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World War I
When World War I began, President Wilson vowed to keep America out of it. But as time wore on, it became more difficult for Wilson to maintain neutrality. Not only was Germany taking hostile actions against American ships, but it seemed that great world events were passing America by. Some Progressives demanded that Wilson keep his promise of neutrality. Reformers such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley formed the American Union Against Militarism. Getting involved in a massive war overseas would inevitably undermine social reform at home, they argued. The pacifists vowed to throw a “monkey wrench into the machinery” of war preparations.
Others, including journalist Walter Lippmann of the New Republic, thought Wilson had dithered in the face of a war that could become the greatest engine of social reform America had ever known. “We Americans have been witnessing supreme drama, clenching our fists, talking, yet unable to fasten any reaction to realities,” Lippmann wrote. Out of the “horror” of war would come fresh opportunities for change in America. “We shall call that man un-American and no patriot who prates of liberty in Europe and resists it at home. A force is loose in America as well.” Lippmann and other Progressives were naïve about the effectiveness of using war to bring about positive domestic change. But as has always been the case in American history, this new war did bring about unpredictable transformations of American society and government.
Mexican Revolution
World War I was not the only foreign policy crisis facing the Wilson administration. Although the United States had major financial interests in Mexico, it was not too concerned with the initial phase of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1911 when the reformer Francisco Madero overthrew longtime Mexican ruler Porfirio Díaz. Just as Wilson was about to be sworn in as president in 1913, however, a Mexican military coup led by General Victoriano Huerta overthrew Madero’s government and killed Madero. With that Mexico descended into bloody chaos, and Wilson insisted that he would not recognize the new military regime. The Wilson administration supported Huerta’s enemies, and Huerta ultimately resigned in 1914. Wilson was reluctantly supportive of a new government headed by Venustiano Carranza, but Carranza met fierce opposition from an army headed by Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Villa, operating in northern Mexico, decided to resupply his army and provoke the Wilson administration by engaging in a 1916 cross-border attack at Columbus, New Mexico. Eighteen Americans were killed in Villa’s assault on the town.
Wilson found this attack intolerable, so he sent General John J. Pershing with a 10,000-man army on an expedition into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa. Chasing after Villa gave Pershing, who would play a key role in World War I, experience in using new war technologies, including trucks, airplanes, and machine guns. Pershing’s army suffered few casualties, but in the end Pershing failed to capture Villa. Wanting to avoid a larger war between the United States and Mexico, Wilson instructed Pershing to withdraw from northern Mexico. Pershing was disappointed, writing that “having dashed into Mexico with the intention of eating the Mexicans raw . . . we are now sneaking back home under cover like a whipped cur.” Pancho Villa’s forces would periodically reappear to threaten Mexican authorities and American border towns. When a 1919 battle in Juárez, Mexico, endangered El Paso, Texas, American commanders sent 3,600 soldiers across the Rio Grande to help defeat Villa’s army, the final loss of Villa’s career. Villa developed a daring image that turned him into a Mexican folk hero, an image that has endured among many Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
The Lusitania Incident
World War I, or the Great War, was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in 1914. A complex tangle of international alliances accounted for the alignments in the war, as the Allied Powers of Britain, France, and Russia faced off against the Central Powers of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Turkey. The United States, a major player in the European economy, stood to make enormous profits from the war. Even before it formally entered the war, US economic interests were firmly aligned with the Allied Powers. US businesses exported billions of dollars’ worth of munitions, food, and steel to them. Much of the trade was facilitated by J. P. Morgan’s banking firm, which also made hundreds of millions of dollars of loans to the Allied Powers.
America’s deep business connections to the warring European powers fed directly into the crisis that led the United States into the war. The United States and Britain had ongoing disagreements about America’s freedom to trade with the Central Powers, even though the amount of goods the United States was shipping to them (mostly to Germany) was shrinking rapidly. But the most acute issue came when German submarines, or U-boats, began menacing American ships in the Atlantic. Germany printed advertisements in the United States warning Americans of the danger of ship travel in the war zone (which included the waters in and around Britain), but Americans considered such threats belligerent and unreasonable.
