Chapter 22
John J. Pershing
Commander of the American Expeditionary Force that fought in Europe; The first U.S. troops reached France in October 1917. Eventually about 2 million American soldiers served in France as members of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) under General John J. Pershing. Most men of the AEF at first found the war a great adventure. Plucked from towns and farms, they sailed for Europe on crowded freighters; a lucky few traveled on captured German passenger liners. The African-Americans with the AEF in France worked mainly as mess-boys (mealtime aides), laborers, and stevedores (ship-cargo handlers). Although discriminatory, the latter assignments vitally aided the war effort. While most African- American troops served behind the front lines, regiments of the all-black 92nd and 93rd infantry divisions saw action under French command in the Second Battle of the Marne and the Meuse-Argonne campaign near the war's end. France awarded the Croix de Guerre, a military honor, to the entire 369th infantry regiment. Only in death was the AEF integrated, since graves in military cemeteries were not racially segregated.
Espionage Act
Criminalized virtually any antiwar activity; The Espionage Act of June 1917 set fines and prison sentences for a variety of loosely defined antiwar activities; Under the Espionage Act, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson banned socialist periodicals, including The Masses. In January 1919, Congressman elect Victor Berger was convicted for publishing antiwar articles in his socialist newspaper, the Milwaukee Leader. (The Supreme Court reversed Berger's conviction in 1921.) Upton Sinclair protested to President Wilson that no one of Burleson's "childish ignorance" should wield such power. Still, Wilson did little to restrain the Postmaster General's excesses. The 1917 Bolshevik takeover in Russia sharpened the attacks on domestic radicals. In 1919, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Espionage Act convictions of war critics. In Schenck v. United States, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing for a unanimous court, justified such repression in cases where a person's speech posed a "clear and present danger" to the nation. When the war ended, Wilson vetoed a bill repealing the Espionage Act, increasing the likelihood that the miasma of conformity and suspicion would linger into the postwar era.
Sedition Amendment
Curtailed First Amendment rights in criticizing war or government; Wartime intolerance also surfaced in federal laws and official; Wilson's wartime attorney general, Thomas W. Gregory, used these laws to suppress dissent. Opponents of the war should expect no mercy "from an outraged people and an avenging government," he said. Under this sweeping legislation and similar state laws, authorities arrested some fifteen hundred pacifists, socialists, IWW leaders, and other war critics. One socialist, Rose Pastor Stokes, received a tenyear prison sentence (later commuted) for telling an audience, "I am for the people, and the government is for the profiteers." Eugene Debs spent three years in prison for a speech discussing the economic causes of the war.
Selective Service Act
Draft act to raise an army during World War I; Raising an army and imposing order on the War Department posed a daunting challenge. Wilson's secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, skillfully implemented the Selective Service Act, passed in May 1917. Baker cleverly made the first draft registration day a "festival and patriotic occasion." By war's end, more than 24 million men had registered, of whom nearly 3 million were drafted. The army's approach to military training echoed the Progressive Era's moral- control campaigns. The War Department closely monitored recruits' offduty behavior. The Commission on Training Camp Activities presented films, lectures, and posters on the dangers of alcohol and prostitution. Beginning in December 1917, recruits also underwent intelligence testing. Psychologists eager to demonstrate the usefulness of their new field claimed that measuring recruits' "intelligence quotient" (IQ) could help win the war by identifying potential officers and those best suited to handle more specialized assignments. In fact, the tests mostly revealed that recruits lacked formal education and cultural sophistication, while reinforcing racial and ethnic stereotypes.
Warren G. Harding
Elected in 1920; the well-meaning but undistinguished successor to Woodrow Wilson; The confident Republicans, meeting in Chicago, nominated Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio, an amiable politician of little distinction. For vice president, they chose Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge, who had won attention in 1919 with his denunciation of a Boston policemen's strike. Harding's vacuous campaign speeches reminded one critic of "an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea." But his reassuring promise of a return to "normalcy" resonated with many voters, and he won by a landslide. Nearly a million citizens defiantly voted for socialist Eugene Debs, still imprisoned for his earlier antiwar speeches.
