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Back to Hypertext History: Our Online American History Textbook America at War: World War I The United States

Enters the War: President Wilson was reluctant to enter World War I. When the War began, Wilson declared U.S. neutrality and demanded that the belligerents respect American rights as a neutral party. He hesitated to embroil the United States in the conflict with good reason. Americans were deeply divided about the European war; involvement in the conflict would certainly disrupt Progressive reforms. In 1914, he had warned that entry into the conflict would bring an end to Progressive reform. "Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war," he said. A popular song in 1915 was "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier." In 1916, President Wilson narrowly won reelection after campaigning on the slogan, "He kept us out of war." He won the election with a 4,000 vote margin in California. Toward Intervention Shortly after war erupted in Europe, President Wilson called on Americans to be "neutral in thought as well as deed." The United States, however, quickly began to lean toward Britain and France. Convinced that wartime trade was necessary to fuel the growth of American trade, President Wilson refused to impose an embargo on trade with the belligerents. During the early years of the war, trade with the allies tripled. This volume of trade quickly exhausted the allies' cash reserves, forcing them to ask the United States for credit. In October 1915, President Wilson permitted loans to belligerents, a decision that greatly favored Britain and France. By 1917, American loans to the allies had soared to $2.25 billion; loans to Germany stood at a paltry $27 million. In January 1917, Germany announced that it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare. This announcement helped precipitate American entry into the conflict. Germany hoped to win the war within five months. Additionally, they were willing to risk antagonizing Wilson on the assumption that, even if the United States declared war, it could not mobilize quickly enough to change the course of the conflict. Then a fresh insult led Wilson to demand a declaration of war. In March 1917, newspapers published the Zimmerman Note, an intercepted telegram from the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman to the German ambassador to Mexico. The telegram said that if Germany went to war with the United States, Germany promised to help Mexico recover the territory it had lost during the 1840s, including Texas, New Mexico, California, and Arizona. The Zimmerman telegram and German attacks on three U.S. ships in mid-March led Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war. Wilson decided to enter the war so that he could help design the peace settlement. Wilson viewed the war as an opportunity to destroy German militarism. "The world must be made safe for democracy," he told a joint session of Congress. Only six Senators and 50 Representatives voted against the war declaration. Over There: American Doughboys Go to War In 1917, a High German official scoffed at American might: "America from a military point-of-view means nothing, and again nothing, and for a third time nothing." The U.S. Army at the time had only 107,641 men. Within a year, however, the United States raised a five million-man army. By the war's end, the American armed forces were a decisive factor in blunting a German offensive and ending the bloody stalemate. Initially, President Wilson hoped to limit America's contribution to supplies, financial credits, and moral support. But by early 1917, the allied forces were on the brink of collapse. Ten divisions of the French army had begun to mutiny. In March 1917, the Bolsheviks, who had seized power in Russia in November, accepted Germany's peace terms and withdrew from the war. Then, German and Austrian forces routed the Italian armies. The United States was forced to quickly assume an active role in the conflict. As a preliminary step, American ships relieved the British of responsibility for patrolling the Western Hemisphere, while another portion of the U.S. fleet steamed to the north Atlantic to combat German submarines. To raise troops, President Wilson insisted on a military draft. More than 23 million men registered during World War I, and 2,810,296 draftees served in the armed forces. To select officers, the army launched an ambitious program of psychological testing.

