Chapter 16
In This Chapter
● Trying to be a good imperialist
● Following the Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson presidencies
● Sweeping America’s shortcomings out from under the rug
● Making progress with the Progressives
● Marching into World War I
At the beginning of the 20th century, the U.S. was all dressed up for a world party but not too sure about going into the dance. America’s somewhat-reluctant empire extended halfway around the globe, so the country was beginning to look like an international player. But people still remembered the Founding Fathers’ warnings to stay away from entangling foreign hassles, and they were more concerned with the economic and social work to do at home.
After years of holding off change, the U.S. shifted into high gear and went trucking down the road to major reform when the odometer of history flipped over to 1900. Just when the Progressives were looking for even more corruption to haul away, the U.S. got dragged into World War I. After tipping the balance toward victory in the war, the nation got so moral at the peace negotiations that it couldn’t stand itself. By not quite agreeing to sign on for its own ideals, the U.S. unintentionally ensured that it would have to fight for them again. But World War II is a story for Chapter 18; this chapter is about what happened in the early 20th century leading up to World War I.
For the test, the way the political, economic, and social (PES) system works is to associate a PES topic in italics with a date (in parenthesis), like Progressives (1910). (See Chapter 1 for more on the PES system.) The big AP test doesn’t care much about exact dates, but you do need to be able to keep the highlights in chronological order. If the PES topic is a law, the date is when it was passed, like the Seventeenth Amendment (1913). If the topic is an institution like Hull House (1889) or a person like John D. Rockefeller (1885), the date is just a representative year in what could be a long career. Remember, the date in parentheses is just an approximate time signal.
More Substitute Teacher than Cop: The U.S. in Asia
In 1899, the Americans and the Filipinos were standing side by side waving goodbye to the Spanish colonists when the native independence fighters realized something was wrong with this picture: The Yankees weren’t leaving.
After five years of the U.S. Army slogging through the jungle led by ex-American-Indian-fighters from the Wild West, the Americans managed to knock out all the major rebel armies at a cost of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. The rewards to the U.S. were slight; it got a naval base and a jumping-off place for activity in Asia. The Filipinos learned some English in the schools Americans helped build but were quite happy to finally get their freedom on July 4th, 1946 — see Chapter 18.
China and the Open Door Policy
Colonialism made little European countries feel like big dogs, so they tried to nip off pieces such as Hong Kong from large-but-weak China. The U.S. didn’t want to nab China, but the nation also didn’t want other countries to set up permanent shop and exclude them from the party. So the U.S., consulting more or less with the other major players, issued the Open Door Policy (1899). All foreign nations in China were supposed to respect Chinese rights and let other countries bid fairly on commercial contracts. To the Chinese, it felt like an agreement among the bullies about how to fairly divide the lunch money they stole.
Question: What was the Open Door Policy?
Answer: A U.S.-sponsored agreement among Western nations to respect Chinese rights and let other countries bid fairly on commercial contracts.
The Boxer Rebellion
Chinese anti-Westerners called the Boxers murdered Western missionaries and besieged Western diplomats holed up in the capital of Beijing. Western governments quickly threw together an eight-nation rescue/invasion force of 20,000 soldiers to put down the Boxer Rebellion (1900).
The United States contributed a couple of thousand troops handily located in the Philippines. The Western diplomats barricaded their offices into one big fort and held out for 55 days with nothing but one old cannon until help arrived.
China had to pay a huge amount of money for the trouble some of their citizens had caused the Westerners. Shame over their weakness led the Chinese to get rid of the ancient Empress Dowager and start a more modern government. The U.S. used some of its share of the money to educate Chinese students in America.
Rough Riding with the Teddy Bear
A nation happy to be a world power without having to do much fighting overwhelmingly reelected William McKinley for a second term. This time, plump and popular McKinley was almost overshadowed by his rambunctious running mate, Theodore Roosevelt, hero of the Spanish-American War.
The political bosses in New York State were so happy to see their reform-minded energy-ball governor Roosevelt leave to run for vice president that they would have bought him the office if they could just to get rid of him.
Teddy toured with cowboys and cut into the rural and Western support for the Democratic nominee, good old cross-of-gold William Jennings Bryan. In the end, the election wasn’t even close — McKinley and Roosevelt won because although a lot of people didn’t like imperialism, they were more afraid of Bryan’s crazy economic theories.
