12
On September 26, 1918, 300,000 young Americans climbed out of their trenches and dashed through fog, mud, and exploding artillery shells into no-man’s-land and toward German entrenchments in the Argonne forest, ninety miles east of Paris. The opening days of the drive did not go well. German artillery and hidden machine gun nests wiped out entire companies. Roads became virtually impassable because of mud, shell craters, and traffic. Horses were critical to carting supplies to the front and transporting wounded to the rear. The few light tanks under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton were picked off one by one as they lost the support of ground troops. After four days, the Americans had been stopped in their tracks. French commanders, contemptuous of the inexperienced Americans whose early actions often resulted in disorganized chaos, said, “We told you so.”
There were some bright spots for the doughboys in the opening days of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Private Alvin York, a former conscientious objector, single-handedly killed 28 Germans, took 132 prisoners, and captured 35 machines guns. Despite the “slackers” who took refuge in the rear, most Americans demonstrated an aggressive will to fight, hurling themselves straight at German positions. Directing the American effort was General John J. Pershing, fifty-seven years old and looking every bit the man in charge, standing ramrod straight in a crisply pressed uniform that matched his steely personality. As supreme commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe, Pershing resisted French and British appeals to integrate American troops with battle-tested Allied divisions. He was adamant that Americans fight as a self-contained unit operating under its own commanders. This plan, he believed, would give his troops the motivation to win.
President Woodrow Wilson stood by his commander, despite appeals from French and British leaders to integrate Americans with Allied forces. Wilson and Pershing realized that the doughboys, sometimes thrust into combat with minimal training, would have to learn on the job. Despite very high casualties in the campaign, Pershing demanded that his men keep attacking. To prepare for the offensive, he had peppered Secretary of War Newton Baker with requests for more men, more supplies, and especially more horses. The lack of American ships created a bedeviling bottleneck. A deal with Britain for transport vessels helped immensely, shipping 300,000 Yanks a month to France by the summer of 1918.
German contempt for the American military turned to disbelief as advancing Yanks drove the enemy from their bunkers and trenches. Outnumbered and dispirited, German commanders decided to push for a truce rather than see French, British, Canadian, and American troops march into the fatherland. Pershing wanted an unconditional surrender but settled for the armistice signed November 11, 1918, which amounted to the same thing. American intervention had turned the tide of the war, changing a stalemated impasse that had lasted more than four years into victory. Pershing deserves some credit for the outcome, but many hands contributed to the Allies’ success. Regardless of who gets the credit for the German defeat, World War I was a critical moment in American statebuilding.1
AMERICA ENTERS THE WORLD STAGE
The path to the American intervention into World War I began in the late nineteenth century, when a global outreach commenced. Influenced by European imperialism and the buildup of national navies, the United States modernized its fleet and defeated Spain in 1898, which put the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam under American control. Hawaii was annexed the same year, bolstering America’s Pacific presence, which already included Alaska and the Midway Islands (1867). Wake and Eastern Samoa were added in 1899.
With US possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and with expanding commercial aspirations, the construction of an interocean canal in Central America gained support. President Theodore Roosevelt used the navy and diplomacy to assist Panama’s break from Colombia in 1903 and persuaded Congress to fund the Panama Canal, which opened in 1914. Bases in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay and in Puerto Rico protected the investment; the purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1916 added other safe harbors. In the years just prior to World War I, the US Navy landed troops in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico. John Pershing gained combat experience in the campaign to suppress Filipino revolutionaries (1899–1902) and notoriety by leading the expedition to catch Pancho Villa (1916–1917) in Mexico during its revolution. For all intents and purposes, the Caribbean had become an American lake, policed through “gunboat diplomacy.”
American outreach in the Pacific also expanded. The United States sent troops to China during the Boxer Rebellion (1900) and displayed its naval prowess in Tokyo when sixteen American battleships toured the world (1907–1909). President Roosevelt encouraged the “white fleet’s” visit to Japan, whose navy had defeated Russia in 1905. American naval planners formulated Plan Orange to block the Japanese should they advance on the Philippines.2
By and large, Americans accepted these military-diplomatic developments as consistent with the country’s continental dominance. Yet most people in the United States were surprised when Britain, France, and Russia (the Allies) went to war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in August 1914. President Wilson announced American neutrality, the nation’s traditional posture concerning conflicts in Europe. No diplomatic pact tied the United States to any of the belligerents, although American sympathies, especially among those of English heritage, leaned toward Britain. The president’s efforts to steer clear of entanglements, however, faced impediments from geography, economics, ethnic culture, and the flow of military events.3
The Atlantic Ocean had long served as a great moat that guarded the United States from an overseas invasion, as well as a highway for American commerce. The Great War was good for American businesses, farmers, and financiers, as European purchases lifted the country out of a sharp recession (1914–1915) at the war’s outset.4 To the displeasure of Germany, most American goods flowed to England, assisted by US loans. Most trans-Atlantic shipments traveled on British ships under the protection of the British navy, which had bottled up Germany’s vessels in port and blockaded the continent. The German command fought back with new technology: the submarine. To be useful, submarines needed stealth, attacking without warning while submerged; otherwise, these fragile craft could be destroyed by ramming or by rounds fired from deck guns. Although Germany had warned travelers to avoid the “war zone” around Great Britain, the Lusitania, a British ship sailing from New York, was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland in May 1915, claiming 1,198 lives, including Americans. This was denounced as an outrageous attack on civilians, and some Americans urged military retaliation.