In March 1918, the Germans launched a massive offensive on the western front in France's Somme River valley. With German troops barely 50 miles from Paris, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the leader of the French army, assumed command of the allied forces. Foch's troops, aided by 85,000 American soldiers, launched a furious counteroffensive. By the end of October, the counterattack pushed the German army back to the Belgian border. American entry into the war quickly overcame the German military's numerical advantage. In June 1918, some 279,000 American soldiers crossed the Atlantic; in July over 300,000; in August, 286,000 more. All told, 1.5 million American troops arrived in Europe during the last six months of the war. By the end of the conflict, the allies could field 600,000 more men than the Germans. The influx of American forces led the Austro-Hungarian Empire to ask for peace, Turkey and Bulgaria to stop fighting, and Germany to request an armistice. President Wilson announced that he would negotiate only with a democratic regime in Germany. When the military leaders and the Kaiser wavered, a brief revolution forced the Kaiser to abdicate, and a civilian regime assumed control of the government. At 11:00 a.m., November 11, 1918, the guns stopped. Over Here: World War I on the Home Front Approximately one-third of the nation (32 million people) were either foreign-born or the children of immigrants, and more than 10 million Americans were derived from the nations of the Central Powers. Furthermore, millions of Irish Americans sided with the Central Powers because they hated the English. The Wilson administration was convinced that it had to mobilize public opinion in support of the war. To influence public opinion, the federal government embarked on its first ever domestic propaganda campaign. Wilson chose muckraking journalist George Creel to head the government agency, the Committee on Public Information (CPI). The CPI placed pro-war advertisements in magazines and distributed 75 million copies of pamphlets defending America's role in the war. Creel also launched a massive advertising campaign for war bonds and sent some 75,000 "Four-Minute Men" to whip up enthusiasm for the war by rallying audiences in theaters. The CPI also encouraged filmmakers to produce movies, like The Kaiser: the Beast of Berlin, that played up alleged German atrocities. For the first time, the federal government had demonstrated the power of propaganda. Anti-German Sentiment German American and Irish American communities came out strongly in favor of neutrality. The groups condemned massive loans and arms sales to the allies as they saw the acts as violations of neutrality. Theodore Roosevelt raised the issue of whether these communities were loyal to their mother country or to the United States: Those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic. Once the United States entered the war, a search for spies and saboteurs escalated into efforts to suppress German culture. Many German-language newspapers were closed down. Public schools stopped teaching German. Lutheran churches dropped services that were spoken in German. Germans were called "Huns." In the name of patriotism, musicians no longer played Bach and Beethoven, and schools stopped teaching the German language. Americans renamed sauerkraut "liberty cabbage"; dachshunds "liberty hounds"; and German measles "liberty measles." Cincinnati, with its large German American population, even removed pretzels from the free lunch counters in saloons. More alarming, vigilante groups attacked anyone suspected of being unpatriotic. Workers who refused to buy war bonds often suffered harsh retribution, and attacks on labor protesters were nothing short of brutal. The legal system backed the suppression. Juries routinely released defendants accused of violence against individuals or groups critical of the war. A St. Louis newspaper campaigned to "wipe out everything German in this city," even though St. Louis had a large German American population. Luxembourg, Missouri became Lemay; Berlin Avenue was renamed Pershing; Bismark Street became Fourth Street; Kaiser Street was changed to Gresham. Perhaps the most horrendous anti-German act was the lynching in April 1918 of 29-year-old Robert Paul Prager, a German-born bakery employee, who was accused of making "disloyal utterances." A mob took him from the basement of the Collinsville, Illinois jail, dragged him outside of town, and hanged him from a tree. Before the lynching, he was allowed to write a last note to his parents in Dresden, Germany: Dear Parents: I must on this, the 4th day of April, 1918, die. Please pray for me, my dear parents. In the trial that followed, the defendants wore red, white, and blue ribbons, while a band in the court house played patriotic songs. It took the jury 25 minutes to return a not-guilty verdict. The German government lodged a protest and offered to pay Prager's funeral expenses.

The Espionage and Sabotage Act In his war message to Congress, President Wilson had warned that the war would require a redefinition of national loyalty. There were "millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us," he said. "If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with a firm hand of repression." In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act. The piece of legislation gave postal officials the authority to ban newspapers and magazines from the mails and threatened individuals convicted of obstructing the draft with $10,000 fines and 20 years in jail. Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a federal offense to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the Constitution, the government, the American uniform, or the flag. The government prosecuted over 2,100 people under these acts. Political dissenters bore the brunt of the repression. Eugene V. Debs, who urged socialists to resist militarism, went to prison for nearly three years. Another Socialist, Kate Richards O'Hare, served a year in prison for stating that the women of the United States were "nothing more nor less than brood sows, to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer." In July 1917, labor radicals offered another ready target for attack. In Cochise County, Arizona, armed men, under the direction of a local sheriff, rounded up 1,186 strikers at the Phelps Dodge copper mine. They placed these workers--many of Mexican descent--on railroad cattle cars without food or water and left them in the New Mexico desert 180 miles away. The Los Angeles Times editorialized: "The citizens of Cochise County have written a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy." The radical labor organization, the International Workers of the World (IWW), never recovered from government attacks during World War I. In September 1917, the Justice Department staged massive raids on IWW officers, arresting 169 of its veteran leaders. The administration's purpose was, as one attorney put it, "very largely to put the IWW out of business." Many observers thought the judicial system would protect dissenters, but the courts handed down stiff prison sentences to the radical labor organization's leaders. Radicals were not the only one to suffer harassment. Robert Goldstein, a motion picture producer, had made a movie about the American Revolution called The Spirit of '76, before the United States entered the war. When he released the picture after the declaration of war, he was accused of undermining American morale. A judge told him that his depiction of heartless British redcoats caused Americans to question their British allies. He was sentenced to a 10 year prison term and fined $5,000.

