A sailor, a workman, and a soldier join arms to show that all Americans—military and civilian alike—needed to work together to win the war. This poster was designed by James Montgomery Flagg, probably the most famous poster artist of the time. Hundreds of posters were used as propaganda to encourage patriotic spirit and persuade Americans to support the war effort.
After three years of uncertainty about America’s role, President Wilson wanted all Americans to agree that war with Germany was the right choice. The president himself had long been against military involvement; he won the presidency in 1916 as the person “who kept us out of war.” By April 1917, what had changed? The immediate reason was unrestricted German submarine warfare. But Wilson, when he called for war, expressed idealistic thoughts about world peace and democracy. He couldn’t point to an attack on the United States to rally everyone. (Even the attack on the Lusitania, which might have provoked war, had happened two years earlier.) Instead, he talked about a moral vision. He needed to convince Americans that it was a moral duty to help do their part to end the war in Europe so that the United States could play an important role in bringing stability and justice to the world.
When the United States entered the war, American opinion was still divided. There were those who favored it—and felt we should have taken part earlier—but also those who opposed it—pacifists, progressives, various immigrant groups, and political opponents in Congress and state politics. How could Wilson achieve a united response in support of the war? One way was to educate people, even children, on the importance of the war.
World War I was a total war. This meant not only that the country would call out many men for the military but that every civilian would do his or her part for the war effort. The economy was based around training, feeding, clothing, transporting, and sustaining the armed forces. Food, uniforms, weapons, and raw materials like coal and steel were all in demand.
Even before the country entered the war, it had built up a war economy. The Allies needed the same goods and weapons the Americans would later need. From 1914 to 1918, the United States’ income from trade went from a little less than $1.5 billion to a little more than $4 billion a year (from $27.7 billion to $74 billion in today’s money). American businesses, factories, and farms were turning out guns, ammunition, wheat, copper, rubber, steel, gasoline, and the thousands of other products that kept the war going. In 1916, the federal government was spending about $477 million on American goods. Once the United States joined the Allies, the figure rose to $8.45 billion in 1918. The transition to a war economy in the United States was made easier because Americans had already expanded the necessary industries to supply the Allies.
Business was booming, and this meant more money for owners and plenty of jobs and higher salaries for workers. The unemployment rate dropped from 7.9 percent to 1.4 percent. Nearly every American who wanted to work was employed. An estimated 3 million people were in military service, and half a million workers joined the government. Adding other jobs like mining and manufacturing, about 44 million Americans were working in 1918. Two hundred thousand of those workers built airplanes, and at its peak, the aircraft industry turned out more than 12,000 airplanes a year.
But the United States was not producing airplanes designed by Americans. Automobile companies converted to make airplanes were turning out British training aircraft, fighter planes, and airplane engines. The U.S. government focused on manufacturing the British DH-4, the de Havilland. In fact, because the United States entered the war quickly and late—and because it was already producing equipment for the French and British—many American soldiers went into battle with British and French guns, gas masks, and other equipment. Nor could the United States keep up with producing enough ships to transport its soldiers to France. For all its output, the country failed to supply American troops with enough standardized American weapons: They were dependent on Allied gear.
There were both good and bad aspects to rapid mobilization—getting the country ready for war. For the first time, more women and African Americans had the opportunity to get better-paying and skilled jobs in factories and industries. But because of the shortage of men, who had become soldiers, children were also called upon to work. Child labor laws were overlooked as children took jobs in factories, bakeries, and grocery stores and on farms. A lot of newspapers were published during World War I, and the newspaper boy became a common figure on street corners. Teenagers also lied about their age so that they could join the army or navy.
The government called on both children and adults to help the war effort in several ways. Although there was no strict rationing in the United States—except for a few months in 1918 when sugar was rationed—American civilians were encouraged to conserve food and fuel so that soldiers and sailors would not face shortages. (Sometimes, partly because of transportation problems, soldiers did anyway.) One card distributed to housewives urged them to “Go back to simple food. . . . Pray hard, work hard, sleep hard, and play hard. Do it all courageously and cheerfully.” The government strongly suggested wheatless days and meatless days. They placed ads in magazines: “Food is sacred. . . . Wheatless days in America make sleepless nights in Germany. . . . If U fast U beat U boats. . . . Serve beans by all means.”