The Lusitania tragedy forced Wilson to make midcourse corrections. He informed German leaders he would hold them to “strict accountability” if they continued to use their Underseebooten in surprise attacks on ships carrying nonbelligerents. After an intensification of the British blockage enticed more aggressive submarine strikes, Wilson threatened to sever diplomatic relations with Germany unless its navy inspected belligerent vessels prior to attacks. Germany agreed.
The attack on the Lusitania also prodded Wilson to support “preparedness” at home. With a small army and a navy inferior to those of the European powers, America lacked the military capacity to confront Germany. Congress approved the Defense Act of 1916, which increased the size of the US Army to 175,000 over five years and allowed the National Guard to be folded into the national armed forces when called on, a provision that circumvented restrictions on its deployment outside the United States. The Naval Act of 1916 provided for a substantial expansion of naval vessels, including battleships, although their completion was years away. Both statutes looked toward the future security of the nation and were not predicated on an imminent intervention in the European war. Demands for preparedness were nonetheless politically compelling, leading Wilson to pay lip service to a program of quasi-military training. In late 1916 the War Department initiated planning for universal military training, the first step toward a draft. More effective in readying the military for war was the expedition into Mexico under General Pershing in quest of Pancho Villa, who had led a murderous raid into New Mexico.5
Aided by legislation that pleased labor and rural residents and by his acceptance of military preparation, which pleased conservatives, Wilson won reelection by a razor-slim margin in 1916. Critical to Wilson’s victory was the Democratic Party’s boast that the president had “kept us out of war,” an appeal aimed at German Americans and Irish Americans who opposed assistance for Great Britain. Wilson’s lectures to Germany about the rights of neutrals, however, could not change the military calculus in Europe. The western front had settled into stalemated trench warfare, which cost tens of thousands of lives without budging the battle lines and eroded the combatants’ capacity to continue the struggle. Faced with this crisis, German militarists overruled their civilian counterparts, arguing that resumption of unrestricted submarine attacks could knock Britain and France out of the war by cutting off critical supplies before the Americans could enter the conflict.
It was a daring gamble that failed. German submarines attacked ships around Great Britain in 1917, sinking some American merchant vessels. Wilson polled his cabinet, which was united behind a decision for war. Wilson delivered the war message to Congress in person on April 2, 1917, outlining three primary reasons for going to war. First, Germany had violated American neutrality rights by “ruthless” submarine attacks, and he condemned the Germans as “outlaws.” Second, German military conduct was unethical, constituting “a war against mankind.” Third, Germany’s aggression was an extension of its “autocratic government,” referring to the monarchy (the kaiser) that controlled military policy. America would fight “for the ultimate peace of the world,” the president said, so that it would “be made safe for democracy” and “the rights of mankind.” This ideological justification became the hallmark of Wilsonian diplomacy. The House voted 373–50 and the Senate 82–6 in favor of the war resolution.
Historians have speculated about Wilson’s motivations. The president was clearly pro-British by background and intellectual inclination. He was aware that a German victory could jeopardize American wartime loans to Britain. The Russian Revolution had broken out in March, pointing to Russia’s withdrawal from the war; this would remove an “autocracy” from the Allied coalition and free the German armies to fight on the western front. The president apparently agreed with Secretary of State Robert Lansing that the “military oligarchy” in Germany threatened American national security because it sought “to become the overlord of the world.”6 The so-called Zimmerman telegram in which Germany offered to help Mexico recover territory in the United States gave creditability to charges of German aggression. Important, too, was Wilson’s aspiration to establish a world forum to prevent future wars. His League of Nations proposal would have a better chance of acceptance if the United States were a full partner in the peace negotiations.
