Unit 2

The United States, hoping to keep stores of munitions from falling into German hands when Bolshevik Russia quit fighting,

contributed some 5,000 troops to an Allied invasion of northern Russia at Archangel. Wilson likewise sent nearly 10,000 troops to Siberia as part of an Allied expedition, which included more than 70,000 Japanese.

On March 19, 1920, the treaty netted a simple majority but failed to get the necessary two thirds majority by a count of 49 years to 35 nays

even with the reservations tacked on

The Americans, dissatisfied with merely bolstering the British and French,

had meanwhile been demanding a separate army.

In exchange for dropping its demands for the Rhineland, France got the Security Treaty,

in which both Britain and America pledged to come to its aid in the event of another German invasion.

red scare

A social/political movement designed to prevent a socialist/communist/radical movement in this country by finding "radicals," incarcerating them, deporting them, and subverting their activities

lots of people went

against him

arsenal

Storage site for weapons

Fire-and-brimstone evangelist Billy Sunday struck a responsive chord when he described a Bolshevik as

"a guy with a face like a porcupine and a breath that would scare a pole cat. . . . If I had my way, I'd fill the jails so full of them that their feet would stick out the window."

General John J. ("Black Jack") Pershing

was finally assigned a front of eighty-five miles, stretching northwestward from the Swiss border to meet the French lines.

The French later felt betrayed when this pact was quickly pigeonholed by the U.S. Senate,

which shied away from all entangling alliances.

Violence was done to traditional American concepts of free speech as IWW members and other radicals were vigorously prosecuted.

. The hysteria went so far that in 1920 five members of the New York legislature, all lawfully elected, were denied their seats simply because they were Socialists.

Rabid Hun-haters, regarding the pact as not harsh enough, voiced their discontent.

German-Americans, Italian-Americans, and other "hyphenated" Americans were aroused because the peace settlement was not sufficiently favorable to their native lands.

Upstanding Americans jumped to the conclusion that labor troubles were fomented by bomb-and-whisker Bolsheviks.

A general strike in Seattle in 1919, though modest in its demands and orderly in its methods, prompted a call from the mayor for federal troops to head off "the anarchy of Russia."

Senator Lodge and other critics were especially alarmed by Article X of the League because it morally bound the United States to aid any member victimized by external aggression.

A jealous Congress wanted to reserve for itself the constitutional war-declaring power.

battle of the marne

A major French victory against the invading German army at the start of WWI. In reality lost Germany the war.

referendum

A state-level method of direct legislation that gives voters a chance to approve or disapprove proposed legislation or a proposed constitutional amendment.

The senator's mind, quipped one critic, was like the soil of his native New England: "naturally barren but highly cultivated." Wilson loathed him, and the feeling was hotly reciprocated.

An accomplished author, Lodge had been known as the "scholar in politics" until Wilson came on the scene. The two men were at daggers drawn, personally and politically

Wilson's decision to go in person to Paris to help make the peace infuriated Republicans.

At that time no president had traveled to Europe, and Wilson's journey looked to his critics like flamboyant grandstanding.

The big "red scare" of 1919-1920 resulted in a nationwide crusade against left-wingers whose Americanism was suspect.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who "saw red" too easily, earned the title of the "Fighting Quaker" by his excess of zeal in rounding up suspects.

This was a historic moment—the first significant engagement of American troops in a European war.

Battle-fatigued French soldiers watched incredulously as the roads filled with endless truckloads of American doughboys, singing New World songs at the top of their voices, a seemingly inexhaustible flood of fresh and gleaming youth. With their arrival it was clear that a new American giant had arisen in the West to replace the dying Russian titan in the East.

Wilson had never been robust;

But he declared that he was willing to die, like the soldiers he had sent into battle, for the sake of the new world order.

He was keenly aware of some of the injustices that had been forced into the treaty.

But he was hoping that the League of Nations—a potent League with America as a leader—would iron out the inequities.

Woodrow Wilson, the great prophet arisen in the West, received tumultuous welcomes from the masses of France, England, and Italy late in 1918 and early in 1919. They saw in his idealism the promise of a better world.

But the statesmen of France and Italy were careful to keep the new messiah at arm's length from worshipful crowds. He might so arouse the people as to prompt them to overthrow their leaders and upset finespun imperialistic plans. - cautious

These antired statutes, some of which were born of the war, made unlawful the mere advocacy of violence to secure social change.

Critics protested that mere words were not criminal deeds, that there was a great gulf between throwing fits and throwing bombs, and that "free screech" was for the nasty as well as the nice

Nor were the isolationists Wilson's only problem

Critics showered the Treaty of Versailles with abuse from all sides.