The U.S. didn’t get long with safe and sane William McKinley; a crazy anarchist gunned him down at the 1901 world’s fair in Buffalo. Although the fair displayed an early X-ray machine, doctors didn’t know how to use it, so they never removed the bullet, which would have saved McKinley’s life. Worse, they had to operate in a room without electric lights. Electricity was relatively new, and although the outside of the building had beautiful lights all over it, no one had thought to put one in the medical department on the inside. At 42, Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt became the youngest president ever.
The rise of Teddy Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt was a whirlwind. One of the greatest and toughest presidents in American history, Roosevelt was so sickly as a child that he had to sleep sitting up to keep from dying of asthma. His father insisted that he exercise and take up boxing to keep from being beaten up by bullies. Even though a doctor told him that his heart condition would keep him at a desk job, Roosevelt just increased his activity.
Roosevelt was brilliant, graduating from Harvard magna cum laude. He wrote books about U.S. Navy battles in the War of 1812 and a four-volume history of the West, both of which scholars still cite today. Roosevelt’s first presidency was as leader of the American Historical Association.
When his mother and his young wife both happened to die on the same day, Roosevelt headed west. He built a ranch in the Dakota Territory and learned shooting, riding, and roping. Elected deputy sheriff, he single handedly brought in three desperados, guarding them without sleeping for almost two days by reading Tolstoy to keep awake. He later married his childhood sweetheart and took her on a honeymoon to Europe, where he climbed Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps.
Appointed to the Civil Service Commission, he served with such fairness that even after the Democrats won the White House, they kept Progressive Republican Roosevelt at his post. As the police commissioner of New York, he cleaned up the police department, often calling officers in the middle of the night to make sure they were on duty.
Roosevelt had always loved the Navy, so Republican President William McKinley appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Assistant was enough power for Roosevelt; he pretty much ran things over the head of his boss and modernized the Navy.
When the Spanish-American War broke out, Roosevelt quit his desk job and organized a regiment of volunteers called the Rough Riders: cowboys, American Indians, polo players, and policemen. Fighting alongside a black regiment, they did well in the key battles of the fight for Cuba. See Chapter 15 for more on the Spanish-American War.
The Big-Stick philosophy
When news of McKinley’s assassination reached Roosevelt, he was camping in the mountains. Even before becoming president, he used to speak publicly in favor of speaking softly but carrying a big stick. Teddy worked to carry out McKinley’s careful policies, but he began to use his famous Big Stick to support progressive laws as he became comfortable as president. Roosevelt charmed his opponents with talk and threatened them with the Big Stick of power. Roosevelt began the practice of busting up trusts (corporations that controlled whole industries so they could fix prices) to encourage competition and lower prices for customers. See Chapter 15 for more on trusts.
Don’t get mesmerized by Theodore Roosevelt’s Big-Stick philosophy and think that he made all the progress in the 1900s. Roosevelt’s successor, William Taft, actually busted more trusts than Teddy. Roosevelt set the tone, but he was balanced and opportunistic in his politics.
Building the Panama Canal
One place Theodore Roosevelt didn’t settle for incremental progress was in dealing with other nations. When the nation of Columbia wouldn’t let the United States build a canal through its Panama district, Teddy helped set up a revolution in which Panama became an independent country. The new country was — big surprise — thrilled to have a U.S.-owned canal running through the middle of it.
Teddy became the first president to leave U.S. soil when he energetically dashed down to Panama to help with the digging. Health workers figured out how to protect people from yellow fever and malaria as the result of America’s interest in surviving in both the canal and in Cuba. The Panama Canal (1914) was a big success, cutting sailing time between the Atlantic and Pacific by more than half. The U.S. finally turned the canal over to Panama in 1999 after owning it for almost 100 years.
The Roosevelt Corollary
Teddy also created the overreaching Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1905), also known as preventive intervention. The original Monroe Doctrine (1823) said that the United States would defend the New World from any further attempts at Old World colonization.
The Roosevelt Corollary said that to keep the little countries of South America from being taken over by bad Europeans, the U.S. would step in with good Americans but only to help them. Well, maybe also to help some big businessmen. U.S. troops invaded six Latin American countries but kept none of them as colonies.
Question: What was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine?
Answer: The U.S. would prevent the intervention of Old World powers in Latin America by intervening itself as necessary.
