World War I
The Road to War
- The "triple Entente" linked Britain, France. and Russia
- the "Triple Alliance" united Germany. the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy
- conflict emerged most directly out of a controversy involving nationalist movements within the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- On June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the tottering empire was assassinated while paying a state visit to Sarajevo
- with support form Germany, Austria, Hungary launched a punitive assault on Serbia
- The Serbians called on Russia
- By August 3, Germany had declared war on both Russia and France and had invaded Belgium in preparation for a thrust across the French border
- On August 3, Great Britain declared war on Germany
- The Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and other smaller nations joined the fighting later in 1914 and 1915 and within less than a year, virtually the entire European continent and part of Asia were embroiled in a major war
- the British had imposed a naval blockade on Germany
- America tacitly ignored the blockade of German and continued trading with Britain
- German began practicing submarine warfare
- Germany began to try to stem the flow of supplies to England and on may 7, 1915, a German submarine sank the British passenger liner "Listania" without warning
- Theodore called it an "act of piracy"
- Wilson angrily demanded that Germany promise not to repeat such outrages
- Allies were now arming merchant ships to sing submarines
- Germany proclaimed that it would fire on such vessels without warning
- A few weeks later it attacked the unarmed french steamer "Susex" injuring several American passengers
- Lacking sufficient naval power, to enforce an effective blockade against Britain, the Germans decided that the marginal advantages of unrestricted submarine warfare did not yet justify the possibility of drawing America into the war
- Wilson at first sided with the anti-preparedness forces, denouncing the idea of an American military buildup as needless
- in the fall of 1915, he endorsed an ambitious proposal by American military leaders for a large and rapid increase in the nation's armed forces
- Still, the peace faction wielded considerable political strength, as became clear at the democratic Convention in the summer of 1916
- The convention became almost hysterically enthusiastic when the keynote speaker enumerating Wilson's accomplishments, punctuated his list of the president's diplomatic achievements with the chant
- The United States, Wilson insisted had no material aims in the conflict
- Rather the nation was committed to using the war as a vehicle for constructing a new world order
- Germany would launch a series of major assaults on the enemy's lines in France
- At the same time, they would begin unrestricted submarine warfare
- On February 25, the British gave Wilson a telegram they had intercepted from the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman, to the government of Mexico.
- It proposed that in the event of war between Germany and the United States, the Mexicans should join with Germany against the Americans. In return they would regain their "lost provinces" (Texas and much of the rest of the american Southwest)
- The trench warfare that characterized the conflict was necessary because of the enormous destructive power of newly improved machine guns and higher-powered artillery
- Was no longer feasible to send troops out into an open field, or even to allow them to camp in the open
- the new weaponry would slaughter them in an instant
- mobile weapons-tanks and flamethrower
- new chemical weapons-poisonous mustard gas, which required troops to carry gas masks at all times
- the new forms of technological warfare required elaborate maintenance
- Faster machine guns required more ammunition
- motorized vehicles required fuel and spare parts and mechanics capable of servicing them
- Word War i was the first conflict in which airplanes played a significant role
- New battleships emerged of which the British "Dreadnought" was perhaps the most visible example
- The new technologies were to a large degree responsible for the most stunning and horrible characteristic of World War I-its appalling level of causalities
- To raise the money for the war, the government relied on two devices
- First, it launched a major drive to solicit loans from the american people by selling "liberty Bonds" to the public
- At the same time, new taxes were bringing in an additional sum of nearly $10 billion
- In 1916, Wilson established a council of National Defense, composed of members of his cabinet and a Civilian Advisory commission, which set up local defense councils in every state and locality
- some members of the Council of National Defense urged a more centralized approach
- At the center of the effort to rationalize the economy was the War Industries Board, agency created in July 1917 to coordinate government purchases of military supplies
- Bernard Baruch decided which factories would convert to the production of which war materials and set prices for the goods they produced
- When materials were scarce, Baruch decided to whom they should go
- The war provided workers with important, if usually temporary gains
- But it did not stop labor militancy
- War helped produce a remarkable period of economic growth in the United States
- Industrial production soared and manufacturing activity expanded in regions that had previously had relative little of it
- Employment increased dramatically and because so many men were away at war, new opportunities for female, African-American, Mexican, and Asian workers