In whatever way these factors combined to edge Wilson toward war, his public justification for intervention is a matter of public record. He wanted to gain popular consent for his decision, and his war message was filled with imagery that resonated with Progressive Era thinking. The clenched-fist agenda of the German autocrats was reminiscent of the power of political bosses and industrial barons in America. Denouncing submarine warfare as immoral carried a reproach analogous to the wickedness of white slave traffickers (of prostitutes) and the saloon power the prohibitionists battled. Portraying German behavior as a threat to democracy resonated with progressives who had struggled to cleanse the polity of corruption. Germany had become a problem. American military power was the solution. The great crusade against Germany was consistent with the intellectual and popular sentiments that animated progressives’ reliance on the state to remedy problems.7
MOBILIZATION FOR WAR
Congress voted overwhelmingly for war against Germany, yet the country was woefully unprepared for it. The regular army numbered fewer than 133,000; its arsenal of weapons was gravely deficient. The War Department had a staff of eighteen in Washington to remedy these deficiencies. The navy had fighting ships but little capacity to transport troops across the Atlantic or protect them from submarine attacks. Given these weaknesses, many Americans, including members of Congress, were surprised when the president announced his decision to draft Americans into military service and send them to Europe. Wilson’s selective service bill passed the House with a solid majority: 313 for and 109 against. The opposition included Claude Kitchen, the majority leader of the president’s party and part of the southern resistance to conscription. The initial law required men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty to register for the draft; a later revision stretched the age range to between eighteen and forty-five. The selection of draftees was assigned to 4,600 Selective Service Boards across the United States, an arrangement that reflected the influence of localism in politics. Twenty-four million men eventually registered for the draft, and 4.8 million were put into uniform, two-thirds by conscription. Perhaps two million others evaded military service by failing to register, failing to appear when called, or fleeing once they were inducted into service. Enforcing the draft became a major preoccupation of officials charged with administering “Mr. Wilson’s war.”8
The challenge for the United States was to enroll, train, and equip a military force of nearly four million virtually from scratch. Training raw recruits was a formidable task in itself, but furnishing them with weapons and equipment and transporting them to France were equally challenging. Most items of warfare, from uniforms and helmets to modern weaponry, were in short supply or, in the case of tanks, planes, and artillery, virtually nonexistent. The Allies supplied most of the latter weapons, as well as a model for the US Army’s first metal helmet. Britain transported half the expeditionary force sent to France and much of its supplies. Reinforced with fifty new destroyers and 400 wooden subchasers to escort troop transports, the US Navy did not lose a single American vessel to German attacks en route to Europe.9 Through trial and error, negotiation and compromise, and a shared dedication to winning the war, two million doughboys got to Europe.
A token unit of American troops reached France in July 1917. The large body of doughboys did not arrive until 1918 and did not fight in a major battle until the summer, more than a year after Congress had declared war. After their arrival, the Americans had to travel to the front, some 400 miles to the east from the coast of France. Pershing was unwilling to commit the Americans to combat unless they formed a complete, fully equipped fighting unit. He resisted most entreaties from French and British commanders to integrate Americans with Allied troops but acceded to an exception in the spring of 1918, when Germany massed forces for a major offensive. Pershing consented to the temporary loan of American troops in exchange for a British commitment to provide more transports.
The German attack was halted, but circumstances forced Pershing to accelerate his combat schedule, as the French supreme commander ordered a massive fall offensive. Despite incomplete training for newly arrived divisions and a lack of experienced officers, Pershing accepted the challenge, committing 600,000 Americans to the Meuse-Argonne phase of the campaign. After forty-seven days of fighting, during which Pershing continually ordered his commanders forward, Germany consented to the armistice.
Supplying the American Expeditionary Force presented the government with a formidable challenge. Some groundwork had been laid in 1916 with an appropriations act that allowed the president to operate the railroads during a crisis. Wilson used this authority to place the carriers under federal management when rail transportation became badly snarled in late 1917. Congress approved the arrangement, making sure that railroad owners and their workers were generously compensated. The Shipping Board, formed in September 1916 to encourage ship production, commandeered hulls under construction as well as large ships operated by American owners. A subsidiary, the Emergency Fleet Corporation, constructed 480 ships, a program aided by government loans to house shipyard workers. Wilson created a War Industries Board by executive order in July 1917 that brought together representatives from government, the military, private industry, and labor to coordinate the allocation of resources and set priorities for war orders, for which the military contracted with private suppliers. The government usually bought supplies by cost-plus contracts, which pleased producers.10
Congress expanded the president’s authority to manage mobilization with the Lever Act (August 1917). The law stated that, “by reason of the existence of the state of war, it is essential to . . . the successful prosecution of the war . . . to assure an adequate supply and equitable distribution . . . of food, fuel . . . and equipment . . . and . . . to prevent . . . monopolization, hoarding, injurious speculation . . . affecting such supply.” The act gave the president the power to fix the price of wheat and coal and prohibited the manufacture and importation of distilled spirits. In an “extreme” emergency he could regulate any industry.