Nativism and the Great White Fleet
Still squabbling over the China situation, Japan and Russia fought a war in 1904. Roosevelt got them to a conference table in the U.S. and hammered out a peace agreement, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize. Roosevelt sent the entire U.S. Navy, painted white, on an around-the-world cruise as The Great White Fleet (1908), symbolizing both American purity and strength.
In 1906, he made a secret deal with the Japanese to limit immigration, thus reassuring California, which was beginning to work up an Asian paranoia again after having previously excluded the Chinese. The movement to limit immigration, called nativism, grew in the early 1900s due to increases in the foreign-born population, competition for jobs, and paranoia about imported radicals.
Question: What influenced the rise of nativism in the early 1900s?
Answer: Increases in the foreign-born population, competition for jobs, and paranoia about imported radicals. California was a center of anti-Asian feeling.
Exposing the Shortcomings of Society
Although change sometimes begins slowly, it can be pretty rambunctious after it gets going. The U.S. had always had a Progressive movement, even as early as Abigail Adams’s remember-the-ladies letter before the Revolution. Although “walrus” presidents (with their slow-moving politics and big business) seemed to dominate the post-Civil War 1800s, the Greenback Labor party of the 1870s and the Populist party of the 1890s also got in on the act. Progressive thinkers rejected the Social Darwinism of unregulated business and called for government action because concentrations of wealth were hurting, not improving, society.
Women and working people didn’t win their crusades, but they also didn’t give up. Upper-class suffragettes worked for the women’s vote and improved living conditions through urban settlement houses like Jane Addams’s Hull House (1889) in Chicago and Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement (1893) in New York. Women’s clubs blossomed from 100,000 members in the 1890s to more than 1 million by World War I.
Question: Why did Progressives reject Social Darwinism?
Answer: Because the natural competition of unregulated business seemed to be hurting people, not helping society to evolve.
Muckraking becomes an art
Exposing the shortcomings of society became a major occupation with the increase in the circulation of newspapers, popular magazines, and books in the early 1900s. People seemed to be able to dredge up almost any hidden secret. Lincoln Steffens (1902) wrote The Shame of the Cities, detailing municipal corruption in leading towns. Ida Tarbell (1904) exposed the monopolistic practices of the Standard Oil Company that had ruined her father. Thomas Lawson (1905), himself a major stock manipulator, tattled on the trust scammers in Frenzied Finance. Other socially conscious authors examined legislative corruption in The Treason of the Senate (1906), the slow progress of the blacks in Following the Color Line (1908), and child labor in The Bitter Cry of Children (1906). Teddy Roosevelt called these reformers muckrakers (1904) because they insisted on cleaning up the country by looking down at the mucky mess.
Question: What helped muckrakers publicize their investigations?
Answer: The growth in the popular press, magazines, and books.
Clearing away bad food
Dr. Harvey Wiley worked from within the government with a Poison Squad to uncover enough bad food to lead to the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), forcing manufacturers to use safe ingredients and honest labels.
The Jungle (1906) by muckraker Upton Sinclair sickened the public with its description of what went on inside the food industry and led to the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Federal inspectors visited packing houses to work toward protecting people from being poisoned by their own food. Like the novel Ramona (see Chapter 15), which intended to save American Indians but ended up initially saving Mission architecture, The Jungle intended to save workers but ended up saving the food they processed.
Charting progress with the Progressives
Forward-thinking attempts to clean up politics became a cause for both political parties.
The Progressives (1910) succeeded because they weren’t marginalized as dangerous radicals: Progressives were middle-and even upper-class reformers working to fix the system from within.
Question: Why were the Progressives so successful?
Answer: They were respectable middle-class reformers with popular support.
To get around the influence of political bosses, Progressives introduced the initiative system so that voters could propose and vote on new laws without going through the legislature. The still-ongoing attempts to limit campaign contributions and the corruption they can bring began with the Progressives passing campaign financing laws in a few states in the early 1900s. Previously, voters had to mark ballots in public, and party bosses could see how people voted; the Progressives made the secret Australian ballot the national standard. Often-corrupt state legislatures elected Senators until Progressives passed the Seventeenth Amendment (1913), which mandated the election of Senators by the people.