Yet the loudly condemned treaty had much to commend it.

Disappointing though Wilson's handiwork was, he saved the pact from being an old-time peace of grasping imperialism. His critics to the contrary, the settlement was almost certainly a fairer one because he had gone to Paris

comrade

Friend; ally; partner

With newly enfranchised women swelling the vote totals, Harding was swept into power with a prodigious plurality of over 7 million votes

Eugene V. Debs, federal prisoner number 9653 at the Atlanta Penitentiary, rolled up the largest vote ever for the left-wing Socialist party

Speed was urgent when the conference opened on January 18, 1919.

Europe seemed to be slipping into anarchy; the red tide of communism was licking westward from Bolshevist Russia.

What part would he now play in shaping the peace?

Expectations ran extravagantly high. As the fighting in Europe crashed to a close, the American president towered at the peak of his popularity and power.

As soon as Wilson was back in Paris, hardheaded Premier Clemenceau pressed French demands for the German-inhabited Rhineland and the Saar Valley, a rich coal area.

Faced with fierce Wilsonian opposition to this violation of self determination, France settled for a compromise whereby the Saar basin would remain under the League of Nations for fifteen years, and then a popular vote would determine its fate.

Wilson then got sick

For more than seven months, he did not meet his cabinet.

the political weathervane began to veer toward genial Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio.

For vice president the party nominated frugal, grim-faced Governor Calvin ("Silent Cal") Coolidge of Massachusetts, who had attracted conservative support by breaking a police strike in Boston.

A completed Treaty of Versailles, after more weeks of wrangling, was handed to the Germans in June 1919

Germany had capitulated on the strength of assurances that it would be granted a peace based on the Fourteen Points.

Berlin's calculations as to American tardiness were surprisingly accurate.

Germany had counted on knocking out Britain six months after the declaration of unlimited submarine warfare, long before America could get into the struggle.

But the maneuver backfired when voters instead returned a narrow Republican majority to Congress.

Having staked his reputation on the outcome, Wilson went to Paris as a diminished leader. Unlike all the parliamentary statesmen at the table, he did not command a legislative majority at home.

Wilson's ultimate goal was a world parliament to be known as the League of Nations, but he first bent his energies to preventing any vengeful parceling out of the former colonies and protectorates of the vanquished powers.

He forced through a compromise between naked imperialism and Wilsonian idealism.

Meanwhile, Wilson had been serving as midwife for the League of Nations

He gained a signal victory over the skeptical Old World diplomats in February 1919, when they agreed to make the League Covenant, Wilson's brainchild, an integral part of the final peace treaty.

Wilson, hating Lodge, saw red at the mere suggestion of the Lodge reservations.

He was quite willing to accept somewhat similar reservations sponsored by his faithful Democratic followers, but he insisted that the Lodge reservations "emasculated" the entire pact.

Ironically enough, General Pershing in some ways depended more on the Allies than they depended on him.

His army purchased more of its supplies in Europe than it shipped from the United States. Fewer than five hundred of Pershing's artillery pieces were of American manufacture. Virtually all his aircraft were provided by the British and French.

At this time—early July 1919—Senator Lodge had no real hope of defeating the Treaty of Versailles.

His strategy was merely to amend it in such a way as to "Americanize," "Republicanize," or "senatorialize" it.

Under the slogan "Politics Is Adjourned," partisan political strife had been kept below the surface during the war crisis.

Hoping to strengthen his hand at the Paris peace table, Wilson broke the truce by personally appealing for a Democratic victory in the congressional elections of November 1918.

Late in December 1919, a shipload of 249 alleged alien radicals was deported on the Buford ("Soviet Ark") to the "workers' paradise" of Russia.

Hysteria was temporarily revived in September 1920, when a still-unexplained bomb blast on Wall Street killed thirty-eight people and wounded several hundred others.

Some people liken the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti to the (similar to) executions during the Salem witch trials in the 17th century. Do you agree with this comparison?

I agree that the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti are similar to the executions during the Salem witch trials in the 17th century because they both involved people who were judged based on their religious and political views and both have been investigated for false accusations. Like Vanzetti at his time, people in the Salem witch trials were accused and punished people for performing an action based on their point of view, "witchcraft".

Various states joined the pack in the outcry against radicals.

In 1919-1920 a number of legislatures, reflecting the anxiety of "solid" citizens, passed criminal syndicalism laws.

Berlin was now ready to hoist the white flag. Warned of imminent defeat by the generals, it turned to the presumably softhearted Wilson in October 1918, seeking a peace based on the Fourteen Points.