The Market Crashes On Thursday, October 24, 1929, an unprecedented wave of sell orders shook the New York Stock Exchange. Stock priced tumbled, falling $2, $5, and even $10 between trades. As prices fell, brokers required investors who had bought stock on margin to put up money to cover their loans. To raise money, many investors dumped stocks for whatever price they could fetch. During the first three hours of trading, stock values plunged by $11 billion. At noon, a group of prominent bankers met at the offices of J.P. Morgan and Co. to stop the hemorrhaging of stock prices. The bankers' pool agreed to buy stocks well above the market. At 1:30 p.m., they put their plan into action. Within an hour, U.S. Steel was up $15 a share; AT&T up $22; General Electric up $21; Montgomery Ward up $23. Even though the market recovered its morning losses, public confidence was badly shaken. Rumors spread that eleven stock speculators had killed themselves and that government troops were surrounding the exchange to protect traders from an angry mob. President Hoover sought to reassure the public by declaring that the "fundamental business of the country...is on a sound and prosperous basis." Prices held steady on Friday, and then slipped on Saturday. Monday, however, brought fresh disaster. Eastman Kodak plunged $41 a share; AT&T plunged $24; New York Central Railroad plunged $22. The worst was yet to come. It occurred on Black Tuesday, October 29, the day the stock market experienced the greatest crash in its history. As soon as the stock exchange's gong sounded, a mad rush to sell began. Trading volume soared to an unprecedented 16,410,030 shares and the average price of a share fell 12 percent. Stocks were sold for whatever price they would bring. White Sewing Machine had reached a high of $48 a share. One purchaser--reportedly a messenger boy--bought a block of the stock for $1 a share.

The bull market of the late 1920s was over. By 1932, the index of stock prices had fallen from a 1929 high of 210 to a low of 30. Stocks were valued at just 12 percent of what they had been worth in September 1929. Altogether, between September 1929 and June 1932, the nation's stock exchanges lost $179 billion in value. The great stock market crash of October 1929 brought the economic prosperity of the 1920s to a symbolic end. For the next ten years, the United States was mired in a deep economic depression. By 1933, unemployment had soared to 25 percent, up from just 3.2 percent in 1929. Industrial production declined by 50 percent. In 1929 before the crash, investment in the U.S. economy totaled $16 billion. By 1933, the figure had fallen to $340 million--a decrease of 98 percent.