In the key Supreme Court case of Muller v. Oregon (1908), Progressive attorney Louis Brandeis convinced the Court that states have a right to protect employees in the workplace; in this case, that meant protecting women from having to work more than 10 hours a day. Brandeis went on to become the first Jewish high official when he himself joined the Supreme Court.
The tragic industrial Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911) claimed the lives of almost 150 women workers but led to legal regulation of workplaces. By the time of World War I, more than half of the states had laws providing some worker’s compensation to people injured on the job. Prohibition rode along with other causes; by 1914 more than half of the country had prohibited the sale of liquor.
Implementing Roosevelt's Square Deal
Theodore Roosevelt promised Americans a Square Deal: He would control the big corporations, protect consumers, and conserve the environment. When coal miners stayed on strike for almost half a year, it looked like a frozen winter for the many people who heated their homes with coal. Roosevelt called employers and workers into the White House and became the first president to hammer out a labor agreement. He threatened to use federal troops against the mine owners if they didn’t compromise — a big change from previous government actions, when the troops were always ordered in against the workers. Congress created the Department of Commerce and Labor (1903) to oversee both business and workers.
Question: How did President Roosevelt handle the coal strike?
Answer: He became the first president to arbitrate a labor settlement.
The all-powerful railroads got slapped around a bit when the Elkins Act (1902) prohibited rebates that kept rates high for little shippers and the Hepburn Act (1906) ended the practice of giving free passes to anyone who could write or pass laws against the transportation companies. The heretofore wimpy Interstate Commerce Commission actually got the power to take action against fares that gouged the public.
Roosevelt busted his first big trust with the Northern Securities Company (1904). Famous rich guy J.P. Morgan and his friends were trying to monopolize railroads in the Northwest. Roosevelt slapped them down, and the Supreme Court backed him. Teddy Roosevelt didn’t believe that big business was automatically bad. He was just against businesses that controlled a market so that they could unfairly make people pay high prices. He probably wouldn’t have minded today’s big-box stores as long as they allowed real competition.
Preserving the American Wilderness
Teddy Roosevelt went camping with the famous environmentalist John Muir and got really committed to saving land. Because the frontier was no longer limitless, the U.S. started locking up land for the future in parks and national forests.
Before Roosevelt, the U.S. had the Forest Reserve Act (1891), which set aside some land, but most of the country was open to exploitation by loggers, miners, ranchers, or anybody else with a profitable way to use it up.
First Roosevelt increased the value of Western land by supporting the Newlands Reclamation Act (1902), which resulted in damming nearly every river in the West to irrigate nearby fields. Then he set aside almost 200 million acres of land for national forests and parks — way more land than all the previous presidents combined.
Working with farsighted Forest Service head Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt created 42 million acres of national forests, 53 national wildlife refuges, and 18 areas of special interest like the Grand Canyon. Americans responded by joining new outdoor organizations like the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Sierra Club (founded by Roosevelt’s buddy Muir).
Roosevelt Gives Way to Taft and then Wilson
Roosevelt rode out a financial panic in 1907 by passing the Aldrich-Vreeland Act (1908), which provided for the issuance of emergency currency and paved the way for the National Reserve Act (1913) that’s still responsible for dealing with national financial problems.
He easily won reelection in 1904 and supported William Howard Taft as his successor when his second term expired in 1908. Most of the nation wanted him to stay on as president, but he went hunting in Africa instead.
Trust-busting with William Howard Taft
President William Howard Taft had a hard act to follow. Fat and jovial, Taft tried to stick to Roosevelt’s policies without Roosevelt’s vision or charm. He took on the U.S. Steel trust and a number of other monopolies, carefully following laws passed under Roosevelt.
Taft and the trusts
The Supreme Court ordered that Standard Oil Company be broken up in 1911. At the same time, the Court issued a rule of reason that said the law applied only to companies that unreasonably restrain trade, thus making it harder to bust trusts. Even so, Taft went after twice as many monopolies as Teddy actually sued.
Republican businessmen generally liked high tariffs on imported goods; it made their products easier to sell at a profit. Problem was, the Progressive wing of their own party called high tariffs the Mother of All Trusts and vowed to substantially lower the charges. After lots of inner-party wrangling, Congress passed the Payne-Aldrich Bill (1909), which only lowered tariffs on the items people didn’t want anyway.
