonies.
•
Opponents to change mobilized, including the allied powers, who saw the Soviet government as a
threat, and sent expeditionary forces that included American troops to aid Lenin’s opponents in
the Russian civil war. Wilson’s policy toward the Soviet Union showed the contradictions of liberal
internationalism. Wilson wanted to foster trade with the new government, but his fear of
communism as a source of international instability and a danger to private property led him to
military intervention. The Allies did not invite the Soviets to peace talks at Versailles, and Wilson
refused to recognize the Soviet government. Anti-communism remained a basic feature of
twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy.
•
Upheaval in America
1919 also saw enormous turmoil in America. Amid racial violence and a devastating flu epidemic,
a bombing campaign targeted the homes of prominent Americans. More significant was an
upsurge in the labor movement, as workers took Wilson’s promises of industrial democracy and
freedom seriously. In 1919, more than 4 million workers went on strike—the greatest wave of
labor unrest in U.S. history. They faced an unprecedented mobilization of employers, government,
and private patriotic organizations. The strike wave began in a January in Seattle, where a
shipyard workers’ strike became a general strike that paralyzed the city. In September, Boston
police went on strike, and Governor Calvin Coolidge fired the entire force and called out the
National Guard. A massive coal strike was ended only by a federal injunction.
1919
The Great Steel Strike
•
The 1919 steel strike was the era’s greatest labor revolt. Centered in Chicago, it brought together
365,000 mostly immigrant workers who demanded union recognition, higher wages, and an eighthour workday in an industry that arbitrarily treated workers and suppressed all union activity.
During the war, large numbers of workers joined the steel workers’ union, and by the end of 1918
they had won the eight-hour day. But employers resumed opposing the union after the war, and
they responded to the strike by appealing to nativism among native-born workers, many of whom
returned to work, and by painting the union and strike as inspired by the IWW, communism, and
disloyalty. Public opinion’s turn against the strikers, along with police attacks, led to the strike’s
defeat in early 1920.
The Red Scare
•
Though many Progressives hoped wartime economic planning would continue after 1918, the
Wilson administration rapidly dismantled agencies that controlled industrial production and the
labor market. Yet the wartime repression of dissent persisted and peaked in the Red Scare of
1919–920, which was inflamed by the postwar strike wave and social tensions and fears caused
by the Russian Revolution. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, certain that the steel strike was
part of a global communist conspiracy, ordered federal raids on radical and labor organizations,
led by the young director of the Radical Division of the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover. More
than 5,000 were arrested, most without warrants, and held for months without charge. The
government deported hundreds of immigrant radicals, including Emma Goldman. This assault on
civil liberties was so extreme that heavy criticism was leveled at Palmer by Congress and the
press, and the scare dissolved. Though it generated a new concern for civil liberties in the 1920s,
the Red Scare successfully destroyed radical groups such as the IWW and Socialist Party.
1919
Wilson at Versailles
Video (3:06) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKzZ1OwPXgk
•
Wilson’s failure to gain a just peace at Versailles based on his Fourteen Points exacerbated many
Progressives’ sense that the war would not fundamentally transform society and government. In
late 1918, Wilson traveled to France for the Versailles peace conference, and was welcomed by
ordinary Europeans as a hero. But while Wilson’s Fourteen Points had called for open diplomacy,
the Versailles talks were held in secret. The Versailles Treaty did accomplish some of Wilson’s
hopes, including the establishment of a League of Nations to supervise a new international order,
and it applied national self-determination to eastern Europe, making new nations from the ruins of
the defeated Austro-Hungarian empire and Germany. But despite Wilson’s opposition to a peace
based on territorial acquisition or revenge, the Versailles Treaty included both, virtually
guaranteeing future conflict. France won the right to occupy iron and coal-rich regions of
Germany, strict limits were imposed on Germany’s future army and navy, and Germany was
required to make reparations payments so high they devastated the German economy.
The Wilsonian Moment
•
The war damaged Europeans’ claims to be a higher civilization with the right to rule lesser
peoples and elevated the international prestige of the United States. Wilson’s language of selfdetermination inspired minority groups and colonial peoples across the world, but they took this
rhetoric more seriously than he did. Wilson’s idea of an equality of nations clashed with European
rulers’ wishes to rebuild their empires in the postwar period. They rejected the appeals of colonial
figures for independence such as Nguyen That Thanh, the future Ho Chi Minh, who went to
Versailles to ask for freedom from French colonial rule. The British and French had no intention of
applying self-determination to their colonies. The Ottoman Empire was divided into nations such
as Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, over which the British and French were given “mandates” to govern.