Eighteenth Amendment
Established national prohibition to encourage and regulate morality during wartime; When the Eighteenth Amendment establishing national prohibition passed Congress in December 1917, it was widely seen as a war measure. Ratified in 1919, it went into effect on January 1, 1920. Similarly, the war strengthened the Progressive Era antiprostitution campaign. The War Department closed red-light districts near military bases, including New Orleans's famed Storyville. (As Storyville's jazz musicians moved north, jazz reached a national audience.) Meanwhile, "protective bureaus" urged women to uphold standards of sexual morality. In Boston, female social workers hid in the Common after dark to apprehend young women dating soldiers from nearby bases.
Boxer Rebellion
Fanatical Chinese insurgency against Christians and foreigners, defeated by an international force; In 1899, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay asked the major European powers to assure American trading rights in China by opening the ports in their spheres of influence to all countries. The nations gave noncommittal answers, but Hay blithely announced their acceptance of the principle of an "Open Door" to American business in China. Hay's Open Door note showed how commercial considerations were increasingly influencing American foreign policy. It reflected a quest for what has been called "informal empire," in contrast to the formal acquisition of overseas territories. As Hay pursued this effort, a more urgent threat emerged. In 1899, an anti-foreign secret society known as the Harmonious Righteous Fists (called "Boxers" by Western journalists) killed thousands of foreigners and Chinese Christians. In June 1900, the Boxers occupied Beijing (BAY-jing), China's capital, and besieged the district housing the foreign legations. The United States contributed twenty-five hundred soldiers to an international army that marched on Beijing, quashed the Boxer Rebellion, and rescued the occupants of the threatened legations.
Open Door Notes
John Hay's statement of American policy to keep trade open in China; The Boxers' defeat further weakened China's government. Fearing that the regime's collapse would allow European powers to carve up China, John Hay issued a second, more important, series of Open Door notes in 1900. He reaffirmed the principle of open trade in China for all nations and announced America's determination to preserve China's territorial and administrative integrity. In general, China remained open to U.S. business interests and Christian missionaries. In the 1930s, when Japanese expansionism menaced China, Hay's policy helped shape the American response. Along with U.S. economic expansion in China came missionary activity. American Protestant missionaries had come to Asia as early as the 1820s. By 1900, some five thousand U.S. missionaries were active in China, Africa, India, and elsewhere. As they preached their religious message, the missionaries also spread American influence globally and blazed the way for U.S. economic expansion.
WIB
Major federal agency created to regulate wartime production and allocation of materials; The war led to unprecedented government economic oversight and corporate regulation, long advocated by Populists and progressives. The War Industries Board (WIB) was established in 1917 to coordinate military purchasing and ensure production efficiency. President Wilson reorganized the WIB in March 1918 and put the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch (bah-ROOK) in charge. Under Baruch, the WIB allocated raw materials, established production priorities, and induced competing companies to standardize and coordinate their products and processes to save scarce commodities. Meanwhile, the Fuel Administration controlled coal output, regulated fuel prices and consumption, and in March 1918 introduced daylight savings time as a wartime conservation measure; The first U.S. troops reached France in October 1917. Eventually about 2 million American soldiers served in France as members of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) under General John J. Pershing. Most men of the AEF at first found the war a great adventure. Plucked from towns and farms, they sailed for Europe on crowded freighters; a lucky few traveled on captured German passenger liners. The African-Americans with the AEF in France worked mainly as mess-boys (mealtime aides), laborers, and stevedores (ship-cargo handlers). Although discriminatory, the latter assignments vitally aided the war effort. While most African- American troops served behind the front lines, regiments of the all-black 92nd and 93rd infantry divisions saw action under French command in the Second Battle of the Marne and the Meuse-Argonne campaign near the war's end. France awarded the Croix de Guerre, a military honor, to the entire 369th infantry regiment. Only in death was the AEF integrated, since graves in military cemeteries were not racially segregated.