Figure 20.1. Portrait of Pancho Villa, general of the Mexican Revolution.
In May 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the British passenger steamship Lusitania off the coast of Ireland. More than half of the boat’s 2,000 passengers, including 124 Americans, perished when the ship sank. It was the worst Atlantic disaster since the Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg in 1912. But this was different from the Titanic tragedy: the Lusitania was sunk by an enemy ship. The American public was outraged, and even many who had favored neutrality now called for war. Others, including Wilson, thought diplomacy could still avert US entrance into the war. Wilson demanded the Germans honor the “freedom of the seas” for neutral powers and warned that any more sinkings of passenger ships with Americans on board would be viewed as “deliberately unfriendly.” Although the language sounds tepid in retrospect, Wilson was effectively guaranteeing that another incident would mean war with the United States. The Germans backed down and promised they would stop attacks on passenger vessels, but the Lusitania incident had done much to push America toward entering the war.
Although some isolationists and pacifists kept insisting that America stay out of the European conflict, Wilson’s critics saw the Lusitania as the definitive confirmation of why the United States must get involved. Theodore Roosevelt lamented that “President Wilson has lacked the courage and the vision to lead this nation in the path of high duty. . . . The cause of preparedness [for war] is inseparably connected with the cause of Americanism, of patriotism, of whole-hearted loyalty to this nation.” Even Walter Lippmann, who did not want to see the United States enter the war as a full participant, admitted that as the sinking of the Lusitania had “united Englishmen and Americans in a common grief and a common indignation,” it might also “unite them in a common war and conceivably a common destiny.”
The United States and the War
Protestants were all over the map regarding the United States’ role in the war. The pacifist William Jennings Bryan, Wilson’s secretary of state, resigned his position rather than continue on a path to war. Conversely, evangelist Billy Sunday competed with Theodore Roosevelt’s stridency about getting into the war. Sunday even seemed to make support for the war a condition of one’s standing as a Christian. “Christianity and Patriotism are synonymous terms,” he said, “and hell and traitors are synonymous.” Conservative pastors and theologians associated with the early Christian fundamentalist movement tended to be skeptical of politics and were cautious about supporting entry into World War I. This drew the ire of more liberal theologians who thought the fundamentalists’ belief in Jesus’s imminent return was a dangerous distraction from the pressing need to support the Allies. Once the United States entered the war, however, fundamentalists became much more supportive, seeing Germany in particular as a great threat to both traditional Christian beliefs (because it was the home of “higher criticism” of the Bible) and to Christian civilization.
After Wilson’s reelection victory, he addressed Congress early in 1917 and argued that the only sustainable peace in the war would be a “peace without victory.” He warned that victory imposed by military force would leave a crippling legacy of bitterness and make the resumption of war more likely. “Only a peace between equals can last,” Wilson insisted. (The hostile European powers were, of course, not interested in such a negotiated outcome.) He proposed the formation of a League of Nations, which would seek to avert war in the future.
Still the direction of the war steered America closer to the brink of intervention. Germany had been inconsistent in its promises to respect the neutrality of American shipping in European waters, but it announced that as of February 1, 1917, its U-boats would attack any and all ships encountered in the seas around Britain or France. The Germans believed this was the only way to strangle the Allied Powers and bring an end to the war. In March, the Germans followed through on their warnings, as U-boats attacked and sank four American ships.
The final provocation came in February when British intelligence agents intercepted a telegram from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmerman, telling the German ambassador in Mexico that if the United States entered the war against Germany, Germany should seek an anti-US alliance with Mexico. Zimmerman floated the possibility that Germany could help Mexico reclaim territories it had once lost to the United States, including Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. When pacifists in Congress resisted Wilson’s appeals to equip American merchant ships with guns, Wilson released the Zimmerman telegram to the media.