A blizzard of agreements between public officials and private companies strained Washington’s capacity to coordinate the wartime economy. To help manage this task, Congress passed the Overman Act (April 1918), which granted the president greater authority to reorganize the executive branch of the federal government for the duration of the war. Utilizing this power, Wilson delegated wide discretion to Bernard Baruch, a financier who headed the War Industries Board. Baruch’s style meshed with the board’s practices; it operated collaboratively with business, especially large corporations, which received the lion’s share of contracts. Separate administrative boards were created to manage food production, fuel, labor relations, railroads, shipping, and war financing. Farmers benefited substantially from federal purchases, while labor fared less well, despite a Labor Board that attempted to settle disputes over wages and hours.
The Great War revamped federal finances. Congress relaxed its tightfistedness and approved expenditures that increased twenty-five-fold between 1916 and 1919 (see figure 12.1). The federal government’s contribution to the gross national product (a dollar measure of economic activity) grew from 1 percent in 1915 to 23 percent in 1918. The extraordinary spike in spending led to important questions about how to pay for it. Wilson left the issue largely to his son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, who devised a mixture of taxation and borrowing. The amount of annual earnings that triggered federal income tax liability was lowered, expanding the proportion of the workforce that had to pay. Wartime legislation also raised the tax rate in steps, based on the amount of income received. The 1918 income tax (enacted in early 1919) had a maximum rate of 77 percent (including a surtax) for those with very high incomes, which some denounced as confiscatory. The other major source of war funds came from borrowing. Liberty loans were purchased primarily by banks and wealthy investors, who were rewarded by tax-exempt interest on the loans. Liberty bonds were sold directly to the public in small denominations, with purchases payable in installments. Celebrities helped promote the sale of these bonds. Borrowing paid for two-thirds of the war and left the federal government with a debt that was twenty times higher in 1920 than in 1916.11
Paying for the war had a significant impact on postwar finances. Federal expenditures contracted sharply with peace but did not return to prewar levels (see figure 12.1). Federal revenue followed a similar course, as Treasury receipts were five times greater in the 1920s than during the Progressive Era. This upward trajectory in Treasury operations constituted a “ratchet effect,” whereby a crisis (e.g., war) permanently raised the level of federal accounts.12 The explosion of fiscal activity during the war breathed new life into the proposal for an executive budget, which Congress had previously rejected. Taking cues from how the US Army’s Quartermaster Corps and federal agencies managed their accounts, the House of Representatives passed an executive budget bill in 1919, with the Senate agreeing in 1920. Wilson vetoed the legislation on a technicality, delaying its approval until 1921.13
Figure 12.1. Federal expenditures and revenue, 1907–1928. Source: Susan B. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), tables Ea584–585.
Wilson sensed correctly that the administration’s mobilization policies would draw criticism. Socialists and sympathetic labor groups charged that the war would fatten the coffers of American capitalists. To head off damaging criticism, the president created the Committee on Public Information, which became synonymous with its director, George Creel. His job was to promote support for the war effort, which the committee did by publishing a blizzard of materials, issuing thousands of press releases, and engaging “four-minute men,” who donated their time to urge patriotic contributions to the war effort. Broadcasting the government’s message that the war was a struggle between American democracy and German militarism, the committee became a handmaiden to industry, which delighted in blocking labor radicalism, and to zealous champions of Americanism, who urged the coerced assimilation of immigrants.
Other federal agencies acted to ensure compliance with wartime objectives. The postmaster general used his authority under the Espionage Act (June 1917) to ban left-wing and antiwar publications from the mail. The attorney general pushed hard to censure protesters who purportedly obstructed the war effort, including critics of the draft, and urged stricter controls on speech related to the war. Herbert Hoover, head of the Food Administration, oversaw a network of half a million persons, recruited from fraternal and women’s groups, who went door to door urging housewives to conserve food. The War Department and other agencies relied heavily on the cooperation of private groups, such as the Red Cross and Boy Scouts, to help provide services for the troops and sell war bonds.14 In various ways, the federal government’s shift to a wartime footing unleashed pressures to stifle criticism of the war, tame if not eradicate labor radicalism, and cajole citizens to embrace 100 percent Americanism.
REPERCUSSIONS OF WAR
The impact of World War I extended well beyond the goal of defeating Germany. The war opened up opportunities for groups to advance their agendas on several long-standing issues. Opponents of saloons and the “liquor interests” were among the most successful. Efforts to limit the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages had a long history in the United States. The antiliquor movement spread in the late nineteenth century when the Women’s Christian Temperance Union battled the “demon rum.” But the distilling and brewing industries had expanded and become intensely competitive, leading to tie-ins with saloons between the late 1800s and the Progressive Era. Their nemesis appeared in 1893 with the formation of the Anti-Saloon League. Dominated by men, the organization had a centralized administration with a paid staff and branches in most states. The Anti-Saloon League emerged as a model pressure group, targeting state lawmakers who opposed its objectives. League advocates focused their attack on saloons, which were depicted as dens of drugs, prostitution, and political corruption, not to mention the consumption of alcohol. By 1917 seventeen states had gone dry.