Why It Happened Why did the seemingly boundless prosperity of the 1920s end so suddenly? And why, once an economic downturn began, did the Great Depression last so long? Economists have been hard pressed to explain why "prosperity's decade" ended in financial disaster. In 1929, the American economy appeared to be extraordinarily healthy. Employment was high and inflation was virtually nonexistent. Industrial production had risen 30 percent between 1919 and 1929, and per capita income had climbed from $520 to $681. The United States accounted for nearly half of the world's industrial output. Still, the seeds of the Depression were already present in the "boom" years of the 1920s. For many groups of Americans, the prosperity of the 1920s was a cruel illusion. Even during the most prosperous years of the Roaring Twenties, most families lived below what contemporaries defined as the poverty line. In 1929, economists considered $2,500 the income necessary to support a family. In that year, more than 60 percent of the nation's families earned less than $2,000 a year--the income necessary for basic necessities--and over 40 percent earned less than $1,500 annually. Although labor productivity soared during the 1920s because of electrification and more efficient management, wages stagnated or fell in mining, transportation, and manufacturing. Hourly wages in coal mines sagged from 84.5 cents in 1923 to just 62.5 cents in 1929. Prosperity bypassed specific groups of Americans entirely. A 1928 report on the condition of Native Americans found that half owned less than $500 and that 71 percent lived on less than $200 a year. Mexican Americans, too, had failed to share in the prosperity. During the 1920s, each year 25,000 Mexicans migrated to the United States. Most lived in conditions of extreme poverty. In Los Angeles the infant mortality rate was five times higher than the rate for Anglos, and most homes lacked toilets. A survey found that a substantial number of Mexican Americans had virtually no meat or fresh vegetables in their diet; 40 percent said that they could not afford to give their children milk. The farm sector had been mired in depression since 1921. Farm prices had been depressed ever since the end of World War I, when European agriculture revived, and grain from Argentina and Australia entered the world market. Strapped with long-term debts, high taxes, and a sharp drop in crop prices, farmers lost ground throughout the 1920s. In 1910, a farmer's income was 40 percent of a city worker's. By 1930, it had sagged to just 30 percent. The decline in farm income reverberated throughout the economy. Rural consumers stopped buying farm implements, tractors, automobiles, furniture, and appliances. Millions of farmers defaulted on their debts, placing tremendous pressure on the banking system. Between 1920 and 1929, more than 5,000 of the country's 30,000 banks failed. Because of the banking crisis, thousands of small businesspeople failed because they could not secure loans. Thousands more went bankrupt because they had lost their working capital in the stock market crash. A heavy burden of consumer debt also weakened the economy. Consumers built up an unmanageable amount of consumer installment and mortgage debt, taking out loans to buy cars, appliances, and homes in the suburbs. To repay these loans, consumers cut back sharply on discretionary spending. Drops in consumer spending led inevitably to reductions in production and worker layoffs. Unemployed workers then spent less, and the cycle repeated itself. A poor distribution of income compounded the country's economic problems. During the 1920s, there was a pronounced shift in wealth and income toward the very rich. Between 1919 and 1929, the share of income received by the wealthiest one percent of Americans rose from 12 percent to 19 percent, while the share received by the richest five percent jumped from 24 percent to 34 percent. Over the same period, the poorest 93 percent of the non-farm population actually saw its disposable income fall. Because the rich tend to spend a high proportion of their income on luxuries, such as large cars, entertainment, and tourism, and save a disproportionately large share of their income, there was insufficient demand to keep employment and investment at a high level.