America Enters the War
The combined effects of U-boat aggression and the Zimmerman telegram made US entry into World War I inevitable. Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war. He regretted that the nation must “accept the status of belligerent which has been . . . thrust upon it.” The United States had been called to fight because the “world must be made safe for democracy,” Wilson asserted. Congress responded overwhelmingly with the Senate approving war by an 82 to 6 vote.
The optimism many felt about the war was reflected in the conflict’s most popular tune in America, “Over There,” written by New York composer George Cohan.2
Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word, over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming everywhere.
So prepare, say a prayer
Send the word, send the word to beware,
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t be back till it’s over over there.
Cohan gave the song to a popular vaudeville singer, and soon it was widely available as sheet music and on disc records, which had been introduced for use with the phonograph in the early 1900s.
In spite of such cheery views of the United States’ role in the European war, the nation was hardly ready to mobilize. The US armed forces remained fairly small as of early 1917, with a combined army and national guard membership of 208,000 when the United States entered the war in April. But Wilson planned on sending millions of Americans to Europe as soldiers. The buildup’s strain on the nation would be massive, and it made supporters of the war angry toward anyone perceived as reluctant or hostile to the war effort. Conservative Protestants found themselves countering charges that the “premillennial” theology many of them embraced made them passive about the war. (Premillennial theology took a dim view of the direction of world history before Christ’s return to earth.) Liberal church historian Shirley Jackson Case of the University of Chicago Divinity School warned of the “Premillennial Menace,” observing that as the nation was “engaged in a gigantic effort to make the world safe for democracy, it would be almost traitorous negligence to ignore the detrimental character of premillennial propaganda.”
Many immigrants, especially German-language speakers, fell under much harsher scrutiny, as pro-war Americans worried about disloyal elements in their midst. German pacifist Christians may have suffered the most harassment because of their ethnicity and their religious views. Hundreds of conscientious objectors were brought up on court-martial charges during the war for refusing to cooperate with military conscription. Many ended up in jails, from the one at Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Four young Hutterite men (members of a German Anabaptist sect) from South Dakota arrived at Alcatraz in mid-1918, having refused to participate in training exercises to which they were forcibly sent in Washington State. Hutterites in South Dakota had already seen some of their livestock seized and sold to pay for war bonds, which they refused to buy. When the four Hutterite dissenters had been drafted and sent to Washington, other soldiers had set upon them on board the train and cut off their hair and beards (a distinctive marker of their faith). When they would not even fill out information cards at the military camp, the Hutterites were court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to captivity in the dungeons of Alcatraz. Two of the men, brothers Joseph and Michael Hofer, died in detention after they were transferred to a prison at Fort Leavenworth. Most of the remaining Hutterites of South Dakota immigrated to Canada to escape further persecution.
Congress supported both the war effort and the suppression of dissent via measures including the Selective Draft Act (1917), the Espionage Act (1917), and the Sedition Act (1918). Under the draft tens of millions of fighting-age men had to register for possible military service, and nearly 3 million of them were actually drafted and conscripted into such service. The Espionage Act gave the postmaster general, Albert Burleson, the power to enforce the measure by preventing the mail from carrying literature deemed to be in violation of the act. Burleson took an expansive view of what counted as “espionage,” so he went after publications of socialist groups, labor unions, foreign-language newspapers, and any others who might “impugn the motives of the government and thus encourage insubordination.” Critics of the war were appalled. Muckraking writer Upton Sinclair regarded it as a travesty that Burleson was given the power “to decide what may or may not be uttered by our radical press.”
The Sedition Act went further, broadening the Espionage Act’s definition of seditious speech to include “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States,” its Constitution, its flag, or its military, or language that might bring “contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute” to any of those national institutions. Even the Sedition Act fell short of some aggressive anti-dissent proposals, such as one that considered handing matters of espionage and sedition over to domestic military enforcement rather than keeping it in the hands of the Justice Department. The Wilson administration also encouraged private citizens to join in the surveillance of dissenters. Hundreds of thousands of Americans joined the American Protective League, which investigated and reported on neighbors and coworkers that the Protective League members suspected of disloyalty.
Figure 20.2. “Draft World War. Drafted Men; Camp Meade.”