In stern responses the president made it clear that the kaiser must be thrown overboard before an armistice could be negotiated.

Returning for the second and final time to America, Wilson sailed straight into a political typhoon.

Isolationists raised a whirlwind of protest against the treaty, especially against Wilson's commitment to usher the United States into his newfangled League of Nations. Invoking the revered advice of Washington and Jefferson, they wanted no part of any "entangling alliance."

The red scare was a godsend to conservative businesspeople, who used it to break the backs of the fledgling unions.

Labor's call for the "closed," or all-union, shop was denounced as "Sovietism in disguise." Employers, in turn, hailed their own antiunion campaign for the "open" shop as "the American plan."

A careful analysis of the treaty shows that only about four of the twenty-three original Wilsonian points and subsequent principles were fully honored.

Loud and bitter cries of betrayal burst from German throats—charges that Adolf Hitler would soon reiterate during his meteoric rise to power.

The boom of the golden twenties showered genuine benefits on Americans, as incomes and living standards rose for many.

New technologies, new consumer products, and new forms of leisure and entertainment made the twenties roar. Yet just beneath the surface lurked widespread anxieties about the future and fears that America was losing sight of its traditional ways.

Late in May 1918, the German juggernaut, smashing to within forty miles of Paris, threatened to knock out France.

Newly arrived American troops, numbering fewer than thirty thousand, were thrown into the breach at ChâteaunThierry, right in the teeth of the German advance.

Antiredism and antiforeignism were reflected in a notorious case regarded by liberals as a "judicial lynching."

Nicola Sacco, a shoe-factory worker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were convicted in 1921 of the murder of a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard. The jury and judge were prejudiced in some degree against the defendants because they were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers.

No really effective American fighting force reached France until about a year after Congress declared war.

No really effective American fighting force reached France until about a year after Congress declared war. Here again the German predictions were not far from the mark, as shipping shortages plagued the Allies.

Russia's collapse underscored the need for haste. The communistic Bolsheviks, after seizing power late in 1917, ultimately withdrew their beaten country from the "capitalistic" war early in 1918.

This sudden defection released hundreds of thousands of battle-tested Germans from the eastern front facing Russia for the western front in France, where, for the first time in the war, they were developing a dangerous superiority in manpower.

Pershing's army undertook the Meuse-Argonne offensive, from September 26 to November 11, 1918.

One objective was to cut the German railroad lines feeding the western front. This battle, the most gargantuan thus far in American history, lasted forty-seven days and engaged 1.2 million American troops. With especially heavy fighting in the rugged Argonne Forest, the killed and wounded mounted to 120,000, or 10 percent of the Americans involved.

Victory was in sight—and fortunately so.

The slowly advancing American armies in France were eating up their supplies so rapidly that they were in grave danger of running short.

Public desire for a change found vent in a resounding repudiation of "high-and-mighty" Wilsonism.

People were tired of professional highbrowism, star-reaching idealism, bothersome dogoodism, moral overstrain, and constant selfsacrifice. Eager to lapse back into "normalcy," they were willing to accept a second-rate president—and they got a third-rate one.

Although the election could not be considered a true referendum, Republican isolationists successfully turned Harding's victory into a death sentence for the League.

Politicians increasingly shunned the League as they would a leper. When the legendary Wilson died in 1924, admirers knelt in the snow outside his Washington home. His "great vision" of a league for peace had perished long before.

Major American purposes were to prevent Japan from getting a stranglehold on Siberia, to rescue some 45,000 marooned Czechoslovak troops, and to snatch military supplies from Bolshevik control.

Sharp fighting at Archangel and in Siberia involved casualties on both sides, including several hundred Americans. The Bolsheviks long resented these "capitalistic" interventions, which they regarded as high-handed efforts to suffocate their infant communist revolution in its cradle.

Bloodied by the war and disillusioned by the peace, Americans turned inward in the 1920s.

Shunning diplomatic commitments to foreign countries, they also denounced "radical" foreign ideas, condemned "un-American" lifestyles, and clanged shut the immigration gates against foreign peoples.

The dreaded German drive on the western front exploded in the spring of 1918.

So dire was the peril that the Allied nations for the first time united under a supreme commander, the quiet French marshal Foch, whose axiom was, "To make war is to attack." Until then the Allies had been fighting imperfectly coordinated actions. At last the ill-trained "Yanks" were coming—and not a moment too soon.

The victors would not take possession of the conquered territory outright, but would receive it as trustees of the League of Nations.