Even before the United States entered World War I, American factories were producing a large number of weapons and products for the Allies. These women are working on the factory floor of a weapons plant in Massachusetts. The war called men away to be soldiers, and women often filled the gap. Some of them worked at skilled jobs like this that were previously not open to them.
The making of “victory bread” was encouraged, using a substitute for wheat like corn, barley, rice, oats, rye flour, or potatoes. American wheat was feeding the American armed services, the Allied armies, and Allied civilians. One flyer asked American women to:
SAVE WHEAT
Will you help the Women of France?
They are struggling against starvation
and trying to feed not only themselves
and children: but their husbands and sons
who are fighting in the trenches
Children were told to eat everything they were served, vegetables included. They were encouraged to keep “A Little American’s Promise”:
At table I’ll not leave a scrap
Of food upon my plate,
And I’ll not eat between meals but
For supper time I’ll wait.
“Victory gardens” were planted in backyards, school yards, and small city plots to grow food that civilians could eat, while big farms fed the soldiers and Allies. Even the White House had a victory garden. It also had sheep to trim the lawn so that gardeners could work elsewhere. The wool was sold to raise money for the war.
With men away, women took on farming. “It has been demonstrated that our girls from college and city trade can do farm work, and do it with a will,” wrote Harriet Stanton Blatch in 1918. “And still better, at the end of the season their health wins high approval from the doctors and their work golden opinions from the farmers.” These young women “ventured out on a new enterprise that meant aching muscles, sunburn and blisters, but not one . . . ‘ever lost a day’ in their eight hours at hard labor, beginning at four-thirty each morning for eight weeks during one of our hottest summers. They ploughed with horses, they ploughed with tractors, they sowed the seed, they thinned and weeded the plants, they reaped, they raked, they pitched the hay, they did fencing.”
The U.S. government also asked that Americans conserve fuel. Coal was almost always in short supply. Civilians were asked to use firewood in its place. Children were given tags to tie to family coal shovels, giving information on how to save fuel. A coal shortage in 1918 closed “nonessential” businesses—those not connected with the war—during January, February, and March. From the fall of 1917 on, businesses were not allowed to use electricity to light signs at night. A “lightless night order” said they could be lit only from 7:45 to 11:00 p.m., and they had to be dark on Thursday and Sunday nights. In January 1918, Marie Tice wrote to her brother at the front, “Guess you have heard the latest on the coal situation. A legal holiday every Monday . . . and a complete industrial shutdown for five days beginning Saturday.” Another relative wrote, “You should see good old New York by night, darkness on all sides—and every store closed.”
These children display a giant head of cabbage grown in the “war garden” of Public School 88 in Queens, New York. Many Americans planted “war” or “victory” gardens near their homes and schools, growing their own food so that there would be no shortage for soldiers.
The U.S. government did not pass laws to require civilians to follow these suggestions. It did establish government agencies to monitor aspects of the home front and to persuade civilians to follow their guidelines. These agencies included members of the government, business and industrial leaders, and other civilians. The four most important were the Food Administration (led by Herbert Hoover, who would serve as president of the United States from 1929 to 1933); the Fuel Administration; the Railroad Administration to coordinate transportation; and the War Industries Board, which tried to make manufacturing more efficient. It set up a priorities system for industries to fill the most essential orders from the U.S. government and Allies first. A priority system places the most important tasks at the top, with less important tasks coming later.
One of the biggest government programs promoted ways for civilians to help pay for the war. The Wilson administration did not want to raise taxes. (Eventually it had to.) Instead, it asked people to support Liberty loans. Americans could buy Liberty bonds—in effect, loaning the government the money they cost. They could then redeem them after the war for the amount they loaned, plus a bonus—known as interest. The first Liberty loan drive was set to raise $2 billion ($37 billion in today’s money). “We went direct to the people, and that means to everybody—to business men, workmen, farmers, bankers, millionaires, school-teachers, laborers,” said William McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury. “We capitalized [on] the profound impulse called patriotism. It is the quality . . . that holds a nation together; it is one of the deepest and most powerful of human motives.” Even children contributed their own money to buy bonds, or, more usually, the cheaper War Savings Stamps.