Obviously the Espionage and Sedition Acts raised constitutional problems, especially about the right to free speech during time of war. (The treatment of pacifist Christians also raised questions of religious liberty.) Several cases along these lines came before the Supreme Court after the war was over. In each instance the high court upheld convictions under the Espionage Act. In Schenk v. United States (1919), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for a unanimous court and argued that speech that might be acceptable in peacetime might not be acceptable during a war, especially if that speech directly hindered the war effort. Thus, the First Amendment’s protection of free speech did not represent an unlimited right. Schenk was a socialist who had mailed flyers urging people to resist the draft. Holmes established a legal standard that if the speech in question created a “clear and present danger” of lawbreaking, it was not protected by the First Amendment.
Likewise, in Debs v. United States (1919), the court upheld the conviction of Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs for seditious speech. Although Debs had not directly advocated illegal behavior, he still praised the courage of those Americans who would not comply with the draft. Debs was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary for his crimes, although President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence to time served in 1921. Debs still received almost a million votes as the Socialist candidate for president in 1920. Congress repealed the Sedition Act after the war was over, but it left the Espionage Act on the books.
The War in Europe
The war between the Allied and Central Powers was grinding and gruesome. Entrenchment spread across the heart of the European continent, with enemy soldiers often separated by just hundreds of yards. Attacks across “no man’s land” in between the trench lines were suicide missions. Weapons such as poison gas and the new machine gun kept the armies in place indefinitely. The lack of movement and the horrid conditions in the trenches took a terrible toll on the soldiers. When the armies did launch offensives, the costs were heavy. The 1916 German campaign at Verdun, France, took the lives of 600,000 soldiers.
As American Navy destroyers curtailed the attacks of the U-boats, American troops led by General John Pershing began arriving in France in June 1917. As the number of American soldiers was reaching 300,000, in March 1918 the Germans tried to break the stalemate in western Europe. In a vast offensive the Germans broke through British and French lines and pushed toward Paris. The fresh American troops were essential to halting the German advance. As the other Allied powers before them had, the US forces took terrible losses. After experiencing his first battle, African American soldier John F. Dixon of New York wrote home to his family and tried to encourage them by saying, “We are real soldiers now and not afraid of Germans. . . . War is more than a notion. Our boys went on the battlefield last night singing, you can’t beat them, they are surely game and a happy bunch. . . . We’ll get that [German] Kaiser yet.”
Figure 20.3. No Man’s Land in World War I, ca. 1919, by F. J. Lamphere.
Among the most critical contributions of the American forces came in June 1918, at the battles of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood. At Château-Thierry, American soldiers and Marines helped the French defend bridges over the Marne River, successfully stalling the German advance on Paris. Near Château-Thierry, Marines also fought for several weeks to expel the Germans from Belleau Wood. Marines dug trenches with their bayonets and fought in vicious combat with the Germans, often grappling in hand-to-hand fights to the death. It required a terrible price for the Marines’ commanders to learn the foolishness of sending assaults against machine gun nests. The American forces took some 9,777 casualties at Belleau Wood, but much heavier losses were ahead.
By mid-July 1918, momentum had begun to turn against the Germans. Pershing’s army scored another major victory against them at St. Mihiel in September, setting the stage for the decisive battles of the Meuse-Argonne, which began in late September. Pershing brought more than a million men against the heavily fortified German defenses in the Argonne forest in eastern France. Again the Americans confronted lines of barbed wire and concrete huts with German gunners. Among the most heroic acts of the battle were those performed by Corporal Alvin York of Tennessee. York was a devout Christian, having experienced conversion through a Church of Christ in 1914. He considered declaring himself a conscientious objector, recalling, “I didn’t want to go and kill. I believed in my bible. . . . And yet Uncle Sam wanted me.” When York went to training camp, an officer convinced him that the Bible sanctioned a Christian’s participation in a just war.
