President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) led the United States to victory in World War I (1914–1918), the first American war fought on European soil, but failed to realize his idealistic goal of creating a durable international peace following the conflict.
Born in Virginia and raised in small towns across the South, Wilson was deeply affected by his boyhood memories of carnage from the Civil War (1861–1865). When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, Wilson initially proclaimed American neutrality. However, the United States entered the war three years later on the side of Great Britain, France, and Italy.
From the beginning, Wilson infused his argument for war with a sense of high moral purpose. The purpose of fighting, he said, was not just to protect American interests but to destroy the old tyrannical empires of Europe and bring freedom to the world. Wilson outlined this vision in his famous Fourteen Points, an idealistic list of goals for the postwar world that included decolonization, disarmament, and the establishment of international bodies to prevent future conflicts.
After the Allied victory, however, those goals proved impossible to realize. At the lengthy treaty negotiations in Paris, many of Wilson’s suggestions were simply ignored by his country’s war allies. Over Wilson’s objections, the Treaty of Paris harshly punished Germany, leading to widespread anger and resentment among the German people.
As a concession to Wilson, the treaty did endorse his cherished idea of an international League of Nations, a forum for countries to air their differences in a peaceful fashion. However, in a cruel twist for Wilson, isolationists in the United States Senate refused to accept the treaty, thus preventing US membership in the League of Nations. Shortly after returning from Paris in 1919, Wilson suffered a stroke. He died not long after departing the White House in 1921.
1. In 1919, Wilson vetoed the act establishing Prohibition, but Congress overrode his veto, and alcohol was banned in the United States between 1920 and 1933.
2. Wilson’s wife, Ellen (1860–1914), died in the middle of Wilson’s first term, in August 1914. He remarried sixteen months later to Edith Bolling Galt (1872–1961).
3. Two US presidents, Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969), served as the president of an Ivy League college before their election to the White House. Wilson led Princeton for eight years, and the university later named an institute at the school after him.
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in the US territory of Hawaii on December 7, 1941, triggered the belated entrance of the United States into World War II (1939–1945). In the short term, the Pearl Harbor bombing was a massive military setback for the United States. Twelve American warships were sunk and many others were badly damaged, and a staggering 2,403 service members lost their lives in the sneak attack. It would take months for the United States military to regroup from Pearl Harbor and begin attacking the Japanese in the Pacific. In the long term, however, the Pearl Harbor bombing was a serious Japanese mistake. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, “One can search military history in vain … for an operation more fatal to the aggressor.”
Prior to the attack, relations between the United States and imperial Japan had deteriorated throughout the 1930s. Japan was ruled by a militaristic elite bent on expanding the nation’s influence throughout Asia, especially in China, which Japanese troops had invaded in 1931. Leading Japanese politicians, including its prime minister, General Hideki Tojo (1884–1948), regarded the United States as an obstacle to Japanese ambitions in the region. The United States, meanwhile, restricted the export of oil and military supplies to Japan. The two countries edged toward war in the summer and fall of 1941.
Although American military officials knew a sneak attack was possible amid worsening relations with Japan, commanders at Pearl Harbor were taken by surprise at 7:55 a.m. on December 7, when the first Japanese warplanes appeared in the skies over Hawaii. Almost immediately, a well-aimed Japanese bomb hit the battleship USS Arizona, causing massive loss of life among its crew. Of the battleships berthed at Pearl Harbor, four were sunk and the rest heavily damaged, dealing a significant blow to the Pacific Fleet. Fortuitously, all three American aircraft carriers in the Pacific were at sea on the morning of the attack and escaped damage.
The national response to Pearl Harbor was overwhelming. Before Pearl Harbor, some Americans still favored neutrality in World War II. But the attack by Japan aroused the public’s wrath, and Americans quickly united behind the war. Cries of “Remember Pearl Harbor” resonated deeply with the American people, who were particularly enraged by the sneaky nature of the bombing.
1. After Pearl Harbor, not only the United States but also a number of Latin American countries declared war on Japan. Together with the British and Soviet empires, the forces arrayed against the Axis powers led by Germany suddenly amounted to roughly half the world’s population.
2. Two of the surviving ships from the Pearl Harbor attack, the Pennsylvania and the Nevada, were later used as test targets for atomic bombs in the waters near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.
3. The Japanese premier who ordered the Pearl Harbor bombing, General Tojo, was captured by the Americans after the war and hanged as a war criminal in 1948.
