ush 1920s + ww1

throughout the nineteenth century, the Atlantic Ocean had protected America from wars fought in Europe. During the early twentieth century, however, the nation's global isolation ended. Ever-expanding world trade entwined U.S. interests with the international economy. In addition, the development of steam-powered ships and submarines meant that foreign navies could directly threaten U.S. security. At the same time, the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 brought to the White House a self-righteous moralist determined to impose his standards on what he saw as renegade nations. This made the startling outbreak of the "Great War" in Europe in 1914 a profound crisis for the United States. The First World War would become the defining event of the early twentieth century. For almost three years, President Wilson maintained America's stance of "neutrality" toward the war while providing increasing amounts of food and supplies to Great Britain and France. In 1917, however, German submarine attacks on U.S. ships forced Congress to declare war. Once America entered the war, almost 5 million men joined the military, including 400,000 African Americans and 150,000 Hispanics, mostly Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. A quarter of the draftees in 1918 were recent immigrants, including Germans who still spoke their native language. Immigrants continued to view military service as a pathway to citizenship and respect. Overall, U.S. soldiers spoke forty-nine languages. During one battle in France, German troops close enough to hear American soldiers talking to one another assumed they were Italians. They were instead Italian immigrants from Manhattan. The departure of so many men from civilian life opened new jobs for men and women. Recruited by businesses and lured by the prospect of higher-paying jobs, some 1.6 million - mostly rural African Americans — moved to cities outside the South to work in defense industries in what was called the Great Migration. Blacks were eager to escape the violent racism and rigid Jim Crow segregation they endured in the southern states. The Great War was so vast and destructive that it transformed the course of modern history, redrawing the map of Europe and elevating the United States to great power status. It also introduced a brutal new era in which advances in military firepower, especially submarines, machine guns, massive cannons, tanks, and warplanes, greatly increased the number of killed and wounded.

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1914 The Great War (World War I) begins 

1915 The British liner Lusitania is torpedoed by a German U-boat; 128 Americans are killed 

1916 Congress passed the National Defense Act and the Revenue Act 

Feb. 1917 Germany announces unrestricted submarine warfare 

March 1917 Zimmermann telegram 

April 1917 US enters the great war (WW1)

Nov. 1917 bolshevik revolution in russia 

Jan. 1918 Wilson delivers his 14 points 

Nov. 11, 1918; pease armistice signed 

1919 Paris Peace Conference convenes Germany signs the Treaty of Versailles Race riots during the Red Summer

1919-1920 First Red Scare and Boston police strikers fired 

1920 Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles Nineteenth Amendment is ratified

In 1914, a system of military alliances divided Europe in two. Britain, France, and the Russian Empire had formed the Triple Entente, later called the Allied Powers. The Triple Alliance (Central Powers) was composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey (the Ottoman Empire). Italy would switch sides in 1915 and join the Allied Powers. In the summer of 1914, the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Serbian nationalist triggered a chain reaction involving these alliances that erupted into the Great War. On the Western Front, troops primarily engaged in trench warfare. New weapons such as machine guns, long-range artillery, and poison gas resulted in unprecedented casualties. The Wilson administration initially declared the United States neutral but allowed American businesses to extend loans to the Allies. Americans were outraged by the German U-boat warfare, especially after the 1915 sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania. In 1917, the publication of the Zimmermann telegram led the United States to enter the Great War. • Mobilizing a Nation for War The Wilson administration drafted millions of young men and created new agencies, such as the War Industries Board and the Food Administration, to coordinate industrial and agricultural production. As White workers left their factory jobs to join the army, hundreds of thousands of African Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North, a massive relocation known as the Great Migration. Many southern Whites and Mexican Americans also migrated to industrial centers. One million women worked in defense industries. The federal government severely curtailed civil liberties during the war. The Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 criminalized public opposition to the war. • The American Role in the War In 1918, the arrival of millions of fresh American troops turned the tide of the war, rolling back a final desperate German offensive. German leaders sued for peace, and an armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. Woodrow Wilson insisted that the United States entered the war to help ensure a new, more democratic Europe. His Fourteen Points (1918) speech outlined his ideas for smaller, ethnically based nation-states to replace the empires. A League of Nations, he believed, would promote peaceful resolutions to future conflicts.