Each state that accepted prohibition exerted pressure on its congressional delegation to support antisaloon legislation. World War I opened a window of opportunity for the Anti-Saloon League to achieve its goal on a national level. The Lever Act had already restricted the brewing of beer and the distilling of spirits to conserve grains. Amid rising antagonism toward anything German, such as beer gardens, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (Prohibition) in December 1917. Following its ratification by state legislatures in 1919, Congress adopted the Volstead Act, which criminalized the sale of beverages with an alcohol content of one-half percent or higher but allowed the possession of spirits for personal consumption. By the end of the year the Treasury Department employed 1,500 prohibition agents, who worked in collaboration with law enforcement agencies in cooperating states, many of which enacted “search and seizure” laws. The intergovernmental campaign substantially reduced the flow of beer and liquor during the 1920s.15
The campaign for female suffrage exhibited similarities to the quest for national Prohibition, especially in the use of state victories to leverage the passage of a constitutional amendment. Like Prohibition, the campaign for women’s voting rights predated the Civil War but had made only minimal progress before 1910. Four states had granted women the right to vote by 1896, but no new states joined that list through 1909. Voters turned down referenda on female suffrage in four northeastern states in 1915. The opposition of (some) men, Democrats, liquor interests, and recent immigrants was slowing a change that some observers considered a logical progressive reform.
The war helped women break through these barriers, with Carrie Chapman Catt leading the way. A former schoolteacher from Iowa and president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1900–1904 and 1915–1920), Catt saw state adoption as the key. The more states that accepted women’s suffrage, she reasoned, the greater the pressure on congressional representatives to support a suffrage amendment to the Constitution. Knowing that success in an influential eastern state was critical, Catt targeted New York, where she launched the Woman’s Suffrage Party. New Yorkers turned down a suffrage referendum in 1915, only to return a positive vote in 1917. With the war on, Catt moved to the nation’s capital to lobby the president, telling him that the United States should reward women for their dedication to the war effort by supporting a suffrage amendment. To overcome male skepticism, she argued that women’s suffrage would suppress the “ignorant vote,” meaning blacks and immigrants, and would reduce immoral activities such as prostitution. Moral persuasion coupled with political leverage did the trick. The House passed the Nineteenth Amendment in 1918, on the strength of Republican and northern Democratic votes, but the amendment failed to win the required two-thirds majority in the Senate until 1919. It took more than a year to overcome last-ditch efforts in the states to reject the amendment during the ratification process.16
Suffragettes boosted their campaign by demonstrating their allegiance to the United States, but other groups criticized American intervention in the war. Radical laborites such as members of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) and supporters of the Socialist Party denounced the war as a capitalist ploy and governmental collaboration with large corporations. Other groups resented antiwar pacifists who were conscientious objectors. Federal officials and local police sought to dampen criticism of the war. Worried about the loyalty of German Americans, President Wilson urged Congress to pass the Espionage Act (June 1917), which prohibited making false reports to help the enemy, inciting rebellion among the armed forces, or obstructing the draft. Conviction carried a sentence of up to twenty years in prison. The law allowed the postmaster general to censor the mail for materials that advocated resistance to the war effort. Unwilling to tolerate dissent to his foreign policy, Wilson encouraged activities that energized demonstrations of patriotism. Aided by officials in his administration and in state and local governments, the president bore much of the responsibility for igniting a vindictive campaign toward individuals who did not conform to “100 percent Americanism.”17
Enforcement of the Espionage Act fell to Attorney General Thomas Gregory, who in turned assigned the job to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. Federal officials solicited local police to keep tabs on known pacifists and German sympathizers. Gregory used his mandate to silence militant labor unionists and left-wing critics of the Wilson administration. Wilson, Gregory, and like-minded conservatives saw a link between aliens (immigrants who were not yet citizens) and hostility to American institutions, especially big corporations. The Immigration Act of 1917 allowed the deportation of newcomers affiliated with “anarchist” organizations. More than 6,000 German aliens were placed in internment camps.