Ellis Island, located in the middle of New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty, was the gateway to the United States of America for more than twelve million immigrants between 1892 and 1954. At its peak in 1907, the facility handled more than a million new arrivals, most of them immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and eastern Europe. In an era when virtually anyone could become an American citizen—except the Chinese—this massive infusion from Europe changed the face of the United States.
By law, only the poorest immigrants, those who had crossed the Atlantic in the third-class “steerage” section of the ship, were required to go through inspections at Ellis Island. Passengers who could pay for first- or second-class accommodations, officials reasoned, were not expected to cause problems.
For about 98 percent of immigrants, the inspections at Ellis Island were a mere formality, lasting an average of three to five hours. However, a small number were refused entry to the United States for medical reasons or because immigration officials suspected they would become “wards of the state.” These unlucky few were deported back to their home countries, giving Ellis Island its nickname, “Island of Tears.”
The first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the highest levels ever of immigration to the United States and helped create the image of the country as a “nation of immigrants.” The arrival of so many poor immigrants from predominantly Catholic countries, however, also provoked a backlash. In 1924, the US Congress limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and the number of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island plummeted sharply. Ellis Island remained open until 1954, when a Norwegian sailor was the last immigrant processed there. Now a national park, Ellis Island has been partially restored to its former glory, and the public is welcome to visit the Ellis Island Immigration Museum housed in the renovated main building.
1. Ellis Island immigrants included comedian Bob Hope (1903–2003) and director Frank Capra (1897–1991).
2. According to the federal government, more than 40 percent of the current American population is descended from Ellis Island immigrants.
3. The island was named after Samuel Ellis, its owner in the 1770s.
Samuel Gompers (1850–1924), the founder of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), is considered one of the fathers of the American labor movement. A cigar maker by trade, Gompers formed the AFL in 1886 to fight for higher wages, job security, and workplace safety during the Gilded Age. Union organizers in the late nineteenth century had few legal protections and faced considerable hostility, and often violence, from owners, but Gompers successively moved unions into the nation’s economic mainstream and enlisted millions of new workers into the labor movement.
Gompers was born in London, went to work rolling cigars with his father at age ten, and immigrated to New York City with his family at age thirteen. He joined his first union, the United Cigar Workers, in 1864, when only fourteen.
At the time, the American labor movement was still in its formative stages. However, the glaring inequalities of the Gilded Age led to a far more confrontational generation of unionists. Despite the massive wealth created by the Industrial Revolution, wages actually fell throughout the 1870s, and ruthless tycoons like Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) aggressively opposed their workers’ efforts to organize.
Gompers rose through the ranks of the cigar-makers’ union and helped form an umbrella group of unions, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, in 1881. The group was reorganized into the AFL in 1886, and Gompers was elected the first president. The union pushed for higher wages, eight-hour workdays, and legal protection for the right to unionize.
During his nearly forty years at the helm of the AFL, Gompers worked to expand the union while containing the more radical elements in his movement. Gompers opposed violence and was leery of socialism; his perceived moderation led to the creation of several rival unions, including the famous International Workers of the World. By working within the system, Gompers became a force within the Democratic Party, and he was an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) on labor issues during and after World War I (1914–1918). By the time of Gompers’s death, the AFL had three million members—a vast increase from 50,000 in 1886.
1. Gompers played a minor role at the Versailles peace conference that ended World War I, helping to found an international labor group.
2. The AFL merged with the second biggest union umbrella group, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), in 1955.
3. American entrance into World War I divided labor leaders; Gompers supported the war and worked to deliver union support for Wilson’s war effort.
In 1893, a contingent of 162 United States Marines from the USS Boston landed in Hawaii and overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, the local ruler. Five years later, the Pacific archipelago was officially annexed to the United States. The American takeover of Hawaii is often cited as the first major episode of American imperialism and a precursor to the expansionist foreign policy of the United States in the early twentieth century.
Before 1887, Hawaii was ruled by an absolute monarchy based in the Iolani Palace in Honolulu. A revolution in that year, backed by European and American businessmen on the islands, limited the ruler’s powers but left the monarchy intact. Queen Liliuokalani (1838–1917), who inherited the throne after the death of her brother, King Kalakaua (1836–1891), antagonized Europeans and some indigenous Hawaiians by attempting to restore the monarchy’s dictatorial powers.
The exact circumstances of Queen Liliuokalani’s overthrow on January 17, 1893, are disputed. However, a congressional investigation launched later that year concluded that the American ambassador to Hawaii, John L. Stevens (1820–1895), had improperly summoned the marines into a sovereign country and forced the queen to abdicate. US President Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), who opposed the annexation of Hawaii and was more sympathetic to native rights than many of his contemporaries, proposed a compromise that would put the queen back on her throne in exchange for amnesty for the coup planners. Liliuokalani wanted the plotters executed and refused the offer.