McAdoo traveled throughout the country, encouraging people to buy Liberty bonds. Movie stars like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks spoke to huge crowds. The government was happy to have the Boy Scouts encourage the buying of bonds. “[E]very Scout [has] a wonderful opportunity to do his share for his country under the slogan ‘Every Scout To Save a Soldier,’” wrote President Wilson to the Boy Scouts’ president. Bond drive posters by famous artists were put up everywhere.
“There was a wonderful Liberty Loan Parade on Friday,” wrote one New Yorker in April 1918. “We got the PM off and stood from 2:30 till 6:30 watching it. . . . In school I sold 51 bonds amounting to $4800. We had a rally on . . . Sat. night and you never heard such thrilling talks as those children gave. . . . One clever stunt . . . for getting bonds [sold] by original ways was performed by a man . . . [who] climbed up to the Fire escape and rapped on the window for people to come out and buy bonds. They came & then he continued his climb until he had everyone out on the fire-escapes and a few hundred on the street. He sold quite a few bonds.”
There were five loan campaigns, each set to raise a certain amount of money. Americans were not just asked to give; they were pressured to give. “A man who can’t lend his government $1.25 [$19.70 in 2015] a week at the rate of 4% interest is not entitled to be an American citizen,” declared McAdoo in one speech in California. But not everyone agreed. Tom W. Black and several other firefighters in Spokane, Washington, felt they had to resign from the fire department rather than buy bonds, because of their religious beliefs as members of the International Bible Students’ Association (later the Jehovah’s Witnesses). “I have been in the department for eight years,” said Black, “and have a wife and four children. I am sorry that circumstances have arisen that compel me to resign to maintain my freedom of conscience, but I guess it can not be helped.”
Liberty loans were not enough to finance the war. By May 1918, the government’s debt was increasing by about a million dollars ($15.7 million in today’s money) each month. Despite strong opposition, especially from the wealthy, Congress eventually passed laws calling for higher taxes on income and on business profits. These were lowered after the war ended but were never again as low as taxes were before the war began.
“The Human Squirrel” specialized in stunts to attract people so they would give money to benefit the New York War Relief Funds. Here he is high above Times Square. There’s no record of this performer’s name. Many celebrities, as well as volunteers like the Four Minute Men, spoke before crowds or entertained them to promote the buying of Liberty bonds.
The government used another tool to arouse patriotic feelings: propaganda, information used to spread one point of view, whether it was accurate or biased. U.S. Commissioner of Education P. P. Claxton organized teachers and university professors to create “war study courses” for young people at every level. He did not want these courses to be overly patriotic, but he did want them to represent the government’s point of view that war was necessary. The courses were written up in pamphlets distributed to teachers. One for elementary school teachers suggested that it was useful to stir up students’ “imagination and . . . emotions” against Germany. The elementary school courses stressed “patriotism, heroism, and sacrifice,” which their country asked even of its young citizens. The important message was that the United States was a democracy. Germany was “autocratic”—a country run by one man, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Germany had done terrible things to civilians in Belgium and France, killing and burning innocent people. Americans had “to keep the German soldiers from coming to our country and treating us the same way.”
The course for high school students stressed that only Germany, not the Allies, had caused the war and that only the Allies really wanted peace. It added that a military, warlike culture dominated German society and its soldiers were immoral and cruel. It ignored the role of the Allies in keeping the war going and in wanting a total victory that would destroy Germany’s military and take away its power. It also ignored the fact that Britain and France had huge colonial empires in Africa and Asia, which their armies helped them control. Since colonies were ruled by other, mostly European, countries and not the people living there, they went against President Wilson’s stated desire for each country to have its own government by the people.