When Gregory wanted broader authority to clamp down on war resisters, labor radicals, and communists, Congress complied by passing the Sedition Act (May 1918), which criminalized speech and writing that were disloyal to and abusive of the federal government, the Constitution, or the armed services. The law made it a crime to advocate, teach, or favor the cause of the German Empire or oppose “the cause of the United States” and its institutions. The Sedition Act, along with supporting statutes, gave federal officials broad authority to track and arrest individuals because of their political beliefs. The most famous person arrested for criticizing the war was Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president in 1912. The Justice Department put him under surveillance and transcribed his speeches. Even though his address in Canton, Ohio, that provoked his arrest attacked American capitalism as much as the war, Debs was sentenced to ten years in the federal penitentiary for violating the Espionage Act. Wilson denied requests for his pardon, even after Debs commended the president’s advocacy of a League of Nations. The Supreme Court brushed aside challenges to Debs’s arrest as an unconstitutional limitation on free speech.18
The wartime loyalty statutes and their energetic application against labor radicals and left-wing groups were unusual for their restriction of political expression, yet they were not without precedent. Both the states and the national government had previously placed limits on acceptable political speech. The New York Anarchy Act (1902), adopted in the wake of the McKinley assassination, made it illegal to advocate the forceful overthrow of the government. The 1903 immigration law, urged by President Roosevelt, banned political radicals from immigrating to the United States. New York enacted a 1917 statute that allowed the removal of teachers convicted of making treasonous or seditious utterances. Idaho in 1917 and Montana in 1918 passed criminal syndicalist laws, which made it illegal to express contempt for the US government, the Constitution, the flag, or the armed services. By the end of 1919 all nonsouthern states had passed one or more laws that criminalized “radical” political activity. Even the US Army got into the act, raiding Wobbly offices and breaking up strikes in lumbering and mining districts of the Northwest. The war had whipped up a frenzy of anxiety about suspected disloyalty and supposed threats to national security from labor radicals. The large inflow of immigrants from central and eastern Europe—including Russia, where Bolsheviks overthrew the tsar in 1917—fanned these fears. Attorney General Gregory, the US Army Military Intelligence Section, the postmaster general, and many local officials in the West operated on the assumption that an uprising of alien-backed communists was possible. As one historian asserted, the war and international events had created a “surveillance state.”19
The congressional elections of 1918 offered a verdict on Wilsonian war policies. The voting took place just days before the armistice was officially announced, although it was clear by then that the Allies had beaten Germany. This good news should have advantaged the Democrats; Wilson urged voters to keep his party in power, which would facilitate the adoption of his Fourteen Points plan for the postwar settlement. A majority of voters, however, turned against the president and the Democrats, who lost control of both the House and the Senate, even though the Democratic slippage in the overall vote was minimal. Democrats lost at the state level too; they held eighteen governorships in the North in 1913 but were reduced to just three in 1919.
Several grievances underlay the backlash against the administration. This was the first election since the declaration of war in 1917. Two large ethnic groups that typically leaned Democratic, German Americans and Irish Americans, were unhappy with Wilson’s collaboration with Britain. Many Germans in the United States retained sentimental attachments to their homeland, and Ireland was on the brink of revolt from British control. Moreover, the Wilson administration’s heavy-handed approach to war mobilization, conscription, and forced loyalty did not sit well with many Americans. The government’s hunt for draft “slackers,” abetted by private groups, alienated some voters. In addition, Wilson vetoed a measure that would have maintained price supports for wheat, which angered midwestern farmers, who thought the administration showed favoritism toward southern cotton producers. Consumer prices and rents had nearly doubled since 1916, which negated wage and salary increases, while big business continued to reap large profits. Wartime shortages of food and fuel were an irritant for families. Plainly, numerous voters had legitimate complaints about the consequences of wartime governance.20
The Democrats’ troubles continued into 1919. Wilson went to France after New Year’s Day to head the American delegation to the peace conference at Versailles. Except for one brief trip back to the States, he remained in France until July. A rousing welcome greeted his arrival in Paris, reflecting French appreciation for the Americans’ contribution to victory. Allied leaders, however, were less enthusiastic about Wilson’s performance at the peace conference, where the president was preoccupied with his League of Nations proposal. The league was the centerpiece of the president’s vision for peace, which he had set forth in his Fourteen Points. But the leaders of France, Italy, and England had minimal interest in Wilson’s international forum and an enormous desire to punish Germany. French premier Clemenceau pushed relentlessly to saddle the Germans with responsibility for the war, pressing for heavy financial reparations and demanding that Germany be stripped of its territory and colonies. Obsessed with securing his league, Wilson bartered away his opposition to a harsh settlement, despite his belief that a vindictive treaty would leave Germany vulnerable to bolshevism. Fear stalked the land that a communist revolution was poised to upend the Western world.21
Republicans back home were even less enthusiastic about a League of Nations, which some saw as Wilson’s attempt to build a case for his reelection. The president had hardly helped his cause by failing to select any prominent Republicans to join him at the peace conference. Now he faced a Republican majority in the US Senate, where a two-thirds majority was needed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. The key stumbling block was Article X, which required league members to recommend ways to counter international aggression. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who, like Wilson, was a scholar in politics but harbored a deep dislike of the president, led the bloc of Republican senators opposed to Article X, which they argued could obligate US military action. Despite widespread pleas that he compromise, Wilson refused to change a word in the document. Instead, he embarked on a speaking tour in the western states to lobby for the League of Nations, which was embedded in the peace treaty. Illness forced the president to suspend the tour in September 1919, and shortly thereafter he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to resume a full schedule. Yet he regained sufficient cognizance to refuse any modification to the treaty. Its rejection in the Senate was a bitter disappointment to idealistic individuals who viewed America’s participation in the war as a way to advance political self-determination.