Taft had failed to come through for the Progressive wing of his party. He did act to protect U.S. business interests in Latin America with a few invasions of little countries, but he got in even more trouble with Progressives for firing environmental hero Gifford Pinchot for criticizing the sale of public lands to corporate development. Taft did establish the Bureau of Mines to protect coal land and water supplies, but it was too little too late. The Republicans lost big in Congress and then, with Roosevelt running on a third-party ticket, lost even bigger in the presidential election of 1912 to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Injured in a perilous exploration in South America, Teddy Roosevelt died in his sleep in 1919. Said Wilson’s vice president Thomas Marshall, “Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.” Roosevelt enlarged the Presidency and the nation in three ways: He civilized capitalism so that it could survive in a world where people as well as profit mattered; he began to make the environment a concern of government; and he introduced the U.S. to its growing responsibilities on the world stage. He is also associated with the introduction of the teddy bear, the model of a little bear he refused to shoot on a hunting trip. Actually, realist Roosevelt didn’t like the idea of a bear being seen as cuddly.
Idealism with Woodrow Wilson
1912 was a campaign to remember. Roosevelt’s name was put in nomination at the Progressive party convention by Hull House feminist Jane Addams. The convention exploded when Roosevelt declared, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
During the campaign, Roosevelt was shot in the chest in Milwaukee by John Schrank, a crazy person. Fortunately, the bullet went through Roosevelt’s steel glasses case, but he was still wounded and bleeding. Roosevelt refused all help and went on to make an 80-minute speech after he had been shot. Doctors decided the bullet was too dangerous to remove, and he carried it with him for the rest of his life. He took a couple of weeks off and then was back on the campaign trail.
On election day, Democrat Woodrow Wilson won easily because Taft and Roosevelt split the Republican vote (although Teddy got more of the vote). The country’s heart was clearly with the Progressives. Not counting the very unprogressive South, which voted for Democrats just because they weren’t Republicans, Progressive votes would have easily won the election. Even the perennial Socialist candidate Eugene Debs racked up 900,000 votes. It was time for some changes.
Wilson sets out to teach America
Woodrow Wilson was only the second Democratic president since the Civil War and the first teacher ever elected president. He promised a program of New Freedoms, which included antitrust action, tariff revision, and reform in banking.
A man of serious purpose, he went after a clear program and got what he fought for on the domestic front. He was also, ahem, the second great president (after Teddy Roosevelt) to be a historian. Maybe we could all make history if we weren’t so busy talking about it.
Wilson got real reductions in the cost of imported goods in the Underwood Tariff Bill (1913). By taking the unprecedented step of going to Congress himself and appealing to the American people to watch their representatives for last-minute special-interest tricks, Wilson got a bill that really reduced import fees. Because the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment (1913) allowed for an income tax, Congress slapped on a modest charge on all incomes over the equivalent of $65,000 in modern money ($3,000 back then). By 1917, income tax passed tariff receipts as the largest share of the federal income.
Question: When did taxes on imports stop being the largest share of federal income?
Answer: With the passage of the income tax in 1917.
Shoring up the banking system
Clearly, the banking system needed some help. The Roosevelt panic of 1907 had shown that the government could ease financial downturns if it had some extra cash to throw into the game when times got tough. Wilson went directly to Congress and got the Federal Reserve Act (1913), one of the most important economic landmarks in U.S. history and still the law of the land.
What the Federal Reserve Act did was establish a national system of 12 privately owned regional banks under the central authority of the Federal Reserve Board appointed by the president and Congress. In this best-of-both-worlds establishment, the regional banks can issue Federal Reserve Notes for private money backed by the government, but only under direction from the government-controlled Federal Reserve Board.
With the power of private enterprise and the control of central government policy, the government spaced the regional banks around the country to try to minimize the control of Wall Street New York money. Good luck; New York remained the financial capital no matter how many solid-looking bank buildings the rest of the country got.
The Trade Commission and Anti-Trust Act
In early 1914, Wilson made his third appearance before Congress. Moving on from the Roosevelt/Taft program of busting trusts, Wilson encouraged fair competition through the Federal Trade Commission (1914), which stopped monopolistic trade practices.
With the addition of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act (1914), the practices of price discrimination, agreements forbidding retailers from handling other companies’ products, and interlocking directorate agreements to limit competition all became illegal. Even better, individual officers of corporations could be held responsible if their companies violated the laws.
