World War I: The Progressive Crusade (1914 – 1920)

Prelude – The Personal Lens: “Brownie” the Doughboy

23-year-old civil engineer from Waterbury, CT, volunteers July 1917 → joins 117th Engineers, 42nd “Rainbow” Division
French tutelage: trench construction, barbed-wire entanglements, machine-gun emplacements
Letters home: equates U.S. cause with “good of humanity”
Combat chronology
• Champagne defensive, spring 1918 – 8 days cost division \approx 6{,}500 casualties (≈ 20 %)
• Saint-Mihiel, 12 Sept 1918 – 3{,}000 U.S. guns fire >1 million rounds; 42nd loses \approx 1{,}200 more
• Meuse–Argonne – poison-gas saturation “so thick you could cut it”; Brownie gassed → recuperates when armistice signed 11 Nov 1918
Post-war: marries Martha Johnson; emblematic of national desire to “get on with life”

Woodrow Wilson’s Foreign-Policy Agenda

Initial focus domestic; campaign 1912 barely mentioned foreign affairs
Progressive moral vision – U.S. duty to champion
• Peaceful free trade
• National self-determination
• Political democracy – “No selfish ends… no conquest”
Yet willing to wield force → interventions in Western Hemisphere under Monroe Doctrine cloak
• Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic – financial receiverships for U.S. banks
Mexico crisis
• Refuses to recognise General Huerta (“government of butchers”) → April 1914 Marines seize Veracruz to block German arms
• Pancho Villa raids – Jan 1916 train massacre (17 U.S. engineers); Mar raid on Columbus, NM (18 killed)
• Gen. John J. Pershing’s “Punitive Expedition” (12,000 troops, 300-mile chase, 1916-17) – Villa evades capture; Pershing recalled to prep for Europe

Europe’s Slide into War (1914)

Nationalism, imperial rivalries, arms race (esp. German naval challenge to Britain)
Alliance systems amplify risk
• Triple Alliance = Germany + Austria–Hungary + Italy
• Triple Entente = Britain + France + Russia
Spark: Sarajevo, 28 June 1914 – assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb
→ July Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia
→ Russia mobilises; Germany declares war on Russia & France (3 Aug); Britain on Germany (4 Aug)
→ Japan joins Allies against Germany ⇒ truly global conflict
Human cost: \approx 8.5 million soldiers killed overall

U.S. Neutrality → Belligerency

The Neutral Stance (1914-15)

Wilson: war “engaged no vital American interest” → claims rights of neutral trade; recession concerns
Public sympathies – cultural ties to Britain/France; mixed-immigrant population demands neutrality to avoid domestic strife
British blockade of Germany: U.S. protests but accepts – U.S. exports to Allies ↑ \approx 400\% (food, munitions) → economic recovery
German U-boat response – Feb 1915 unrestricted zone; 7 May 1915 sinking of Lusitania (1,198 dead, 128 Americans)
• Bryan resigns over Wilson’s protest note (predicts collision course)
• Germany issues Arabic & Sussex pledges (1916) → warns before sinking passenger ships

Election 1916 Context

Slogan: “He kept us out of war”; Wilson wins by \,23 electoral-vote margin, \approx 600{,}000 popular

Final Steps to War (1917)

Allies’ purchases = 40\% of their total materiel supplied by U.S.; Wilson permits \text{billions} in private loans despite neutrality rhetoric
31 Jan 1917 – Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare; calculates Britain will starve before U.S. troops arrive
Zimmermann Telegram (25 Feb) – German offer to Mexico: regain {\text{TX, NM, AZ}} if it joins war vs. U.S.
March: 5 U.S. ships sunk, 66 sailors die
2 Apr 1917 Wilson asks for war: “world safe for democracy”, seeks “war without hate”
Congress declaration 6 Apr 1917 (House 373-50; Senate 82-6)

Building & Deploying the American Expeditionary Force (AEF)

Selective Service Act 18 May 1917
• Draft ages 21-30 → later 18-45
• 2.8 million conscripted; 2 million volunteers; total 4.8 million under arms
• Black troops \approx 370{,}000; 64{,}000 conscientious objectors; 3 million evaders
Progressive “moral” training – YMCA, settlement-house veterans, sexual-hygiene lectures
Commander: Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing – “lean, clean, keen”

Battlefield Experience

Trench stalemate, no-man’s-land horrors – Somme (1916): Allies 600{,}000 casualties, Germans 500{,}000 for few miles gained
Segregated service
• White officers warn French not to “spoil” Black soldiers
• 92nd Division & famed 369th Harlem Hellfighters serve with French; 369th in combat 191 days, highest U.S. medal count
U.S. combats 1918
• Cantigny (May), Chateau-Thierry (June) stop German spring offensive
• Belleau Wood – U.S. Marines’ costly assault; German comment on fresh American nerves
• Saint-Mihiel (Sept) – first independent U.S. operation >1 million shells fired
• Meuse–Argonne (Sept-Nov) – >1 million U.S. troops; 4 days = 45{,}000 AEF casualties
Armistice: 11 Nov 1918; Kaiser flees
AEF toll: 112{,}000 dead (½ influenza), 230{,}000 wounded; European losses dwarfed U.S. (e.g., France & Germany >1.4 million each)

Progressive Crusade on the Home Front

War Governance Machinery

War Industries Board (WIB) – Bernard Baruch; coordinates production, standardisation, profits triple
Food Administration – Herbert Hoover; “meatless Mondays”, “wheatless Wednesdays”; high crop prices
Railroad, Fuel, Shipping Boards; National War Labor Policies Board (8-hr day, “living wage”, collective bargaining)
Economic winners: farmers & industrial workers (Figure 22.2 shows industrial wages up; graph 1912-20)