Versailles Peace Conference
Negotiations for a peace settlement in France; the resulting settlement harshly punished Germany, laying the seeds of future conflict; The euphoria faded, however, when the peace conference began on January 18, 1919, at the palace of Versailles (verh-SIGH) near Paris. A Council of Four officiated, comprising the heads of state of the Allied powers: Italy, France, Great Britain, and the United States. (Japan participated as well.) The French and British came to the Versailles Peace Conference determined to punish Germany for their nations' wartime losses. Their vindictive agenda bore little relation to Wilson's liberal vision. As French statesman Georges Clemenceau remarked, "God gave us the Ten Commandments and we broke them. Mr. Wilson has given us the Fourteen Points. We shall see." Differences surfaced quickly. Italy demanded a port on the eastern Adriatic Sea. Japan insisted on keeping the trading rights it had seized from Germany in China. Clemenceau and Lloyd George were obsessed with revenge. At one point, an appalled Wilson threatened to leave the conference.
Influenza Pandemic
Outbreak of illness in 1918 on the heels of the World War I devastation, in which more than a half million Americans died of influenza; Amid battlefield casualties and home-front social changes, the nation in 1918 coped with a global outbreak of influenza, a highly contagious viral infection. The influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide. Originating in Africa, the virus spread from battlefields in France to U.S. military camps, striking Fort Riley, Kansas, in March 1918 and quickly advancing to other bases and the urban population. The flu hit the cities hard. After a September Liberty Loan rally in Philadelphia, doctors reported 635 new influenza cases. Many cities forbade public gatherings. In the worst month, October, influenza killed 195,000 Americans. The total U.S. death toll reached about 550,000, over six times the number of AEF battle deaths in France. Despite the development of a flu vaccine in the 1940s, flu pandemics remained a threat. In 2004, using tissue preserved from two U.S. soldiers who had died of influenza in 1918, scientists successfully synthesized the 1918 virus for research purposes.
Nineteenth Amendment
The amendment granting women the right to vote; ratified in 1920; As the woman-suffrage movement gained momentum, a key victory came in November 1917 when New York voters amended the state constitution to permit women to vote. In Washington, Alice Paul and members of her National Woman's Party (see Chapter 21) picketed the White House. Several protesters were jailed and, when they went on a hunger strike, they were force-fed. Under growing pressure, Wilson declared that women's war service had earned them the right to vote. In 1919, the House and Senate overwhelmingly passed the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote. Ratification followed in 1920. Beyond this victory, however, the war did little to better women's status permanently. Relatively few women actually entered the work force for the first time in 1917-1918; most simply moved to better-paying jobs. As for the women in the AEF, the War Department refused their requests for military rank and benefits. At the war's end, many women lost their jobs to returning veterans. In 1920, the percentage of U.S. women in the paid labor force was actually slightly lower than it had been in 1910.
AEF
The three million American men drafted into a force to fight in Europe during World War I; Some twelve thousand Native Americans served in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). While some reformers eager to preserve Indian culture argued for all-Indian units, military officials integrated Native Americans into the general army. Some observers predicted that the wartime experience would hasten the assimilation of Indians into mainstream American life. In addition, some 16,500 women served directly in the AEF as nurses, telephone operators, canteen workers, and secretaries. Some blacks resisted the draft, especially in the South, but most followed W. E. B. Du Bois's advice urging AfricanAmericans to "close ranks" and support the war. More than 260,000 blacks volunteered or were drafted, and some fifty thousand went to France. However, racism pervaded the military. The navy assigned blacks only to menial positions, and the marines excluded them altogether.
WLB
Wartime agency that encouraged unionization and collective bargaining as a means of avoiding labor discord; Labor reforms advanced as well. The Railroad Administration and the War Labor Board (WLB) pressured factory owners to introduce the eight-hour workday and recognize unions' right to bargain with management. Under these favorable conditions, union membership rose from 2.7 million in 1916 to more than 5 million by 1920. In addition, the Bureau of War Risk Insurance (BWRI) provided direct aid to soldiers' families.