With the archipelago’s status in limbo, a Republic of Hawaii was formed the next year. In 1896, a pro-annexation candidate, William McKinley (1843–1901), was elected to the White House. With Cleveland out of the way, the islands were annexed as a United States possession in 1898. Hawaii became a US territory in 1900 and then a US state in 1959. In a 1993 resolution on the 100th anniversary of the coup, the US Congress and President Bill Clinton (1946–) officially apologized for overthrowing Liliuokalani.
1. The first people to live in Hawaii arrived about 2,000 years ago from Polynesia.
2. The first European to visit Hawaii was British navy captain James Cook (1728–1779), who arrived in 1778 and named them the Sandwich Islands in honor of an English noble, the Earl of Sandwich.
3. Hawaii is not the westernmost point in the United States; the western tip of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands extends farther west.
Richard Wright (1908–1960) was the first African-American novelist to achieve widespread critical acclaim and commercial success with his 1940 book, Native Son. The novel, a harrowing story of a black Chicagoan named Bigger Thomas who is arrested after accidentally killing a white woman, was the first book by an African-American author selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Wright’s commercial success made him an extremely influential figure in American literature, and he used his influence to challenge black writers to inject more social realism into their fiction. His autobiography Black Boy (1945), released after the author went into self-imposed exile in France, was also a bestseller.
Wright was born in poverty on a plantation in Natchez, Mississippi, the grandson of slaves. His father abandoned the family when Wright was five, and he was raised by other relatives.
During the great migration of Southern blacks to the North in the early 1900s, Wright moved first to Memphis and later to Chicago. He published his first book, a collection of short stories that was based on his Mississippi upbringing, called Uncle Tom’s Children, in 1938.
For Wright, politics and literature were inseparable. He had joined the Communist Party in 1932, and he heeded the party’s insistence that writers use fiction as a vehicle for social criticism and agitation. Wright is one the most famous authors of “protest literature” in American history, and he used his literary criticism to attack authors like Zora Neale Hurston who did not root their novels in social protest. Wright’s approach has been criticized by other authors, however, including Hurston, who wanted to place a greater emphasis on storytelling and felt less concerned with politics. The backlash against Wright’s unstintingly political literature grew in the 1950s after he quit the Communist Party and moved to Europe.
1. A successful Broadway version of Native Son was produced in 1941 under the direction of Orson Welles (1915–1985).
2. Wright himself starred as Bigger Thomas in a film version of the book made in Argentina in 1951.
3. His 1953 novel The Outsider was praised in France as the first American existentialist novel.
Casablanca, a motion picture starring Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) and Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982), was released in 1942, in the midst of World War II (1939–1945). The movie, set in the African port city of Casablanca, won three Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture, and is one of the best-loved films of the twentieth century. War movie, love story, and comedy rolled into one, the film produced some of Hollywood’s most memorable and oft-quoted lines, including “Here’s looking at you, kid,” “Round up the usual suspects,” and “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
The filming of the movie began in 1941, before the United States had actually entered World War II. As many critics have pointed out, the plot of the movie, which centers on European refugees stranded in Casablanca on their way to the United States, was wildly implausible. Based on a play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, the script contains numerous factual inaccuracies and inconsistencies—none of which have detracted from the film’s lasting sentimental appeal.
Most of the movie is set within Rick’s Cafe Americain, an expatriate hangout owned by the world-weary and cynical Rick Blaine, played by Bogart. Bergman plays an old flame of Rick’s who reenters his life unexpectedly. The cast also includes memorable performances by Peter Lorre (1904–1964) as a small-time forger, Sydney Greenstreet (1879–1954) as Casablanca’s criminal kingpin, and Claude Rains (1889–1967) as the city’s corrupt French police chief.
Warner Brothers, the studio that made Casablanca, had no inkling that the movie would be such an enormous success. The directing of the film by Michael Curtiz, who won an Oscar as Best Director, is thoroughly conventional. But the combination of the buoyant script, Bogart’s tough-guy acting, and a famous emotional climax produced one of Hollywood’s most enduring films ever. As the film critic Roger Ebert has written, “the greatness of Casablanca was largely the result of happy chance.”
1. A 1990 remake, Havana, starring Robert Redford (1937–) and directed by Sydney Pollack (1934–), was nominated for two Oscars.
2. There is no such thing as a “letter of transit,” a plot device that was invented by the screenwriters.
3. The grandson of one of the screenwriters, Philip G. Epstein (1909–1952), is Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein (1973–).