The new business laws set out clear guidelines that corporations had to follow, much better than being thumped with no warning under previous, less clear legislation. As a plus for labor, the law ended the silly business of applying anti-trust laws to unions.
Victories for ordinary people
Wilson made himself even more popular with working people when, in 1916, he approved legislation (the Adamson Act) that increased wages and cut working hours of railroad employees, thus avoiding a strike.
Wilson was on a roll; the victories for ordinary people just kept coming.
● The Federal Farm Loan Act (1916) and the Warehouse Act (1916) let farmers get much-needed loans at low rates.
● The La Follette Seamen’s Act (1915) guaranteed sailors on American merchant ships decent wages and treatment (and doomed the U.S. merchant fleet, which couldn’t compete).
● The Workingmen’s Compensation Act (1916) granted help to disabled federal employees.
Wilson's shortcoming: Government segregation
Wilson had a moral blind spot when it came to the treatment of blacks. A Southerner who fondly remembered seeing Robert E. Lee as a child, Wilson delivered for his racist South Democratic voters by segregating federal offices for the first time since the Civil War and dismissing many blacks from government work.
His segregation of government lasted until after World War II, when the Democrats under Harry Truman decided to do the right thing for civil rights even if it cost them the next election (which it did). Since that time, the South has moved into the Republican column in most elections.
The most important black leader to stand up to Wilson’s segregationist tendencies during the Progressive Era was the eloquent W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP. Du Bois fought for African American progress for most of his 95-year life. He carried the torch until the day he died, which just happened to be the day before Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.
Question: Who was the most important black leader during the Progressive time period? Answer: W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP.
Progressing Internationally
Wilson tried to apply morality to international relations, but it’s hard to be idealistic when other people are shooting at you. He withdrew subsidies for U.S. companies investing abroad and stopped giving American ships free passage through the Panama Canal. He reluctantly continued the Roosevelt Corollary by sending Marines in to tame violence in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Wilson bought the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean from Denmark, thus giving Americans another naval ship base and another navel tanning choice.
Wilson did his best to stay out of Mexican politics as factions maneuvered after a revolution. Standing up to pressure from American businessmen worried about their Mexican investments, Wilson declared that he wouldn’t decide foreign policy “in the terms of material interest.”
After innocent Americans had been killed on both sides of the border by Pancho Villa’s soldiers, Wilson sent General “Black Jack” Pershing on a lightning cavalry raid into Mexico. Pershing chased Pancho’s army and was swiftly pulled back. He may be needed elsewhere; the situation in Europe was looking grim.
World War I Begins
Germany and Austria-Hungary were locked in a war with Britain, France and Russia. The actual fighting started in 1914 after Franz Ferdinand, the prince who was set to become emperor of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated on a visit to Serbia. However, the endless fight to be top dog of Europe had been brewing for hundreds of years. This was exactly the kind of war the United States wanted to avoid.
The natural tendency of English-speaking America to side with England was helped along by careful propaganda coming over the only news wire from Europe, which conveniently ran through Britain. Plus, Germans looked like bad guys with their spiked helmets, upturned mustaches, and habit of tromping through neutral countries.
The millions of Americans with German heritage did little cheering for their old homeland; one of the reasons they left Germany in the first place was to avoid all that military bluster. Americans even changed the German names of foods: sauerkraut became victory cabbage, and more Americans started saying “hot dog” instead of wiener.
Germany paid a penalty for not ruling the waves. America proclaimed her neutral rights to the seas in hopes of continuing trade with the warring parties who were very much in need of supplies. Meanwhile, Germany and Britain both blockaded each other. Britain used surface ships that could gently force American cargo ships away from Germany and into British ports. Germany used submarines, which could only wave at passing ships or sink them; they weren’t big enough to shepherd the American ships to distant German ports or even take on extra passengers if the ships sank. Because this war was the first with submarines, the whole game seemed like dirty pool to many Americans.
The sinking of the Lusitania
Germany said that it would try not to sink any neutral ships but that mistakes could easily happen. The first so-called mistake wasn’t a neutral ship but the British liner Lusitania carrying ammunition as well as passengers. The Germans sunk it off Ireland in 1915, killing over a thousand people, more than a hundred of them Americans.