at the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson was only partially successful in achieving his goals. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) did create the League of Nations but included a war guilt clause that forced Germany to pay massive reparations for war damages to France and Britain. In the United States, the fight for Senate ratification of the treaty pitted supporters against those who feared that involvement in a league of nations would hinder domestic reforms and require U.S. participation in future wars. Wilson's refusal to compromise and the alienation of Republican senators resulted in the failure of Senate ratification. • Stumbling from War to Peace The Bolsheviks established a Communist regime in the old Russian Empire in 1917. The German and Austro-Hungarian Empires were dismantled and replaced by smaller nation-states. The "war guilt" clause fostered German bitterness and contributed to the subsequent rise of the Nazis. The United States struggled with its new status as the leading world power and with changes at home. As wartime industries shifted to peacetime production, wartime wage and price controls were ended, and millions of former soldiers reentered the workforce. Unemployment rose and consumer prices increased, provoking labor unrest in many cities. Many Americans believed the labor strikes were part of a Bolshevik plot to gain power in the United States. Several incidents of domestic terrorism fueled these fears and provoked the First Red Scare (1919-1920). Race riots broke out as resentful White mobs tried to stop African Americans from exercising their civil rights. The summer of 1919 also saw the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment; ratified in 1920, it gave women throughout the country the right to vote.

During the Great Migration, many African Americans in the South migrated to northern cities in quest of jols related to the war effort. In Harlem, a densely populated neighborhood of northern Manhattan in New York City, a vibrant African American cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance emerged in the 1920s.

the 1920s' most iconic labels—the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties-describe a period that was, as a writer in the New York Times declared in 1923, "the greatest era of transition the human race has ever known. Old institutions are crumbling, old ideals are being battered into dust; the shock of the most cataclysmic war in history has left the world more disorganized than ever." The twenties experienced an economic boom fueled by the impact of transformational technologies (automobiles, trucks, tractors, airplanes, radios, movies, electrical appliances, indoor plumbing) that enhanced the standard of living for most Americans. Between 1922 and 1927, the nation's economic output grew by an astounding 7 percent a year. At the same time, significant social and political changes signaled what many called a "New Era" in American life. The Eighteenth Amendment (1919) outlawed the production and sale of alcoholic beverages ("Prohibition"), but many Americans defied the law. By some accounts, more people drank, and drank more, than before the ban. The seventy-year struggle for women's suffrage finally ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), which allowed women to vote (although most African American women—and men—in the South were prevented from doing so). During the twenties, women claimed many freedoms previously limited to men.

Another disruptive force resulted from startling new scientific theories developed by physicist Albert Einstein and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Their findings undermined many traditional assumptions about God, the universe, and human behavior. Such new ideas and sweeping social changes created what one historian called a "nervous generation" of Americans "groping for what certainty they could find." Mabel Dodge Luhan, a leading promoter of modern art and literature, said that the literary and artistic rebels who emerged during the Great War were determined to overthrow "the old order of things." Much of the cultural conflict grew out of tensions between rural and urban ways of life and notions of morality. For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas. While urban economies prospered, farmers suffered as Europe no longer needed record amounts of wheat, corn, and cotton. Depressed crop prices spurred 4 million people to move from farms to cities, bringing their different cultural values with them. Given this population shift and the nation's growing ethnic and religious diversity, fights erupted over evolutionary theory, Prohibition, and other charged issues.