At Meuse-Argonne, York and his fellow soldiers were tasked with flanking a German machine gun position. York’s best friend was killed in the assault, but York, an expert sharpshooter, picked the Germans off one after another with his rifle and pistol, he said, the “way we shoot wild turkeys at home.” York convinced the Germans to surrender with the assistance of a captured German officer and brought back 132 prisoners of war. But York still struggled with the morality of the killings, not entirely sure God approved of his actions.
The massive American phalanx moved slowly forward through the German defenses at Meuse-Argonne, and after two weeks of fighting, more than 26,000 Americans had died. The Meuse-Argonne battles lasted longer than some of America’s more famous battles, and they were the deadliest in American history in terms of total men who perished. By the second week of November, however, it had become clear to the Germans that there was no point in fighting on. They accepted the Allies’ peace terms and signed the armistice ending the fighting. In six months of fighting, the United States had lost almost 49,000 dead, with 230,000 injured. Another 63,000 Americans died of disease during the war. These losses paled compared to those endured by the British, the French, or the Germans, but it still made World War I the third-deadliest war in American history, behind the Civil War and World War II, both of which lasted far longer than the America’s fighting role in the First World War. It was a lesson in just how devastating a modern mechanized war could become.
The Great Migration
It would be hard to overstate the level of change World War I brought to the American home front. The great flood of immigration from Europe stopped abruptly because of the threat of the U-boats. Millions of American men went into the armed forces just as factory production was ratcheting up for the war effort. For the men not drafted, and many women who had previously been out of the industrial workforce, new job opportunities became abundant, especially in the cities of the Midwest and Northeast. This resulted in the beginning of the “Great Migration” of black farmers and sharecroppers out of the South to the North. African American men were subject to the draft, and almost 400,000 of them enlisted in the armed forces. But even more African Americans moved north from 1916 to 1918. It was the largest geographic shift for African Americans since the Civil War, and for the first time it gave northern cities a sizable black population.
African Americans were often drawn by higher income, even though they often took the lowest-paying entry jobs in the factories, such as janitors. Continuing racial tension and violence in the South also pushed blacks to leave. There were some 3,000 lynchings in America between 1889 and 1918, most of them in the South. The year 1916 had seen the horrific murder, dismemberment, and burning of a teenager named Jesse Washington in a public square in Waco, Texas. Washington had been accused of killing a white woman and was hastily convicted by an all-white jury. A photographer captured the scene of a crowd of whites milling around Washington’s smoldering corpse.
Even the presence of black enlisted men in the South sparked racial tensions. In 1917, African American soldiers stationed at Camp Logan near Houston grew weary of the daily indignities they and African American civilians endured under Jim Crow segregation rules. A violent confrontation between black soldiers and Houston police erupted into a spasm of racial violence by hundreds of black soldiers against whites. They had vowed to take revenge on white police officers, but some of the soldiers randomly shot white civilians too. By the time the riot had ended, sixteen whites and four black soldiers were dead. Unfortunately, the violence, committed entirely by the rogue soldiers, led to a crackdown on Houston’s black community in general. Thousands of African Americans left Houston after the incident, even though the city had banned northern employers from openly recruiting them, fearing a labor shortage in Houston.
Black activists implored poor African Americans to seek safety and opportunity in the North. But the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest were often not welcoming to blacks either. In East St. Louis, Illinois, metalworking factories had begun to recruit African Americans to counteract the power of labor unions, which were run and dominated by white workers. Whites’ anger at the black workers spilled over in July 1917, when mobs attacked the African American section of East St. Louis, leaving forty-seven people dead and thousands of blacks without homes. Cities from Omaha, Nebraska, to Washington, DC, saw additional racial violence.
Still many blacks felt as if World War I was a time of unfolding possibilities for what they called the “New Negroes.” Freed not only from the shackles of slavery but from burdens of the post–Civil War South, many migrating African Americans felt a new sense of independence, led by the veterans who had served in World War I. If blacks had fought for freedom in the war, then surely they could do so on the home front too. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1919, “By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land. We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America.”
The popular song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” composed in 1900, spoke to the sense of growing black independence. Its first verse said:
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise,
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
In 1919, the NAACP adopted this song as the “Negro National Anthem.”