Strategic Syria, for example, was awarded to France, and oilrich Iraq went to Britain. But in practice this halfloaf solution was little more than the old prewar colonialism, thinly disguised

The slow progress and severe losses from machine guns resulted in part from inadequate training, in part from dashing openfield tactics, with the bayonet liberally employed.

Tennessee-bred Alvin C. York, a member of an antiwar religious sect, became a hero when he singlehandedly killed 20 Germans and captured 132 more.

Hysterical fears of red Russia continued to color American thinking for several years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which spawned a tiny Communist party in America.

Tensions were heightened by an epidemic of strikes that convulsed the Republic at war's end, many of them the result of high prices and frustrated union-organizing drives.

Who defeated the treaty?

The Lodge-Wilson personal feud, traditionalism, isolationism, disillusionment, and partisanship all contributed to the confused picture

The United States' main contributions to the ultimate victory had been foodstuffs, munitions, credits, oil for this first mechanized war, and manpower—but not battlefield victories.

The Yanks fought only two major battles, at St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne, both in the last two months of the four-year war, and they were still grinding away in the Meuse-Argonne, well short of their objectives, when the war ended.

Lodge effectively used delay to muddle and divide public opinion.

The bulky pact was bogged down in the Senate, while the nation was drifting into confusion and apathy. He therefore decided to go to the country in a spectacular speechmaking tour. He would appeal over the heads of the Senate to the sovereign people—as he often had in the past.

Liberals and radicals the world over rallied to the defense of the two aliens doomed to die.

The case dragged on for six years until 1927, when the condemned men were electrocuted.

Communists and other radicals were thus presented with two martyrs in the "class struggle," while many American liberals hung their heads.

The evidence against the accused, though damaging, betrayed serious weaknesses. If the trial had been held in an atmosphere less charged with antiredism, the outcome might well have been only a prison term.

Nevertheless, France gradually began to bustle with American doughboys. The first trainees to reach the front were used as replacements in the Allied armies and were generally deployed in quiet sectors with the British and French.

The first trainees to reach the front were used as replacements in the Allied armies and were generally deployed in quiet sectors with the British and French. The newcomers soon made friends with the French girls—or tried to—and one of the most sung-about women in history was the fabled

War-weary Germans, whom Wilson had been trying to turn against their "military masters," took the hint.

The kaiser was forced to flee to Holland, where he lived out his remaining twenty-three years, "unwept, unhonored, and unhung."

He further ruffled Republican feathers when he snubbed the Senate in assembling his peace delegation and neglected to include a single Republican senator in his official party.

The logical choice was the new chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, slender and aristocratically bewhiskered Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, a Harvard Ph.D. But including Lodge would have been problematic for the president.

But the battered Germans were ready to stagger out of the trenches and cry "Kamerad" ("Comrade").

Their allies were deserting them, the British blockade was causing critical food shortages, and the sledgehammer blows of the Allies rained down relentlessly. Propaganda leaflets, containing seductive Wilsonian promises, rained upon their crumbling lines from balloons, shells, and rockets.

Wilson, of course, was guilty of no conscious betrayal. But the Allied powers were torn by conflicting aims, many of them sanctioned by secret treaties.

There had to be compromise at Paris, or there would be no agreement. Faced with hard realities, Wilson was forced to compromise away some of his less cherished Fourteen Points in order to salvage the more precious League of Nations.

Senator Lodge, coldly calculating, was now at the helm. After failing to amend the treaty outright, he finally came up with fourteen formal reservations to it—a sardonic slap at Wilson's Fourteen Points.

These safeguards reserved the rights of the United States under the Monroe Doctrine and the Constitution and otherwise sought to protect American sovereignty.

Irish-Americans, traditional twisters of the British lion's tail, also denounced the League. `

They felt that with the additional votes of the five overseas British dominions, it gave Britain undue influence, and they feared that it could be used to force the United States to crush any rising for Irish independence Crowds of Irish-American zealots hissed and booed Wilson's name.

The exhausted Germans were through.

They laid down their arms at eleven o'clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, and an eerie, numbing silence fell over the western front. War-taut America burst into a delirium of aroundthe-clock rejoicing, as streets were jammed with laughing, whooping, milling, dancing masses. The war to end wars had ended.

These difficulties delighted Wilson's Allied adversaries in Paris.

They were now in a stronger bargaining position because Wilson would have to beg them for changes in the covenant that would safeguard the Monroe Doctrine and other American interests dear to the senators.

Their hard core was composed of a dozen or so militant isolationists, led by senators William Borah of Idaho and Hiram Johnson of California, who were known as "irreconcilables" or "the Battalion of Death."

Thirty-nine Republican senators or senatorselect—enough to defeat the treaty—proclaimed that the Senate would not approve the League of Nations in its existing imperfect form.