Oversimplifying the war—portraying it in black and white, with no room for complexity or doubt—was not confined to teaching materials. In April 1917, the government formed the Committee on Public Information (CPI), an agency to provide government-approved information and publicity about the war to newspapers, magazines, and the general public. George Creel headed the committee. He was a newspaper editor and an investigative journalist—someone who exposed corruption in government and business. But his job at the CPI was to promote the government’s thinking. The committee had many sections—the best-known ones were the Division of Pictorial Publicity, the News Division, and the Four Minute Men Division. The Committee on Public Information was by far the most powerful and influential publicity and propaganda organization the United States government had ever had or the world had ever seen.
Creel created “the Four Minute Men,” some 75,000 civilian volunteers who gave short speeches before the public. They spoke in any place they had an audience—movie theaters, churches, and labor union meetings among them. (Four minutes was the time it took to change film reels in movie theaters.) They spoke in favor of the draft, rationing of food and raw materials, buying war bonds, and anything else that might support the war. By the end of the war, Creel claimed, the Four Minute Men had given 7.5 million speeches to more than 314 million Americans. There were Four Minute Men who gave their speeches in many languages, including Yiddish, Polish, Italian, Russian, and Bohemian-Slovak, and even a Sioux Indian who spoke to Native Americans.
The CPI supplied the speakers with tips on what they should say. A bulletin issued by the committee in May 1917 advised, “The speech must not be longer than four minutes, which means there is no time for a single wasted word. . . . There never was a speech yet that couldn’t be improved. Never be satisfied with success. Aim to be more successful, and still more successful. So keep your eyes open. Read all the papers every day, to find a new slogan . . . or a new idea to replace something you have in your speech. For instance, the editorial page of the Chicago Herald of May 19 . . . says, ‘No country was ever saved by the other fellow; it must be done by you, by a hundred million yous, or it will not be done at all.’ . . . Try slogans like ‘Earn the right to say, I helped to win the war,’ and . . . ‘A cause that is worth living for is worth dying for, and a cause that is worth dying for is worth fighting for.’”
In the beginning of its work, the CPI wanted to persuade people to support the war. The committee’s Official Bulletin did distribute many facts about how government agencies worked. During the course of the war, it sent out 6,000 press releases and 75 million copies of more than thirty pamphlets. But as the war continued, more of its materials were straightforward propaganda. It ran advertisements in major magazines, encouraging ordinary Americans to report anyone who was negative about the war or spoke too loudly for peace. The Four Minute Men were advised they could speak about “horrible” crimes that the Germans had committed—though the huge majority of these rumors were false, including the intentional killing of babies.
Films produced by the CPI became more and more viciously anti-German, like The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin, which portrayed the German leader as aggressive, greedy, and immoral. Increasing pressure was put on American media to publicize the committee’s efforts. Toward the end of 1918, the CPI produced Under Four Flags—British, French, American, and Italian—“THE authentic record of actual fighting on the famous battle fronts of Europe.” A letter to movie theater managers stressed that the film was “a picture that the Government intends every one in the United States shall see . . . as an example of what the United States and the Allies . . . are doing for the cause of Liberty. . . . You owe it to your Government and to every American citizen in your neighborhood to show ‘UNDER FOUR FLAGS’ in your theatre. . . . It will increase their belief that you are a good business man as well as a patriotic citizen.”
The CPI did not have legal authority to censor any newspaper or magazine, but it gave out “voluntary guidelines” that it expected would be followed. In order to keep their connections with government and military sources and learn up-to-the-minute news, most journalists followed them. Laws passed by Congress, however, directly permitted censorship. Wilson had said in his request for Congress to declare war, “If there should be any disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.” Now the government would decide what “disloyalty” would be. Not every member of Congress agreed with censorship. As a law called “the Espionage Act” was being debated, it “has all the earmarks of a dictatorship,” said Republican Senator William E. Borah from Idaho. “It suppresses free speech and does it all in the name of war and patriotism.”
But the Espionage Act was passed and became law in 1917. It stated, “Every letter, writing, circular, postal card, picture, print, engraving, photograph, newspaper, pamphlet, book, or other publication . . . of any kind, containing any matter advocating or urging treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States, is hereby declared to be nonmailable.” Under it, the government could prevent anything printed from being sent through the mail. If magazines, journals, or newspapers could not be mailed, they could not reach their readers.