Germany agreed to stop sinking passenger liners but reasonably asked that Britain respond by lifting its blockade, which was starving the German people. Britain refused, so safety on the sea was definitely up in the air as the U.S. got ready to vote for president in 1916. Wilson barely squeaked through to reelection on a platform that said, “He kept us out of war,” but he made no guarantees for the future.
America marches to the Great War
At the beginning of 1917, Wilson made one last, moving speech asking the fighting powers to come to the peace table. Meanwhile, the Germans made a whopping tactical decision. Figuring that it would take the U.S. longer to get to France than it would take Germany to win the war with full submarine warfare, the Germans announced that all bets were off. They were blockaded, and they intended to blockade Britain by sinking any ships headed that way. Then stupid got stupider.
The Germans sent a note called the Zimmermann telegram to Mexico, inviting them to invade the United States with the help of Japan. This harebrained scheme would never have worked, and the Mexicans knew it. Britain, who had been happily reading diplomatic mail from other countries that passed through their island along the transatlantic cable, intercepted the telegram and excitedly showed it to the United States. The Germans had already started sinking ships, and the telegram was the last straw for even peace-loving Wilson. The United States declared war on Germany.
Making War with noble intentions
Forced to resort to cold steel, Wilson turned fighting into an idealistic crusade. He declared that this was a “war to end all wars” and a “crusade to make the world safe for democracy.” Wilson outlined the 14 Points (1918) he felt should be the righteous aims of the Allies. In short form, they included:
● No secret treaties (like the spider webs of undercover alliances that started the war)
● Freedom of the seas
● Free trade
● Fewer weapons
● National self-determination (a people’s right to choose its own form of government without interference)
● An international organization to keep the peace
A propaganda machine led by George Creel talked up America’s peaceful war aims. Meanwhile, an ugly set of repressive laws, the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), led to the arrest of virtually anyone who spoke up against the war.
Most of the 2,000 prosecutions were against union leaders, including Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who had been putting up with persecution for 24 years since the Pullman Strike of 1894.
Question: What were the main issues in Wilson’s 14 Points?
Answer: Open treaties, freedom of the seas, national self-determination and an international peace keeping organization.
Preparing for War
America never got into full production for World War I. The draft supplied lots of soldiers after the War Department issued a work or fight declaration. Labor was kept under control by the National War Labor Board chaired by roly-poly former President Taft. Unions made solid gains in membership, and pay improved with lots of wartime work.
For the first time, blacks (who had for years stayed in the South) began to move North to take wartime jobs; 500,000 made the move by 1920. This migration led to violence on the part of whites, especially when blacks helped break white labor actions like the great steel strike of 1919.
Question: When did blacks start to migrate to the North?
Answer: They made the move during and after World War I.
The role of Women in the Great War
President Wilson learned how determined women were to get the vote when police arrested 20 suffragettes who were trying to storm the White House. During the war, he came out in favor of women’s suffrage as “a vitally necessary war measure.” Most Western states had given women the vote before 1914 (see Chapter 15). New York, Michigan, Oklahoma, and South Dakota jumped on board during the war, and after only 130 years of waiting, Abigail Adams’ pre-Revolution wish finally came true. With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), all American women got the right to vote.
With men gone to fight, some women took temporary so-called men’s jobs in railroads and factories, but they quickly gave up their positions when the war was over. Still, by the end of the war, one out of four women had a job outside the home.
Food and drink (and Prohibition) at Wartime
Food was no problem for America during the war; farm production increased by 20 percent. An effective humanitarian engineer named Herbert Hoover had already led a food drive to help Europe — now he headed the national effort.
People grew victory gardens and patriotically observed meatless Tuesdays and wheatless Wednesdays. Liberty Loan drives got ordinary citizens to buy government bonds and raised billions of dollars to finance the war.
Question: What was the Liberty Loan program?
Answer: Liberty Loan was a government bond program in which ordinary citizens helped raise money to finance the war.
Congress restricted the manufacture of alcohol, and that set the already half-dry country up for its national experiment with Prohibition. Lots of brewers were a little suspect anyway, what with all the German names like Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst. Progressives were under fire from prohibitionists to try a perfect boozeless society.
In 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the legal sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States, thus opening the door for lots of profitable illegal sales. (In 1933, the Twenty First Amendment repealed Prohibition; see Chapter 17.)
Question: What led to the passage of Prohibition in 1919?