CPI
Wartime propaganda agency established in April 1917; led by journalist George Creel; Posters exhorted citizens to "Fight or Buy Bonds." Parades, rallies, and appearances by movie stars all aided the cause. Patriotic war songs reached a large public through phonograph recordings. Beneath the ballyhoo ran a note of coercion. Only "a friend of Germany," McAdoo warned, would refuse to buy bonds. The balance of the government's war costs came from taxes. Using the power granted it by the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress imposed wartime income taxes that reached 70 percent at the top level. Journalist George Creel headed the key wartime propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information (CPI). While claiming merely to combat rumors with facts, the Creel committee in reality publicized the government's version of events and discredited all who questioned that version. Posters, news releases, advertisements, and movies all trumpeted the government's sanitized version of events. The CPI poured foreign-language publications into the cities to ensure the loyalty of recent immigrants. Creel also organized the "four-minute men": a network of 75,000 speakers throughout the nation who gave patriotic talks to audiences of all kinds. Teachers, writers, religious leaders, and magazine editors overwhelmingly supported the war. These custodians of culture viewed the conflict as a struggle to defend threatened values and standards. Alan Seeger, a young Harvard graduate who volunteered to fight for France in 1916, wrote highly popular poems romanticizing the war. An artillery barrage became "the magnificent orchestra of war." The "sense of being the instrument of Destiny," wrote Seeger, represented the "supreme experience" of combat. He was killed in action in 1916.
Panama Canal
Waterway between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, completed by the United States in 1914; Roosevelt found a willing collaborator in Philippe Bunau-Varilla (fih-LEEP booNAW vah-REE-yuh), an official of the bankrupt French company. Dismayed that his company might lose its $40 million, Bunau-Varilla organized a "revolution" in Panama from a New York hotel room. While his wife stitched a flag, he wrote a declaration of independence and a constitution for the new nation. On November 3, 1903, the "revolution" erupted on schedule, with a U.S. warship anchored offshore. In short order, Bunau-Varilla gained American recognition of the newly hatched nation and signed a treaty guaranteeing the United States a ten-mile-wide strip of land across Panama "in perpetuity" in return for $10 million and an annual payment of $250,000. Roosevelt later summarized the episode: "I took the Canal Zone, and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on, the canal does also." Before completing the canal, the United States first had to conquer yellow fever. After Dr. Walter Reed of the Army Medical Corps recognized the mosquito as its carrier, the army carried out a prodigious drainage project that eradicated the disease-bearing pest. Construction began in 1906, and in August 1914 the first ship sailed through the Panama Canal. The ill feeling generated by Theodore Roosevelt's actions, combined with other instances of U.S. interventionism, would long shadow U.S.-Latin American relations.
Fourteen Points
Wilson's blueprint for a better world; emphasized self-determination; Addressing Congress in January 1918, Wilson summed up U.S. war aims in fourteen points. Eight of these promised the subject peoples of the Austro- Hungarian and Ottoman empires the right of self-determination. A ninth point insisted that imperial disputes should consider the interests of the colonized peoples. The remaining five points offered Wilson's larger postwar vision: a world of free navigation, free trade, reduced armaments, openly negotiated treaties, and "a general association of nations" to resolve conflicts peacefully. The Fourteen Points helped solidify American support for the war, especially among liberals. They seemed proof that America was fighting for noble motives, not selfish aims. In early October 1918, facing defeat, Germany proposed an armistice based on Wilson's Fourteen Points. The British and French hesitated, but when Wilson threatened to negotiate a separate peace, they agreed. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated and a German republic had been proclaimed.
League of Nations
Wilson's plan for an international deliberative body, viewed as necessary to keep the peace; rejected by the U.S. Senate; the United States never joined; Wilson focused on his one shining achievement at Versailles—the creation of a new international organization, the League of Nations. The agreement to establish the League, written into the treaty, embodied Wilson's vision of a new world order of peace and justice. But Wilson's League faced major hurdles. A warning shot came in February 1919 when thirty-nine Republican senators signed a letter rejecting the League in its present form. When Wilson sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification in July 1919, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge bottled it up in the Foreign Relations Committee. To rally popular opinion, Wilson left Washington in September for a national speaking tour. Covering more than nine thousand miles by train, Wilson defended the League before large and friendly audiences. People wept as he described his visits to American war cemeteries in France and sketched his vision of a new world order. But the trip exhausted Wilson, and on October 2 he suffered a stroke that for a time left him near death. He spent the rest of his term mostly in bed or in a wheelchair, a reclusive invalid, his mind clouded, his fragile emotions betraying him into vindictive actions and tearful outbursts. He broke with close advisers and dismissed Secretary of State Lansing, accusing him of disloyalty. In January 1920, his physician advised him to resign, but Wilson refused.