Americans experienced a tumultuous year while Wilson was in France and then recuperating at home after his stroke. The year 1919 recorded 3,000 strikes involving three million workers, who saw prices spiral as their wages lagged. A strike of longshoremen in Seattle escalated into a citywide general strike that was broken with the assistance of the US Army. Federal troops intervened in a steel strike that involved a quarter million workers; Gary, Indiana, was put under martial law. Steel company executives called striking workers communists. A strike of 300,000 in the coalfields stretching from Pennsylvania into the Midwest was cut short by a federal court injunction against the United Mine Workers Union. The US Fuel Administration, which continued to operate under wartime emergency rules, had urged that decision. Boston police walked off the job over wages and a demand for unionization. President Wilson called the walkout “a crime against civilization.” Trouble brewed in cities and towns in the heat of summer, when racial clashes erupted. The Chicago race riot in July left twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites dead in thirteen days of fighting. It took 6,000 National Guardsmen to restore order to the city’s South Side.
Bombs mailed to political officials underscored the explosiveness of 1919. One detonation destroyed the front porch of the home of US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer swung into action, enlisting the help of J. Edgar Hoover, a young lawyer in the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, which had kept tabs on suspected German spies and saboteurs during the war. Believing that communists and anarchists were responsible for the terrorism, Hoover was put in charge of the bureau’s Radical Division, and his instructions were to round up the culprits.
The twenty-four-year-old Hoover leaped at the opportunity to channel his enormous energy and zealous commitment to suppress bolshevism. He read everything he could find about international communism. He mined innumerable sources of information, including US military intelligence, for names of suspects, and he prepared crib sheets for Palmer, who testified before Congress on the purported communist uprising. As the finale to the campaign, Hoover arranged a raid on meetings of alien radicals in thirty-three cities on January 2, 1920. With only 579 agents, the Bureau of Investigation required assistance from local law enforcement agencies and help from civilian groups to pull off the nighttime arrests. The so-called Palmer raids detained upward of 6,000 supposed radicals, whom Hoover sought to deport, but few individuals were expelled. Protests over the arrests, which lacked evidence of illegal acts, and resistance from the Department of Labor, which had jurisdiction over immigrant deportations, blocked most expulsions. As 1920 unfolded, widespread fears of a communist uprising faded. But the administrative base of the Bureau of Investigation had expanded, in part due to the enforcement of Prohibition.22
Uncertainty over whether Wilson would run again handicapped the Democratic search for a presidential candidate in 1920. The party eventually nominated James Cox, governor of Ohio, after a long convention fight. Cox’s campaign had to contend with voters angered by the criminalization of buying beer, wine, and liquor. His equivocation on Prohibition and on Wilson’s League of Nations reflected the political hurdles of 1920, when the Democratic Party’s nominal leader remained an invalid in the White House. Republicans nominated Warren G. Harding, Ohio’s junior senator, who continued the GOP’s opposition to the League of Nations and promised to return the nation to “normalcy.” Voting results gave Republicans an overwhelming victory, as Democrats suffered major setbacks around the country in congressional and state races, even in the South and in the bigger cities.
Events of 1920 are usually interpreted as a repudiation of idealist Wilsonian diplomacy and the nation’s turn toward conservatism. While these factors were clearly present, other dynamics were also at work. The sweeping rejection of Democrats was linked to the rapid spike in government power and its uneven application. The federal government’s increased intervention in the economy, abetted by state cooperation, generated annoying regulations. When the fighting in Europe ended abruptly, so did the federal stimulus to the economy—the government yanked defense contracts, terminated most price supports, ended protection for labor unions, and allowed coal price hikes that caused fuel shortages. Both consumer prices and unemployment jumped higher in late 1920. By the end of the year stagflation had enveloped the country, and many voters held the incumbent Democrats culpable for the economic malaise.23
Voters harbored other grievances as well. The Wilson administration had sponsored numerous political restrictions that irritated Democrats especially. The administration had gone after immigrants and labor unions (under the guise of political radicalism) and encouraged a nationwide campaign to elevate patriotism. Wilson was a prominent cheerleader for the latter movement, which targeted German Americans. As a result, German American support for Democrats dropped noticeably in 1920, as did the Irish vote. Rather than stem the intolerance toward draft shirkers and war critics or try to cap rising prices, the president appeared to be tone deaf to problems at home while he pursued his obsession for a League of Nations abroad. Then he fell out of sight due to illness. The majority of Americans turned toward the Republicans and Harding, who blamed the administration for excess taxation and a high cost of living, thanks to an “autocratic” chief executive. The abrupt expansion of the state during the Great War had created a massive political backlash.24
CONTROL, COERCION, AND THE DOCUMENTARY STATE
The United States’ participation in World War I fostered a remarkable expansion of governmental power. The national government drafted 2.7 million individuals into the military and sent more than 2 million soldiers to fight in France. Washington officials spent $32 billion to pay for the war, implemented controls over the private economy, and imposed new restrictions on the political activity of individuals. National policymakers designed this agenda, with states and localities playing a compliant role by implementing national policy and adding provisions of their own. By thrusting its military muscle into Europe, the United States demonstrated that it was a major world power. World War I proved that the United States could act like a state.