Even before the onset of the Depression, business investment had begun to decline. Residential construction boomed between 1924 and 1927, but in 1929 housing starts fell to less than half the 1924 level. A major reason for the depressed housing market was the 1924 immigration law that had restricted foreign immigration. Soaring inventories also led businesses to reduce investment and production. During the mid-1920s, manufacturers expanded their production capacity and built up excessive inventories. At the decade's end they cut back sharply, directing their surplus funds into stock market speculation. The Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank, played a critical, if inadvertent, role in weakening the economy. In an effort to curb stock market speculation, the Federal Reserve slowed the growth of the money supply, then allowed the money supply to fall dramatically after the stock market crash, producing a wrenching "liquidity crisis." Consumers found themselves unable to repay loans, while businesses did not have the capital to finance business operations. Instead of actively stimulating the economy by cutting interest rates and expanding the money supply-the way monetary authorities fight recessions today--the Federal Reserve allowed the country's money supply to decline by 27 percent between 1929 and 1933. Finally, Republican tariff policies damaged the economy by depressing foreign trade. Anxious to protect American industries from foreign competitors, Congress passed the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 and the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930, raising tariff rates to unprecedented levels. American tariffs stifled international trade, making it difficult for European nations to pay off their debts. As foreign economies foundered, those countries imposed trade barriers of their own, choking off U.S. exports. By 1933, international trade had plunged 30 percent. All these factors left the economy ripe for disaster. Yet the depression did not strike instantly; it infected the country gradually, like a slow-growing cancer. Measured in human terms, the Great Depression was the worst economic catastrophe in American history. It hit urban and rural areas, blue-and white-collar families alike. In the nation's cities, unemployed men took to the streets to sell apples or to shine shoes. Thousands of others hopped freight trains and wandered from town to town, looking for jobs or handouts. Unlike most of Western Europe, the United States had no federal system of unemployment insurance. The relief burden fell on state and municipal governments working in cooperation with private charities, such as the Red Cross and the Community Chest. Created to handle temporary emergencies, these groups lacked the resources to alleviate the massive suffering created by the Great Depression. Poor Southerners, whose states had virtually no relief funds, were particularly hard hit. Urban centers in the North fared little better. Most city charters did not permit public funds to be spent on work relief. Adding insult to injury, several states disqualified relief clients from voting, while other cities forced them to surrender their automobile license plates. "Prosperity's decade" had ended in economic The Great Depression in Global Perspective The Great Depression was a global phenomenon, unlike previous economic downturns, which generally were confined to a handful of nations or specific regions. Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America all suffered from the economic collapse. International trade fell 30 percent, as nations tried to protect their industries by raising tariffs on imported goods. "Beggar-thy-neighbor" trade policies were a major reason why the Depression persisted as long as it did. By 1932 an estimated 30 million people were unemployed around the world. Also, in contrast to the relatively brief economic "panics" of the past, the Great Depression dragged on with no end in sight. As the depression deepened, it had far-reaching political consequences. One response to the depression was military dictatorship--a response that could be found in Argentina and in many countries in Central America. Western industrialized countries cut back sharply on the purchase of raw materials and other commodities. The price of coffee, cotton, rubber, tin, and other commodities dropped 40 percent. The collapse in raw material and agricultural commodity prices led to social unrest, resulting in the rise of military dictatorships that promised to maintain order. A second response to the Depression was fascism and militarism--a response found in Germany, Italy, and Japan. In Germany, Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party promised to restore the country's economy and to rebuild its military. After becoming chancellor in 1932, Hitler outlawed labor unions, restructured German industry into a series of cartels, and after 1935, instituted a massive program of military rearmament that ended high unemployment. In Italy, fascism arose even before the Depression's onset under the leadership of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. In Japan, militarists seized control of the government during the 1930s. In an effort to relieve the Depression, Japanese military officers conquered Manchuria, a region rich in raw materials, and coastal China in 1937. A third response to the Depression was totalitarian communism. In the Soviet Union, the Great Depression helped solidify Joseph Stalin's grip on power. In 1928 Stalin instituted a planned economy. His first Five Year Plan called for rapid industrialization and "collectivization" of small peasant farms under government control. To crush opposition to his program, which required peasant farmers to give their products to the government at low prices,

Stalin exiled millions of peasant to labor camps in Siberia, and instituted a program of terror called the Great Purge. Historians estimate that as many as 20 million Soviets died during the 1930s as a result of famine and deliberate killings. A final response to the Depression was welfare capitalism, which could be found in countries including Canada, Great Britain, and France. Under welfare capitalism, government assumed ultimate responsibility for promoting a reasonably fair distribution of wealth and power and for providing security against the risks of bankruptcy, unemployment and destitution. Compared to other industrialized countries, the economic decline brought on by the Depression was steeper and more protracted in the United States. The unemployment rate rose higher and remained higher longer than in any other western society. European countries significantly reduced unemployment by 1936. However, the American jobless rate still exceeded 17 percent as late as 1939, when World War II began in Europe. It did not drop below 14 percent until 1941. The Great Depression transformed the American political and economic landscape. It produced a major political realignment, creating a coalition of big city ethnics, African Americans and Southern Democrats committed, to varying degrees, to interventionist government. The Depression strengthened the federal presence in American life, producing such innovations as national old age pensions, unemployment compensation, aid to dependent children, public housing, federally subsidized school lunches, insured bank deposits, the minimum wage, and stock market regulation. It fundamentally altered labor relations, producing a revived labor movement and a national labor policy protective of collective bargaining. It transformed the farm economy by introducing federal price supports and rural electrification. Above all, the Great Depression produced a fundamental transformation in public attitudes. It led Americans to view the federal government as the ultimate protector of public well-being.

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