Reform Triumphs

Eighteenth Amendment passed Dec 1917; effective Jan 1 1920 (“Shall the many have food or the few drink?”) – anti-German brewer sentiment
Woman power → Woman Suffrage
• >25,000 women serve in France (½ nurses; others drivers, canteens, “Hello Girls”)
• Domestic labor shortage → women in RR, munitions, clerical; women clerks double 1910-20; >1 million in war industries
• Dual strategy: NAWSA state-by-state + federal amendment; Alice Paul’s radical pickets (“America Is Not a Democracy”) – jail & hunger strikes
• Wilson backs 1918 (“vital to winning war”); Nineteenth Amendment passes 1919, ratified Aug 1920

Propaganda & Repression

Committee on Public Information (CPI) – George Creel; 75,000 “Four-Minute Men”; films, posters demonise “Huns”
Anti-German hysteria: language banned, foods renamed (“liberty cabbage”), lynching of Robert Prager acquitted
Legal crackdown
• Espionage Act 1917, Trading with the Enemy 1917, Sedition 1918 – criminalise “disloyal, scurrilous” speech
• Postmaster Burleson blocks radical mail; ≈1,500 prosecuted
• Eugene V. Debs jailed 10 yrs for anti-war speech
Supreme Court: Schenck v. U.S. 1919 – “clear and present danger” \Rightarrow limitation on free speech

Wilson’s Fight for Peace

Fourteen Points (8 Jan 1918)

1-5: open diplomacy, \text{freedom of seas}, free trade, arms reduction, colonial peoples’ interests
6-13: self-determination for European nationalities
14: League of Nations – collective security “parliament of man”

Paris Peace Conference (Jan-Jun 1919)

Wilson leads U.S. delegation; excludes key Republicans (political blunder)
Allied priorities: punish Germany, reparations >33 billion, disarmament, colonial spoils, naval supremacy
Compromises
• Article 231 “war guilt” on Germany; Rhineland occupation; resource-rich Saar → France (15 yrs)
• New nations: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, etc. → borders fraught with minorities (Lansing worries self-determination “loaded with dynamite”)
• Ottoman empire carved into British/French mandates (Iraq, Palestine, Syria…) – roots of modern conflicts
• Japan denied racial-equality clause; given Shantung leasehold
League of Nations charter adopted – Wilson’s chief satisfaction

Senate Ratification Battle

Opposition camps
• Irreconcilables (≈14 Senators): no entanglements
• Reservationists (Lodge): OK if Congress retains war-making power
Lodge Reservations – e.g., Article X cannot override Congress on troop commitments
Wilson refuses compromise; nationwide speaking tour → stroke 25 Sept 1919; from sickroom instructs Democrats to defeat reservations
Nov 1919 & Mar 1920: treaty defeated (six votes short); U.S. never joins League, weakening it from birth; Wilson wins 1920 Nobel Peace Prize anyway

Demobilisation & Post-war Turbulence

Economic Whiplash

Govt cancels contracts; controls lifted; 3 million veterans flood labor market; unemployment + inflation (1919 prices +75\% over 1913)
Employer offensive vs. eight-hour day & unions → wave of \approx 3{,}600 strikes (4 million workers) 1919
• Seattle General Strike (Feb) – IWW + AFL shut city; branded “Bolshevik”
• Boston Police Strike (Sept) – Gov. Calvin Coolidge: “no right to strike against the public safety” → catapults him to national fame
• Steel Strike (Sept 1919-Jan 1920) – 350,000 workers; industry hires 30,000 strikebreakers, frames strikers as radicals; 18 killed → labour momentum crushed for two decades

The Red Scare (1919-20)

Triggers: Russian Revolution, Comintern 1919, bombs mailed to officials, Wall St. bombing 16 Sept 1920 (38 dead)
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer & young J. Edgar Hoover – Radical Division
• Palmer raids Jan 1920 – 6,000 arrests, 500 deportations (incl. Emma Goldman)
Mob violence: Centralia, WA lynching of Wesley Everett; vigilantes vs. IWW, radicals
Supreme Court backs repression: Schenck, Abrams etc.
Birth of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 1920 – Roger Baldwin: defend “constitutional rights of all”
Public backlash after false May Day 1920 terror warning ⇒ hysteria subsides

Race & Migration

Great Migration (1915-20): \approx 500{,}000 African Americans leave South for industrial North (≈10 % of Southern Black pop.)
• Push: Jim Crow, sharecropping poverty; Pull: war jobs, voting rights
• White backlash → race riots in >20 cities; East St. Louis 1917 (39 killed); 1918 lynchings = 96
Mexican Immigration 1910-20: population 222{,}000 \to 478{,}000; reasons = Mexican Revolution + U.S. labour demand after Chinese Exclusion & wartime cutoff; by 1920 Mexicans = ¾ of CA farm labourers; formation of League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) 1929

Election of 1920 & “Normalcy”

Wilson frames vote as League referendum; Dems: James M. Cox & Franklin D. Roosevelt support internationalism
GOP: Warren G. Harding + Calvin Coolidge promise “not heroics but healing… normalcy” (steady order without excess)
Results: Harding 404/531 electoral; popular vote 16.1 million (60.5 %) vs. Cox 9.2 million; Socialist Eugene Debs from prison wins 919{,}799 (3.4 %)
Mandate for retreat from crusades, beginning of 1920s conservative era

Conclusion – Victory, but at What Cost?

U.S. emerges economic leader; yet pays in lives (112{,}000 dead) and disillusionment
Progressive hopes largely dashed: only suffrage lasts; prohibition soon falters; civil liberties battered
Internationally: Wilson “won the war” militarily, but failure to secure treaty means he “lost the peace”; unresolved ethnic tensions, punitive reparations plant seeds for \text{WWII}