By July 1918 the awesome German drive had spent its force, and keyed-up American men participated in a Foch counteroffensive in the Second Battle of the Marne.

This engagement marked the beginning of a German withdrawal that was never effectively reversed. In September 1918 nine American divisions (about 243,000 men) joined four French divisions to push the Germans from the St. Mihiel salient, a German dagger in France's flank.

He proposed to settle the treaty issue in the forthcoming presidential campaign of 1920 by appealing to the people for a "solemn referendum."

This was sheer folly, for a true mandate on the League in the noisy arena of politics was clearly an impossibility.

Certain Republican senators, Lodge in the lead, were sharpening their knives for Wilson.

To them the League was either a useless "sewing circle" or an overpotent "super-state."

3 ) What accusation did Vanzetti make against the prosecuting attorney, Mr. Katzmann?

Vanzetti accused Mr. Katzmann of supporting the juror's prejudice and passion against him and Sacco. This reveals that Vanzetti believes that Mr. Katzmann "agitated" the "passion" of the judge's prejudice of his political views and principles, which affected the decision making of the trial.

Did Vanzetti believe that Judge Thayer had been fair and impartial?

Vanzetti believed that Judge Thayer had not been fair and impartial. This reveals that Vanzetti believes that Judge Thayer is not "impartial or fair" but more "prejudiced and cruel" and made his decisions based more on their political positions than on their actions.

What crimes did Vanzetti maintain that he did not commit?

Vanzetti claims that he is innocent of the Braintree crime and the Bridgewater crime. He claims that he has never stole, killed or robbed in his life.

4 ) Vanzetti said he had suffered for his guilt. What "crimes" did he mention?

Vanzetti mentioned that he had suffered because of his political perspective and nationality. Vanzetti believes that he has fought and sacrificed himself because he is guilty of being the political view and having the nationality that was frowned upon at the time: "I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian. I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself." This makes it clear that Vanzetti has suffered more for his nationality (Italian) and political view (radicalist) and being prejudged based on those qualities than for his actions.

Wilson's next battle was with Italy over Fiume, a valuable seaport inhabited by both Italians and Yugoslavs.

When Italy demanded Fiume, Wilson insisted that the seaport go to Yugoslavia and appealed over the heads of Italy's leaders to the country's masses.

Despite mounting discontent, the president had reason to feel optimistic.

When he brought home the treaty, with the "Wilson League" firmly riveted in as Part I, a strong majority of the people still seemed favorable

The United States, in short, was no arsenal of democracy in this war; that role awaited it in the next global conflict, two decades later.

Wilson Steps Down from Olympus Woodrow Wilson had helped to win the war.

When the day finally came for the voting in the Senate, he sent word to all true Democrats to vote against the treaty with the odious Lodge reservations attached.

Wilson hoped that when these were cleared away, the path would be open for ratification without reservations or with only some mild Democratic ones.

But when the Japanese threatened to walk out

Wilson reluctantly accepted a compromise whereby Japan kept Germany's economic holdings in Shandong and pledged to return the peninsula to China at a later date

The Paris Conference of great and small nations fell into the hands of an inner clique, known as the Big Four.

Wilson, representing the richest and freshest great power, more or less occupied the driver's seat. He was joined by genial Premier Vittorio Orlando of Italy and brilliant Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain. Perhaps the most realistic of the quartet was cynical, hard-bitten Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, the seventy-eight year-old "organizer of victory" known as "the Tiger."

Marshall Foch

a Frenchman who was made supreme commander of the army of the Allied nations in order to better coordinate their actions and strategies. His motto was "To make war is to attack."

It was the prospect of endless U.S. troop reserves, rather than America's actual military performance

that eventually demoralized the Germans.

Loyal Democrats in the Senate, on November 19, 1919, blindly did Wilson's bidding.

they rejected the treaty with the Lodge reservations appended, 55 to 39.

American operations were not confined solely

to France; small detachments fought in Belgium, Italy, and notably Russia.

Another crucial struggle was with Japan over China's Shandong (Shantung) Peninsula and the German islands in the Pacific,

which the Japanese had seized during the war. Japan was conceded the strategic Pacific islands under a League of Nations mandate,* but Wilson staunchly opposed Japanese control of Shandong as a violation of self-determination for its 30 million Chinese residents

The maneuver fell flat. The Italian delegates went home in a huff,

while the Italian masses turned savagely against Wilson.

solumn referendum

wilson thought it could use election of 1920 to get a clear mandate on the treaty (did not work)

treaty

with points and mix with reservations