Wartime Reform
African Americans were not alone in seeing the potential for political and moral reform in the Great War. Momentum had been building before the war for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. Women contributed to the war effort in innumerable ways: they replaced men in industrial and office jobs; they worked in charitable and Christian organizations such as the Red Cross, the YMCA/YWCA, and the Salvation Army to provide care and supplies to soldiers; and they served in the tens of thousands as military nurses. President Wilson came to endorse the voting rights amendment for women in 1918 partly because of the invaluable wartime service women had provided. The Nineteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution in 1920. Jane Addams calculated that votes for women came so soon after the war that “it must be accounted as the direct result of war psychology.”
The long-standing American campaign against alcohol also reached its apex during World War I. Led by organizations such as the Anti-Saloon League and Frances Willard’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union, many argued that alcohol had a uniquely destructive influence in American society and should be banned. The crusade for prohibition took on added urgency during the war. Temperance advocates painted Germans and German Americans as beer guzzling and disloyal. Alcoholic beverages seemed a terrible extravagance at best, given Americans’ need to conserve for the war effort. The military also sought to keep soldiers away from alcohol’s stupefying effects.
The rate of alcohol consumption remained quite high in America on the eve of Prohibition. The rate increased rapidly from Reconstruction to World War I, when adults drank an average of more than thirty gallons of beer, wine, and hard liquor a year (mostly beer). An Alabama congressman spoke for many when he declared in 1914 that alcohol
undermines and blights the home and the family, checks education, attacks the young when they are entitled to protection, undermines the public health, slaughtering, killing, and wounding our citizens many fold times more than war, pestilence, and famine combined; that it blights the progeny of the Nation, flooding the land with a horde of degenerates; that it strikes deadly blows at the life of the Nation itself and at the very life of the race, reversing the great evolutionary principles of nature and the purposes of the Almighty. There can be but one verdict, and that is this great destroyer must be destroyed.
White Protestant Christians heavily backed the prohibition cause, but African American Christians were more mixed in their response. The fact that groups such as a resurgent Ku Klux Klan supported prohibition made many blacks wary of a racial agenda behind the anti-alcohol movement. Catholics and Jews in America generally did not support prohibition either. In the end the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919. It banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in America. Historians generally agree that Prohibition was a failure because it created an enormous black market for alcohol and was a boon to organized crime and “bootleggers,” who illegally trafficked in alcohol. Nevertheless, Prohibition did lead to an apparent decline in overall alcohol consumption, which would not rise to pre-Prohibition levels for many decades even after the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933.
The Fourteen Points
In 1917, President Wilson became troubled by reports coming from Europe, made public by communist revolutionaries in Russia, that the Allied Powers planned to divvy up Germany’s and Turkey’s colonies once the war was over. The idealistic Wilson did not want the war to result in mere switching of colonial powers and retribution against the losing side. With the help of journalist Walter Lippmann, Wilson drew up a fourteen-point plan for a just peace settlement, which he presented to Congress in January 1918. “The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by,” Wilson declared. “What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression.”
The Fourteen Points focused especially on national self-determination (as opposed to control by empires), free navigation of the oceans, transparent diplomacy, and the formation of a “general association of nations,” which would help guarantee “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” In a break from the tradition of previous wars, Wilson professed no desire to destroy Germany, nor even a desire to lessen Germany’s “legitimate influence or power.” The Allies should simply expect Germany to live in peace and equity with other nations, Wilson declared.
