APUSH 29

Underwood Tariff

Underwood Tariff

This tariff provided for a substantial reduction of rates and enacted an unprecedented, graduated federal income tax. By 1917, revenue from the income tax surpassed receipts from the tariff, a gap that has since been vastly widened.

Federal Reserve Act

An act establishing twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks and a Federal Reserve Board, appointed by the president, to regulate banking and create stability on a national scale in the volatile banking sector. The law carried the nation through the financial crises of the First World War of 1914-1918.

Federal Trade Commission Ac

A banner accomplishment of Woodrow Wilson's administration, this law empowered a standing, presidentially appointed commission to investigate illegal business practices in interstate commerce like unlawful competition, false advertising, and mislabeling of goods.

Clayton Anti-Trust Act

Law extending the anti-trust protections of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and exempting labor unions and agricultural organizations from antimonopoly constraints. The act conferred long-overdue benefits on labor.

holding companies

Companies that own part or all of other companies' stock in order to extend monopoly control. Often, a holding company does not produce goods or services of its own but only exists to control other companies. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914 sought to clamp down on these companies when they obstructed competition.

Workingmen's Compensation Act

Passed under Woodrow Wilson, this law granted assistance to federal civil-service employees during periods of disability. It was a precursor to labor-friendly legislation passed during the New Deal.

Adamson Act

This law established an eight-hour day for all employees on trains involved in interstate commerce, with extra pay for overtime. The first federal law regulating the hours of workers in private companies, it was upheld by the Supreme Court in Wilson v. New (1917).

Jones Act

Law according territorial status to the Philippines and promising independence as soon as a "stable government" could be established. The United States did not grant the Philippines independence until July 4, 1946.

Tampico Incident

An arrest of American sailors by the Mexican government that spurred Woodrow Wilson to dispatch the American navy to seize the port of Veracruz in April 1914. Although war was avoided, tensions grew between the United States and Mexico.

Central Powers

Germany and Austria-Hungary, later joined by Turkey and Bulgaria, made up this alliance against the Allies in World War I.

Allies

Great Britain, Russia, and France, later joined by Italy, Japan, and the United States, formed this alliance against the Central Powers in World War I.

U-boats

German submarines, named for the German Unterseeboot, or "undersea boat," proved deadly for Allied ships in the war zone. U-boat attacks played an important role in drawing the United States into the First World War.

Lusitania

A British passenger ship that was sunk by a German U-Boat on May 7, 1915. 128 Americans died. The sinking greatly turned American opinion against the Germans, helping the move towards entering the war.

Zimmermann note

German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmerman had secretly proposed a German-Mexican alliance against the United States. When the note was intercepted and published in March 1917, it caused an uproar that made some Americans more willing to enter the war.

Fourteen Points

Woodrow Wilson's proposal to ensure peace after World War I, calling for an end to secret treaties, widespread arms reduction, national self-determination, and a new league of nations.

Committee on Public Information

A government office during World War I known popularly as the Creel Committee for its chairman George Creel, it was dedicated to winning everyday Americans' support for the war effort. It regularly distributed prowar propaganda and sent out an army of "four-minute men" to rally crowds and deliver "patriotic pep."

Espionage Act

A law prohibiting interference with the draft and other acts of national "disloyalty." Together with the Sedition Act of 1918, which added penalties for abusing the government in writing, it created a climate that was unfriendly to civil liberties.

Schenck v. United States

A Supreme Court decision that upheld the Espionage and Sedition Acts, reasoning that freedom of speech could be curtailed when it posed a "clear and present danger" to the nation.

War Industries Board

Headed by Bernard Baruch, this federal agency coordinated industrial production during World War I, setting production quotas, allocating raw materials, and pushing companies to increase efficiency and eliminate waste. Under the economic mobilization of the War Industries Board, industrial production in the United States increased 20 percent during the war.

Industrial Workers of the World

The IWW, also known as the "Wobblies," was a radical organization that sought to build "one big union" and advocated industrial sabotage in defense of that goal. At its peak in 1923, it could claim 100,000 members and could gain the support of 300,000. The IWW particularly appealed to migratory workers in agriculture and lumbering and to miners, all of whom suffered from horrific working conditions.

general strike

A large-scale work stoppage that typically cuts across industry lines and affects an entire community. In February 1919, such a strike erupted in Seattle, Washington, eventually involving more than 60,000 workers and paralyzing the city for five days. The strike provoked a fierce backlash, as many of its ringleaders were branded as American "Bolsheviks" eager to foment a second Communist Revolution in the United States.

Great Migration

The movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West in two major waves. The first, from World War I until the onset of the Great Depression, brought more than 1.5 million migrants to northern cities. From 1940 to 1970, another 5 million left the South, pushed off the land by the mechanization of cotton farming and lured north and west by hopes for greater economic opportunity and more equitable political participation. After 1970, increasing numbers of African Americans trekked back to the South in what was called the New Great Migration, as new jobs became more plentiful in the South than in the older industrial cities of the North and racial relations improved in the South.