This was a strong form of censorship: one written piece declared disloyal could prevent thousands of people from reading it. Postmaster General Albert Burleson used this power to censor the writings of pacifists, socialists, and other political radicals if he decided they opposed the federal government. Although “espionage” usually means spying, in 1917 the act, as Senator Borah understood, was aimed at limiting free speech. It allowed the government to fine and/or imprison anyone who said something it considered untrue that was meant to “interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces.” This included anyone who spoke out against the draft or tried to encourage men not to join the military services.
Eugene Debs (right) and Victor Berger (left) were both arrested under the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act. Debs went to jail for giving a speech that blamed the war on business interests. Berger was also sentenced to prison for publishing a socialist newspaper, but he appealed his sentence and was never jailed. Bertha Hale White, the woman between them, was a journalist and teacher who also worked for the American Socialist Party.
The charge of “unpatriotic” became used as a weapon against even mild opposition. “I . . . planned an Anti-Enlistment League, which should line up all men and women who should promise never to enlist voluntarily or to give approval to such enlistment on the part of others,” remembered Jessie Wallace Hughan. “As I was a high school teacher at this time, and still am, the league, which received more publicity than its importance deserved, was the subject of much hostile comment in the Brooklyn papers. I was an active Socialist, also, and always talked against the war in speeches that I made. This activity caused me to be examined before superintendents and boards of examiners several times, the general surveillance and excitement lasting through the war and after.”
In 1918, Congress passed the Sedition Act. “Sedition” means acting or speaking to encourage people to rebel against a government. The Sedition Act expanded the Espionage Act. It gave greater power to the U.S. government to arrest anyone accused of antiwar or antimilitary actions. It could be used to punish anyone who said or published “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form or government of the United States, or the Constitution.” Again, this included antidraft speech or action as a punishable offense. Under the Sedition Act, the government could arrest anyone who spoke out against lending money to the Allies or buying Liberty bonds to support the war.
There was reason to protect war industries and the military from violent actions. There had already been some acts of espionage even before the United States entered the war. Germans and Americans sympathetic to Germany had blown up a factory making weapons in New Jersey in July 1916. But it was one thing to arrest someone for a disloyal action; it was another to arrest them for a thought. Under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, a person could go to jail for what he wrote or spoke. Eugene Debs was one of these. Five times a Socialist candidate for president of the United States, he was sentenced to ten years in jail for giving a speech that blamed the war on business interests. “[T]he working class who fight all the battles, . . . who make the supreme sacrifices, . . . who freely shed their blood . . . have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace,” said Debs. “It is the ruling class that . . . does both.” Debs’s sentence was commuted in 1921.
Victor Berger was the first Socialist congressman to be elected in the United States. As the editor of the Milwaukee Leader, he spoke out against the war. Postmaster General Burleson charged him three times with breaking the Espionage Act. He could no longer mail his newspaper to its readers. In 1919, he was sentenced to twenty years in jail, but he appealed his conviction. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor in 1921, and he was reelected to Congress.
Berger was an immigrant from Austria-Hungary. Immigrants received particular attention from the government and from the American people during the war. By 1917, there were huge numbers of immigrants living in the United States. Many who had come since 1870 were Italian, eastern European, or Jewish. They often continued to speak their native languages. They often lived in poverty. Even before World War I they seemed foreign and threatening to many Americans, who did not believe they could ever fit into mainstream society in the United States. The war heightened those fears. Were immigrants loyal to the United States or to their home countries? Most Americans wanted a united country in time of war—one in which people put aside their ethnic loyalties and foreign customs to be unquestionably patriotic. This was the root of the “100 percent American” campaign, supported by the CPI and many public organizations, to quickly teach immigrants English, educate them about American values, and turn them into citizens.