Answer: Years of Prohibition campaigning, war shortages, the belief that human beings could be perfected, plus the spreading passage of state anti-liquor laws.
Entering the fight — reluctantly
At first, the U.S. hoped to just send the Navy and let the Europeans do the ground fighting. The British and French quickly fessed up: They were almost out of men. The United States drafted a minimally trained army of 4 million men and began to ship them to Europe.
A year passed between the time America declared war and the time an effective U.S. fighting force assembled in Europe, and it was none too soon. Russia, which had been fighting on the Allied side, was swept by a Communist revolution and dropped out of the war.
Experienced German troops shifted to fight in France. By May of 1918, the Germans were within 40 miles of Paris. The first large American contingent was thrown right into a breach in the French line. By July, the German advance ground to a halt. By the fall, over a million American troops were helping to slowly push the Germans back.
Heroes came from the strangest places: Sergeant York, an American soldier raised in an antiwar church, singlehandedly killed 20 Germans and captured 132 more.
The Great War ends — sort of
In October, the Germans asked for peace based on Wilson’s 14 Points. At 11:00 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month (November 11, 1918), the Great War was over.
The Allied forces won because Germany knew what was going to happen if it continued fighting; Socialist revolutions were going on back in Germany, and lots of German (and Allied) troops were dying from a worldwide flu epidemic. Germany had given up before it was completely defeated, something that would come to bother a hard-fighting, wounded German army corporal named Adolf Hitler.
The United States was far from the arsenal of democracy it would become in World War II; Britain and France actually supplied most of the planes, big guns, and transport ships used by American troops.
Leaders of the world hurried to Paris in January of 1919 to conclude a peace treaty while revolutions were tearing apart Russia and central Europe. Woodrow Wilson was the hero of the day. People expected freedom and peace from the 14 Points. Unfortunately, most of the points’ good ideas didn’t end up in the Treaty of Versailles, a compromise Wilson had to make with broke, tired, and angry European victors.
Wilson tried to move the world toward fairness, and he did succeed on getting a few new nations established and some more reasonable boundaries drawn. In the end, Wilson got a treaty with too much reparation money due to be paid by a too-poor Germany. He took what he could get to preserve his pet project, the League of Nations.
The peace that can’t hold
Back in America, powerful conservative forces had taken over Congress. They refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles as written, and Wilson refused to accept anything less. The misunderstood final warning from George Washington to “avoid foreign entanglements” hovered over the hall like an outdated ghost.
George had been speaking to a small, weak nation of farmers in a world where crossing the ocean took weeks and America didn’t have to trade with anybody. Now the U.S. was the one nation with the strength and moral position to make the League of Nations work, but it wouldn’t take the responsibility. Wilson’s moral position worked against him — some senators had just had it with the do-gooder.
Wilson works to hold everything together
Wilson went on a speaking tour to try to get people to put pressure on the Congress to accept the treaty. In Pueblo, Colorado, with tears streaming down his cheeks, he pleaded for the League of Nations as the only way to avoid another war. That night he collapsed. Hit by a stroke, Wilson didn’t make public appearances for months afterwards. The political strategy he followed from his sick bed was feverish.
Wilson’s Democratic Party had lost control of Congress in the 1918 elections. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the great Republican enemy of the League of Nations, attached some reservations to the treaty that Wilson didn’t like. Wilson ordered all the Democratic senators to vote against the treaty rather than compromise. Having been so successful in the past, Wilson seemed to think he could turn the upcoming presidential election of 1920 into a referendum on the treaty.
Question: How did President Wilson try to convince Congress to vote for the Treaty of
Versailles?
Answer: He appealed directly to the people to put pressure on Congress.
The League of Nations fatts
The Republicans nominated affable and empty-headed Warren Harding for president. He trounced the Democrats who supported the League of Nations by saying he would work for a vague Association of Nations and playing to the postwar atmosphere of relief. The Republicans got almost twice as many votes as the too-serious Democrats.
The failure of the United States to join the League of Nations led to World War II. The United States didn’t create Hitler, Mussolini, or the poverty, greed, and hatred that sparked World War II and caused the deaths of 72 million people, including 418,000 Americans. But because of outmoded isolationism and an almost-adolescent snit between people who were too righteous to work together, the United States did nothing to stop it. As the saying goes, if you’re not part of the solution, maybe you’re part of the problem.