Former German colonies in Africa were given to South Africa, Australia, and Japan, and Ireland
was not given its independence.
Map 19.6a Europe in 1914
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1919
The Seeds of Wars to Come
•
Widespread disappointment among colonial peoples that the Fourteen Points had not been applied to the nonEuropean world created cynicism regarding the West’s language of freedom and democracy. Wilson’s apparent
capitulation to the claims of European empires sparked popular anti-Western nationalist movements across the
world, including the May 4 movement in China and the communist movement in Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh.
Lenin in fact spoke of “the right of nations to self-determination” before Wilson, and with the end of the Wilsonian
moment, Lenin’s reputation supplanted that of America’s president. These movements, whether or not they were
communist, signaled the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism as a major force in the twentieth century.
Ironically, when colonial peoples demanded to be recognized as independent members of the international
community, they invoked the legacy of the American Revolution as the first colonial struggle to establish an
independent nation and Wilson’s language of self-governing and equal nation-states as the most legitimate form of
government and world order.
•
Wilson, upon returning to the United States from Versailles, saw the League of Nations as the war’s most
important legacy. But many Americans feared that League membership would force the United States into openended commitments in the affairs of other nations. Wilson argued that the United States could not save the world
without being continually involved with it. His opponents, led by Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge,
argued the League would limit America’s freedom of action. Wilson refused to compromise, and in the midst of the
League debate, he suffered a massive stroke that left him incapacitated. His wife Edith effectively assumed his
office for seventeen months. The Senate twice rejected the Versailles Treaty.
The Treaty Debate
•
In the war’s immediate aftermath, the United States retreated from international affairs. Over the long term,
however, Wilson’s idealism and power politics shaped the fundamentals of American foreign policy in the twentieth
century—a commitment to democracy, open markets and trade, and America’s special mission to instruct the
world in freedom, and the will for military intervention abroad to promote American interests and values. But the
war had not made the world safe or democratic, it undermined freedom in the United States, and it led to the
defeat of Progressivism. Republican Warren G. Harding, part of the party’s conservative wing and elected
president in 1920, repudiated “Wilsonism” and promised a “return to normalcy,” thus inaugurating one of the most
conservative decades in the nation’s history.
Additional Art for Chapter 19
A rather aggressive-looking Statue of Liberty
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A Russian advertisement
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The Greatest Department Store on Earth
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The World’s Constable, a cartoon
commenting on Theodore Roosevelt’s
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A 1915 postcard portrays two soldiers—one American
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Wilbur Wright
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The liner Lusitania, pictured on a “peace” postcard.
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A 1916 Wilson campaign truck (a new development in
political campaigning)
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World War I was the first war in which soldiers
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A poster addressed to Jewish immigrants by the
U.S. Food Administration proclaims
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A female figure wearing a cap of liberty rings the liberty
bell in this patriotic illustration from 1918.
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A vivid example of the anti-German propaganda
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Women during World War I
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A 1915 cartoon showing the western states where women
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The Liberty Bell, formed by 25,000 soldiers at Camp Dix
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A 1917 antiwar cartoon from the radical magazine
The Masses depicts an editor
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A long line of striking miners being led out of Bisbee
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An Americanization Celebration.
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Graduates of the Ford English School
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A 1919 Americanization pageant in Milwaukee
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A 1919 cartoon, Close the Gate
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A cartoon from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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W. E. B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP and
editor of its magazine
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A 1918 poster celebrates black soldiers in World War I
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Table 19.1 The Great Migration
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The silent parade down Fifth Avenue
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An advertisement placed by a steel company in a Pittsburgh
Newspaper announces
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Local police with literature seized from a Communist
Party office in Cambridge
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Part of the crowd that greeted President
Woodrow Wilson in November 1918
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Map 19.6b Europe in 1919
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Mahatma Ghandi, pictured here in 1919
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Interrupting the Ceremony, a 1918 cartoon from
the Chicago Tribune
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Norton Lecture Slides
Independent and Employee-Owned
This concludes the Norton Lecture Slides
Slide Set for Chapter 19
Give Me Liberty!
AN AMERICAN HISTORY
THIRD EDITION
by
Eric Foner