Not only did Wilson wish to avoid a peace based on crushing Germany and its allies, but he also needed to counteract the new communist threat emerging from Russia. In late 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries led by Vladimir Lenin had overthrown the Russian government. The Bolsheviks sought the destruction of the capitalist system and called for workers everywhere to rise up against business and political authorities. “We summon you to this struggle, workers of all countries! There is no other way. The crimes of the ruling, exploiting classes in this war have been countless. These crimes cry out for revolutionary revenge.” Inspired by the philosophy of German philosopher Karl Marx, they prohibited private property and set up a radical workers’ democracy. Lenin believed Russia needed to seek peace with Germany at virtually any cost to secure the communist revolution within Russia itself. So in March 1918, Russia and Germany signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, under which Russia surrendered its claims to territories including Poland, Ukraine, and Finland, which accounted for a quarter of the Russian empire’s population. Worried about communism and about German influence in Russia, Wilson sent thousands of American troops into Russia to aid anti-Bolshevik fighters there. In doing so, Wilson himself seemed to contradict one of his Fourteen Points, the right to national self-determination in Russia.
Wilson staked his reputation on the peace conference in Paris in early 1919. He personally attended the talks at the palace of Versailles, to much fanfare. The Fourteen Points would not fare well in Paris, as a scramble for colonies and the desire to punish Germany animated the leaders of Britain, France, and other nations. The Allied Powers understandably blamed Germany for the awful suffering of the war. They forced the Germans to sign a devastating (and unrealistic) program of reparations, which would amount to $33 billion. Most of Wilson’s Fourteen Points were either ignored or compromised at Versailles. But Wilson insisted on the creation of the League of Nations, which would feature a nine-nation council including Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States. Members would promise to consult with one another when war loomed and would commit to protect one another’s sovereignty.
Wilson saw the League of Nations as a modern, internationalist means to prevent more war. But his Republican opponents at home disagreed. They thought the League of Nations would make war more likely, as it bound the United States to get involved in the conflicts and concerns of foreign nations. Many Americans were weary of war and feared that the League of Nations would compromise America’s independence on the world stage. Opponents such as Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts saw in the League of Nations a zeal for “internationalism” that smacked of Bolshevism. “We must not lose by an improvident attempt to reach eternal peace all that we have won by war and sacrifice,” Lodge told the Senate in February 1919. “We must build no bridges across the chasm which now separates American freedom and order from Russian anarchy and destruction. . . . America and the American people are first in my heart now and always.”
Before the Treaty of Versailles was finished, Lodge and almost forty senators had already pledged to oppose it if the treaty included US membership in the League of Nations. Because the Senate must ratify treaties by a two-thirds majority, this was a serious threat to the League. Wilson secured adjustments to the League in order to emphasize members’ independence. In June 1919, delegates signed the Treaty of Versailles, and Wilson came back to America to campaign for the treaty’s ratification. Wilson appealed directly to the American people, declaring that the United States had a moral obligation to support the League. “We have come to redeem the world by giving it liberty and justice. Now we are called up before the tribunal of mankind to redeem that immortal pledge.” Conflating the Christian language of salvation with America’s place on the global stage, Wilson thundered, “At last the world knows America as savior of the world.”
After a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, the exhausted Wilson became ill and returned to Washington. On October 2, 1919, Wilson suffered a stroke that caused partial paralysis. His wife, Edith, closely guarded information about the president’s health, and some critics speculated that she was really in control of the presidency. As Woodrow Wilson convalesced, he spent all of his limited energy trying to salvage the League. Lodge and some Republicans offered compromise versions of the treaty, but Wilson thought they undermined the original purpose of the League. The Senate voted repeatedly on the treaty and amendments to it but never could muster the two-thirds majority required. In 1921, Congress adopted a resolution technically ending US involvement in the war since they had rejected the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
Wilson had lost on the initiative he had hoped would define his presidency. European powers went ahead and created the League of Nations. But the alliance was badly hampered by the absence of the United States and communist Russia, now called the Soviet Union. The League would continue to exist until 1946, when in the aftermath of World War II, it was superseded by the United Nations.
The Red Scare
For decades the socialist and labor movements in America had commanded widespread support. Even communist groups claimed tens of thousands of American members. But with the heightened patriotism of World War I and the calls for workers’ revolution coming out of Russia, America became far less hospitable to any movements that critics could associate with Bolshevism. Labor strikes that had once garnered some popular favor with their calls for humane working conditions and decent pay now became associated with the terror of the communist insurgency.