Both major political parties still included "progressive" wings, but they were shrinking. Woodrow Wilson's losing fight over the Treaty of Versailles, coupled with his administration's savage crackdown on dissenters and socialists during and after the war, had weakened an already fragmented progressive movement. As reformer Amos Pinchot bitterly observed, Wilson had "put his enemies in office and his friends in jail." By 1920, many disheartened progressives had withdrawn from public life. Reformer Jane Addams lamented that the twenties, dominated by a Republican party devoted to the interests of Big Business, were "a period of political and social sag." The desire to restore traditional values and social stability led voters to elect Republican Warren G. Harding president in 1920. He promised to end progressivism and return America to "normalcy." The demand for honest, efficient government and public services remained strong; the impulse for social reform, however, shifted into a drive for moral righteousness and social conformity. In sum, postwar life in America and Europe was fraught with turbulent changes, contradictory impulses, superficial frivolity, and seething tensions.

During the 1920s, the American economy grew at the fastest rate in history, while consumer debt tripled. Innovations in production, advertising, and financing, combined with a jump in the use of electricity, enabled and encouraged millions of Americans to purchase automobiles, radios, and other electrical household appliances. The new consumer culture valued leisure, self-expression, and self-indulgence. More and more Americans purchased national brand-name items from retail chain stores, listened to the same radio shows, and watched the same movies. • The "Jazz Age" New social and cultural movements challenged the traditional order. The carefree attitude of the 1920s, perhaps best represented by the frantic rhythms of jazz music, led writer F. Scott Fitzgerald to call the decade the Jazz Age. Though flappers emerged to challenge gender norms, most women remained full-time housewives or domestic servants. As the Great Migration continued, African Americans in northern cities felt freer to speak out against racial injustice and express pride in their race. The Harlem Renaissance gave voice to African American literature and arts. Racial separatism and Black nationalism grew popular under Marcus Garvev. while the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) made efforts to undo racism through education and legislation. • The Modernist Revolt Many artists and intellectuals were attracted to modernism, which drew upon Einstein's theory of relativity and Freud's psychological explorations. For modernists, the world was no longer governed by reason, but rather something created and expressed through one's highly individual consciousness. To be "modern" meant to break free of tradition, to violate restrictions, and to shock and confuse the public. • The Reactionary Twenties Retaliating against these challenges to convention, various movements fought to uphold their traditional ideas of what America was and how it should remain. In reaction to a renewed surge of immigration after the Great War and the Red Scare, Americans again embraced nativism. The 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti case, which resulted in the conviction and death sentence of two Italian immigrants who were self-professed anarchists, reinforced the fear that immigrants were too often troublemakers. Nativists persuaded Congress to restrict future immigration with the Immigration Act of 1924. A revived Ku Klux Klan gained a large membership and considerable political influence across the nation. Fundamentalist Protestants campaigned against teaching evolution in public schools, arguing instead for the literal truth of the Bible. Their efforts culminated in the 1925 Scopes Trial. Progressive reformers and conservative Protestants supported the nationwide Prohibition of alcoholic beverages that started in 1920. • Republican Resurgence Union membership declined as businesses adopted new anti-labor techniques such as the open shop. Disillusionment with the Great War turned the public against progressivism and in favor of disarmament and isolationism. The Republican Party benefited from this shift in the public mood. Warren G. Harding's call for a return to normalcy brought about his landslide presidential victory in 1920. His administration followed the Mellon Plan, which succeeded in reviving the economy. Despite numerous scandals that plagued the Harding administration, including the Teapot Dome Scandal (1923), the progressive goal of efficiency through better management remained a part of many Republican initiatives, such as the Budget and Accounting Act. 

CHRONOLOGY 1903 Wright Brothers fly first motorized airplane Ford Motor Company is founded 1910 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded 1913 Armory Show brings modern artto America 1916 Marcus Carvey brings Universal Negro Improvement Association to New York 1920 Prohibition begins Warren C. Harding is elected president 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti trial Five-Power Treaty Congress passes Emergency Immigration Act 1923 Teapot Dome Scandal Harding dies

1920 Prohibition begins Warren C. Harding is elected president 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti trial Five-Power Treaty Congress passes Emergency Immigration Act 1923 Teapot Dome Scandal Harding dies 1924 Congress passes Immigration Act Calvin Coolidge is reelected president 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" 1927 Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., makes first solo transatlantic airplane flight Sacco and Vanzetti are executed 1928 Herbert Hoover is elected president