Nineteenth Amendment

This constitutional amendment, finally passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified in 1920, gave women the right to vote over seventy years after the first organized calls for woman's suffrage in Seneca Falls, New York.

Sheppard-Towner Maternity Act

Designed to appeal to new women voters, this act provided federally financed instruction in maternal and infant health care and expanded the role of government in family welfare.

American Expeditionary Force (AEF)

The name given to the U.S. Army force deployed to Europe in World War I commanded by General John J. Pershing and composed mostly of conscripts. Because the United States entered the war so late, by the time the AEF was raised, trained, and deployed, the war was in its last year (1918). Units of the AEF fought at Cantigny in May and at Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood in June; its major engagements were at Saint Mihiel (September 12-15) and the Meuse-Argonne (September 26-November 11).

Battle of Château-Thierry

The first significant engagement of American troops in World War I—and, indeed, in any European war. To weary French soldiers, the American doughboys were an image of fresh and gleaming youth.

Meuse-Argonne Offensive

General John J. ("Black Jack") Pershing led American troops in this effort to cut the German railroad lines supplying the western front. One of the few major battles that Americans participated in during the entire war, it was still under way when the war ended.

League of Nations

A world organization of national governments proposed by President Woodrow Wilson and established by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. It worked to facilitate peaceful international cooperation. Despite emotional appeals by Wilson, isolationists' objections to the League created the major obstacle to American signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Treaty of Versailles

Signed in France's famed palace after six months of tough negotiations, it established the terms of settlement of the First World War between Germany and the Allied and Associated Powers (most notably France, Britain, Italy, and the United States). Article 231, soon dubbed "the war guilt clause," blamed the war on Germany as justification for forcing German disarmament and saddling Germany with heavy reparations payments to the Allied victors. Germans detested the treaty as too harsh, the French feared it was too weak to prevent future aggression, and the U.S. Senate rejected it, largely because it obliged the United States to join the League of Nations.

irreconcilables

Led by Senators William Borah of Idaho and Hiram Johnson of California, this was a hard-core group of militant isolationists who opposed the Wilsonian dream of international cooperation in the League of Nations after World War I. Their efforts played an important part in preventing American participation in the international organization.

Louis D. Brandeis

(1856-1941) A progressive-minded confidant of Woodrow Wilson, Brandeis was the litigator behind Muller v. Oregon. In 1916, Wilson made him the first Jewish American to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Victoriano Huerta

He ruthlessly seized power in Mexico in 1913. President Wilson objected to his murderous methods and refused to extend diplomatic recognition to his government. He abdicated in 1914.

Francisco ("Pancho") Villa

(1877-1923) A combination of bandit and Robin Hood, Villa emerged as a chief rival to Mexican president Carranza and tried to provoke the United States into war by going on a killing spree north of the border in New Mexico. President Wilson dispatched General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing in an attempt to capture Villa, but the expedition ended in defeat for American forces.

Arthur Zimmermann

(1864-1940) German foreign secretary during World War I and author of the infamous "Zimmermann note," which proposed a German-Mexican alliance against the United States.

George Creel

(1876-1953) The young, outspoken, and tactless journalist who was tapped to head the Committee on Public Information, also known as the Creel Committee, during World War I.

Eugene V. Debs

(1855-1926) A tireless socialist leader who organized the American Railway Union in the Pullman Strike in 1894. Debs was later convicted under the World War I's Espionage Act in 1918 and sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary. A frequent presidential candidate on the Socialist party ticket, in 1920 he won more than 900,000 votes campaigning for president from his prison cell.

William D. ("Big Bill") Haywood

(1869-1928) As a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Western Federation of Miners, and the Socialist Party of America, Haywood was one of the most feared American labor radicals. During World War I, he became a special target of anti-leftist legislation.

Herbert C. Hoover

(1874-1964) A Quaker-humanitarian tapped to head the Food Administration during World War I. During the 1920s, he became the secretary of commerce, promoting economic modernization and responsible leadership by business to hold off further expansion of government power. Elected to the presidency in 1928 as a Republican, he soon faced the crisis of the Great Depression, which he tried to combat with the same voluntary efforts and restrained government action that had been his hallmark over the previous decade. He lost the election of 1932 to Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, who advocated a more activist role for the federal government.

Alice Paul

(1885-1977) A leading suffragist, feminist, and antiwar activist. The Quaker-raised Paul worked with the Women's Social and Political Union in Great Britain and the National American Woman Suffrage Association in the United States before cofounding the National Woman's party (NWP) in 1916. The NWP combined militant feminist protest action with controversial opposition to America's involvement in World War I, and in 1923 it launched the movement for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

Henry Cabot Lodge

(1850-1924) A prominent Republican senator from Massachusetts, Lodge was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a persistent thorn in President Wilson's internationalist side when he crusaded against the League of Nations.