A string of mail and house bombings in the spring and summer of 1919 spawned a wave of fear about the possible work of communist operatives in the United States. One bomb destroyed part of the Washington, DC, home of attorney general Mitchell Palmer and frightened his neighbors, including future presidential couple Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. There did not seem to be any conspiracy behind the bombings, but they remained terrifying nevertheless. Attorney General Palmer warned that the wildfire of communism was “eating its way into the homes of the American workman . . . licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, [and] burning up the foundations of society.” The Justice Department conducted raids on communist party offices, confiscating Marxist literature and rounding up and deporting thousands of noncitizens suspected of having Bolshevik sympathies.
Perhaps the most controversial case associated with the “Red Scare” was the trial and execution of Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were accused of robbery and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Although their role in the crime was unclear, Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists and atheists who spoke limited English. They seemed to embody the murderous threat posed by European radical philosophy. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and tried in 1920, and liberal critics from around the world insisted that they did not receive an adequate defense or a fair hearing. Appeals dragged on until 1927, when the two were executed by electrocution. There were important philosophical differences between communists, socialists, anarchists, and other left-wing radicals, but to worried observers they all seemed attached to the internationalist Marxist menace.
The 1920 Election and the Rise of Calvin Coolidge
War-weariness and controversy over the League of Nations dominated the 1920 presidential election. Republican nominee Senator Warren Harding of Ohio insisted that the nation needed no more Wilsonian adventures. Americans wanted a return to “normalcy,” Harding said. He believed Americans were ready for “not the dramatic but the dispassionate, not experiment but equipoise, not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality.” The Democrats were hamstrung by uncertainty over Wilson’s health and future. Some imagined that Wilson, who played such a dominant role in Democratic politics, might run for a third term, but those close to him knew his physical condition would not allow it. So the Democrats nominated Ohio governor James Cox to run against Harding. Cox’s vice-presidential running mate was Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. Although Progressives were generally unhappy with the choice presented between Cox and Harding, they could not coalesce around a third-party candidate. In spite of his imprisonment, Socialist Eugene Debs still got more than 900,000 votes in the 1920 election.
An economic recession in 1920 sealed the fate of the Democrats. Harding won a smashing 60 percent of the popular vote and more than 400 electoral votes. Republicans now controlled the House and Senate by large margins. But scandals in the Harding administration would squander much of the Republicans’ advantage. Harding was surrounded by old political allies that critics called the “Ohio Gang,” who made a series of shady deals, exchanging political favors for cash. Most notoriously, Harding’s interior secretary, Albert Fall, was exposed for taking bribes in exchange for granting oil leases on federal land, including at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. The Teapot Dome Scandal landed Fall in jail. Harding was deeply distressed by his unraveling presidency. In 1923, he suffered a fatal heart attack, and the presidency passed to Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts, Harding’s vice president.
Coolidge was able to redeem the presidency for the Republicans, removing some of the key players in Harding’s scandals. He easily defeated the Democratic nominee John W. Davis of West Virginia in the 1924 election, in spite of the third-party Progressive candidacy of Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. Coolidge won almost the entire Northeast, Midwest, and West, while the Democrats only managed to win the South. Coolidge was the champion of small, business-friendly government. He was the antithesis of the interventionist bent of Theodore Roosevelt or Wilson, on the domestic and the international front. Boosted by the federal income tax, higher tariffs, and lower government spending, the federal government under Coolidge cut debt and actually took in more revenue than it spent. Older Progressive leaders felt as though they were living in a different America than the one that had preceded World War I and Wilson’s presidency. “What has become of this movement that promised so much twenty years ago?” asked reformer Frederic Howe in 1925. “What has become of the prewar radicals?” Disillusionment over the war, a healthy economy under Coolidge, and Progressive gains in areas like women’s suffrage had changed the political environment dramatically. The era of internationalism and aggressive reform seemed, for the moment, to be over. Americans entered an era of exuberant prosperity in the 1920s, but the nation’s carefree days were not to last.
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2 Copyright Canada 1917 by Whaley, Royce and Co. for William Jerome Pub. Corp.