Progressive social workers and others had been trying for several years to “Americanize” immigrants and their children to give them better opportunities for jobs, education, and fitting into American society. But when the United States entered the war, this became an urgent pressure. The CPI created a Division of Work with the Foreign-Born. It formed Loyalty Leagues among different ethnic groups, distributing patriotic propaganda to them in their own languages. On July 4, 1918, the CPI brought men and women from thirty-three ethnic groups to respectfully walk by President George Washington’s tomb at his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia—what today might be called “a photo opportunity.” While events like this one were positive and cheerful, there was another side to the CPI’s work with immigrants. The committee used people fluent in immigrant languages, many of them college professors, to read foreign-language newspapers and other publications. They reported back to the CPI on any “material which may fall under the Espionage Act.” Although the CPI could not censor them, they could pass this information back to people like Postmaster General Burleson, who did.
Actually, the vast majority of immigrants showed their patriotism in many ways. They bought Liberty bonds. Half a million foreign-born soldiers served in the U.S. armed forces—18 percent of all soldiers and sailors. Immigrants also held jobs in many war-related industries, including mining, lumber, and the production of iron and steel. In the workplace, however, they encountered another kind of prejudice and fear if they supported unions or workers’ rights. Many Americans believed that socialists and anarchists (people who believed there should be no governments or laws) stirred up trouble and discontent among workers. They believed that Italian and Russian immigrants, especially, brought radical ideas about laborers to the United States. In wartime the U.S. government and owners of business and industry both wanted production to run smoothly. Strikes and unions could interrupt the war effort. Therefore, the government had a stake in preventing workers from using the war to gain better pay or working conditions at the cost of decreased production. Employers could and did ignore the call for workers’ rights by labeling such demands socialist or unpatriotic.
German immigrants were made to register as enemy aliens with the U.S. Justice Department. This is a page from the registration form of Hans Joachim von Fischer-Treuenfeld, who lived in Kansas City, Kansas. His story seems unusual. After Germany declared war, he reported to the German consul in New Orleans to serve as a reservist in the German army, but was dismissed. He later asked to be detained because he was being badly treated by Americans, who thought he was a German spy.
These members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were held for eighteen months at Ellis Island because of their radical support for better conditions for laborers. They are shown here in 1919, when they were released. The U.S. government detained thousands of antiwar advocates, socialists, and labor leaders, most of them immigrants who were not citizens. More than eight hundred people were deported back to their home countries.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL), the largest union in the United States, had gone on record in support of war just before it was declared. “It is our earnest hope that our republic may be safeguarded in its unswerving desire for peace,” pledged the union on March 24, 1917. “But despite all our endeavors and hopes, should our country be drawn into the maelstrom of the European conflict, we, with these ideals of liberty and justice herein declared, as the indispensable basis for national policies, offer our services to our country in every field of activity to defend, safeguard and preserve the republic of the United States of America against its enemies . . . and we call upon our fellow workers and fellow citizens in the holy name of labor, justice, freedom and humanity to devotedly and patriotically give like service.”
The wartime president of the AFL, Samuel Gompers, a British immigrant, did not believe that socialism was the way to better worker conditions. He envisioned a partnership of workers, employers, and government in which patience and fairness would prevail. In contrast, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a smaller and far more radical union nicknamed the Wobblies, denounced business, industry, and the military for pushing the United States into war. The federal government tapped the union’s phones and read its mail. Yet the IWW continued to agitate for the rights of working men and women through the war years. Between 1914 and 1920 there were more than 3,000 strikes a year; between 1916 and 1918 alone, more than 4 million workers went on strike.
Some employers used violence to break the strikes. They used privately hired security men, and sometimes regular police or federal troops, to attack strikers. They evicted families who lived in company-owned homes. When copper miners struck in Bisbee, Arizona, in June 1917, city law enforcers forced hundreds of strikers onto trains, then left them in the desert without food or water. In Butte, Montana, IWW organizer Frank Little, also working with copper miners, was dragged from his house and lynched. Lynching is the mob murder of someone believed to have committed a crime or violated social customs. A mob does not follow the rule of the law. Though government leaders and newspapers objected to lynching, the New York Times wrote that “the IWW agitators are in effect, and perhaps in fact, agents of Germany. The Federal authorities should make short work of these treasonable conspirators against the United States.”