This new assertiveness took numerous forms. New taxes were levied on individuals. Restrictions were placed on permissible speech and personal consumption. Temporary regulations were imposed on private enterprise. Increased cooperation between national and local officials occurred. In various ways during the war and in its immediate aftermath, the government broadened the controls and coercion that had characterized the Progressive Era. Wartime governance, in fact, can be seen as an extension of the crusading and moralizing features that made progressivism distinctive.
J. Edgar Hoover, the boyish attorney who ran the Justice Department’s Radical Division, was a caricature of progressive organization. To prepare for his dragnet, Hoover ransacked publications and data collections to build a file of 60,000 “radically inclined individuals.” He continued to add to his files after the Palmer raids. In 1921 he was promoted to assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation; three years later he became its head, directing searches for criminal activity related to passports, stolen vehicles, prostitution rings, and alien radicals. He had already become the custodian of the fingerprint archive created by the Association of Police Chiefs. By 1930 the Bureau of Investigation (which became the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] in 1935) had a collection of two million fingerprints and an archive of five million criminal records.25 The enormous power Hoover wielded over his long career as director of the FBI derived in good measure from his ability to master the Progressive Era’s penchant for organization and data collection.
Hoover’s files on individuals represented a major step toward the creation of a documentary state. His data collections reflected the mission of his agency, combined with his personal distaste for political radicals and suspected criminals. The process of gathering information about individuals, however, had a long history in the United States (see table A.6 in the appendix). Recording and archiving the names of military enlistees enabled the United States to provide benefits to veterans, beginning with those who served during the American Revolution. The national government maintained records of individuals who obtained land in the public domain. The post office began home mail delivery in 1863 to individuals who had specific urban addresses. The US Constitution mandated that the federal government count the country’s population every ten years. The 1790 census attempted to list the name of the head of every free household and, by 1850, the name of every resident at each address. Tabulating these and other data constituted statistics, a term from the Greek meaning the study of information about state affairs.26
Local governments collected the greatest volume of personal information in the nineteenth century. All communities kept records of property owners and tax payments. As the century unfolded, subnational governments received reports on births and deaths, school attendance, and criminal activity. The licensing of health and other professionals generated additional lists; toward the end of the century, municipalities began inspecting places of business and commercial dwellings. A few states, such as New York and Iowa, conducted their own population censuses.
The long Progressive Era (1890s–1910s) witnessed an acceleration of systemic data collection about individuals, with state governments playing an increasing role. Motor vehicles stimulated a growth in personal documentation, as states required vehicle registrations starting in 1901, followed shortly thereafter by driver’s licenses, which still constitute a nationally recognized form of identification. Early in the twentieth century states enacted laws requiring marriage licenses; eventually, a medical examination was required prior to their issuance. States also set up their own criminal bureaus that functioned in cooperation with the state police. Voter registration, which expanded after 1890, was a quintessential progressive reform and represented how statebuilding had advanced.
The appeal of collecting data about various activities attracted administrators in many federal positions. The Treasury Department relieved the states of the task of examining immigrants in 1891, a process that required the retention of inspection reports. The post office started delivering mail to rural families in 1896. In 1913 the national government initiated the personal income tax, which mandated that individuals report their earnings to revenue officials. Much larger bodies of data about individuals came from the national government’s compilation of birth and death data collected in the states, which were instructed to observe specific reporting protocols. Registration for the draft in 1917 and 1918 generated twenty-four million individual data cards. With the advent of World War I, foreign travelers and immigrants desiring entry into the United States were required to obtain passports and visas.27 J. Edgar Hoover’s project to profile radicals in America built on a pattern of counting, categorizing, and analyzing information about individual behavior that became characteristic of the expanding state.28 That tendency complemented industrializing societies’ need to enumerate, record, and quantitatively calibrate human activity. World War I provided a rationale for officials to broaden governmental control over individuals.