After 1917, everything German came under attack. German Americans, even longtime citizens, experienced severe discrimination—and outright hatred—because they came from the country of America’s enemy. Perhaps many Americans did not realize that German Americans also served in the armed forces. “Two sons, Charlie and August went to the World War,” said Judge J. Faudie, an immigrant from Germany. “August was in France, and was in the army of occupation after the war closed. . . . I have become an American citizen long ago, and was glad that my boys could serve this country of my adoption . . . even if we were not here in those early days.”
Although the German language had been taught in schools throughout the country, almost half of the states eliminated it from classes. Orchestras stopped playing music by German composers like Ludwig van Beethoven. “It is still a question in my mind whether it is for the good of the country to abolish a treasure of art which does not belong to Germany but to the world,” famous conductor Leopold Stokowski wrote to President Wilson. “If, in your opinion, it is necessary for the good of the nation that the music of Bach and Beethoven be abolished from our concert programs, it is needless to say that I shall unquestionably abide by your decision.” Wilson suggested Stokowski listen to the public, which at this time was against almost everything German.
German-origin expressions changed—sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage” and hamburger “liberty sandwich.” German measles were called “liberty measles.” “Those who opposed or did not readily accept the United States’ entry into the War (especially, of course, if they happened to be of German ancestry) were labeled ‘pro-Germans,’” remembered A. J. Muste, a Protestant minister. “People began to act as amateur spies and loyalty agents, reporting mysterious circles of light in the windows of neighbors living somewhere near the shore, which were assumed to be signals to prowling German submarines.” Robert Prager, a German immigrant in Collinsville, Illinois (who had tried to enlist in the navy), was accused of attempting to blow up a mine and lynched.
But perhaps the most anger and contempt went toward conscientious objectors (COs)—those who refused to fight because of religious or personal beliefs. Some agreed to work for the army or the country in jobs where they did not have to carry weapons or kill. These included farming on the home front and aiding the wounded in France. But some COs refused even alternative service. Roger Baldwin, a social worker and pacifist, stated in a court hearing about whether he should be jailed: “I am not seeking to evade the draft. . . . I scorn evasion, compromise and gambling with moral issues. It may . . . be argued that the War Department’s liberal provision for agricultural service . . . for conscientious objectors would be open to me if I obey the law . . . and that there can be no moral objection to farming . . . I can make no moral distinction between the various services which assist in prosecuting a war—whether rendered in the trenches, in the purchase of bonds or thrift stamps at home, or in raising farm products under the lash of the draft act. All serve the same end—war.” Baldwin served nine months in jail for refusing to register for the draft. He became one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, which continues today to give legal help to citizens fighting for their civil rights.
COs who did agree to serve as noncombatants in the army were often harassed by other soldiers and officers. Erling H. Lunde was “punished for not doing ‘camp police,’ namely cutting grass on the post, by being put in solitary confinement on bread and water for three days.”
Conscientious objectors were often considered “slackers.” During World War I this meant anyone who avoided military service. The word “slackers” conveyed laziness and even cowardice. It was used to insult young men who were not in the armed forces and was sometimes directed even toward those who had tried to enlist but were rejected for medical reasons. An enthusiastic “patriot” might not bother to find the reason why a man was not in military uniform. One did not have to be a CO or a labor organizer or a socialist publisher or an immigrant to be charged with disloyalty. With emotions running high in wartime, and a federal government determined to establish unity of thought, anyone might find himself or herself accused of not being 100 percent American.
The federal government grew larger and more powerful during World War I. This was not particularly what Wilson or the Americans who served in his government and on the war boards wanted. They believed they could persuade—and sometimes harass—civilians into doing what was needed to fight the war. But World War I demanded more of government and citizens than any war before it. It took an increased income tax to fund it—even though tax rates might go down afterward, they would never be as low as they were before the First World War. By creating committees to oversee production and conservation, government showed Americans that it could be useful in helping to run the country in a crisis and reach out to citizens at every level. This was something progressives and socialists had hoped for. But the war also demonstrated that the U.S. government could use propaganda on a large scale to win the loyalty of Americans and censor those who disagreed.