- Farm prices rose to their highest levels in decades, and agricultural production increased dramatically as a result
- One of the most important social changes of the war years was the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South into northern industrial cities
- Northern factory owners dispatched agents to the South to recruit African-American workers
- For american women, black and white, the war meant new opportunities for employment
- a million or more women worked in a wide range of industrial jobs that were considered male preserves: steel, munitions, trucking, public transportation
- The peace movement in the United states before 1917 had many constituencies; German Americans, who opposed American intervention against Germany, Irish Americans, who opposed any support for the British; religious pacifists
- The most active and widespread peace activism came from the women's movement
- In 1915, Carrie Chapman Catt, a leader of the fight for woman suffrage, helped create the Women's Peace Party, with a small but active membership
- Women peace activists were sharply divided once America entered the war in 1917
- The Nation American Woman Suffrage association, the single largest women's organization, supported the war, and more than that, presented itself as a patriotic organization dedicated to advancing the war effort
- Women peace activists shared many of the political and economic objections to the war of the Socialist Party. But some criticized the war on other grounds as well, arguing that as wives and mothers they had a special moral basis for their pacifism
- Wilson arrived in Europe to a welcome such as few men in history have experienced
- to the war-weary people of the continent, he was nothing less than a savior, the man who would create a new and better world
- The principal figures in the negotiations were the leaders of the victorious Allied nations: Lloyd George representing Great Britain, Clemenceau representing France, Virtorio Orland, the prime minister of Italy, and Wilson who hoped to dominate them all
- Some of Wilson's advisers had warned him that if agreement could not be reached at the "summit" there would be nowhere else to go, and that it would therefore be better to begin negotiations at a lower level. Wilson, however was adamant, he alone would represent the United States
- There was, a pervasive sense of unease about the unstable situation in eastern Europe and the threat of communism
- Into long before he came to Paris, Wilson ordered the landing of American troops in the soviet Union
- In the tense and often vindictive atmosphere theses competing concerns produced in Paris, Wilson was unable to win approval of many broad principles he had espoused: freedom of the seas, which the British refused even to discuss, free trade
- Economic and strategic demands were constantly coming into conflict with the principle of cultural nationalism
- As the conference began, the president opposed demanding compensation from the defeated central Powers
- The other Allied leaders, however, were intransigent, and slowly Wilson gave way and accepted the principle of reparations, the specific sum to be set later by a commission
- There were continued negotiations for a decade, which scaled the sum back considerably
- In the end, Germany paid only $9 billion, which was still more than its crippled economy could afford
- Wilson did mange to win some important victories in Paris in setting boundaries and dealing with former colonies. He secured approval of a plan to place many former colonies and imperial possessions in "trusteeship" under the League of Nations-the so-called mandate system
- Wilson's most visible triumph and the one most important to him, was the creation of a permanent international organization to oversee world affairs and prevent future wars
- On January 25, 1919, the allies voted to accept the "covenant" of the League of Nations and with that , Wilson believed the peace treaty was transformed from a disappointment into a success. Whatever mistakes and inequities had emerged from the peace conference, he was convinced, could be corrected later by the League
- The covenant provided for an assembly of nations that would meet regularly to debate means of resolving dispute sand protecting the peace
- Authority to implement League decisions would rest with a nine-member executive Council
- Many Americans were less concerned about international matters than about turbulent events at home
- The aftermath of war brought not the age of liberal reform that progressives had predicated but a period of repression and reaction
- Citizens of Washington, on the day after the armistice found it impossible to place long-distance telephone calls, the lines were jammed with officials of the war agencies canceling government contracts
- At first, the wartime boom continued but the postwar prosperity rested largely on the lingering effects of the war
- The postwar boom was accompanied moreover, by raging inflation, a result in part of the precipitous abandonment of wartime price controls
- Finally, late in 1920, the economic bubble burst, as many of the temporary forces that had created it disappeared and as inflation began killing the market for consumer goods
- Nearly 5 million Americans lost their jobs between 1920 and 1921
- In this unpromising economic environment, leaders of organized labor set out to consolidate the advances they had made in the war, which now seemed in danger of being lost
- In September, there was a strike by the Boston police force, which was responding to layoffs and wage cuts by demanding recognition of its union
- In September 1919, the greatest strike in American history began, when 350,000 steel workers in several eastern and midwestern cities walked off the job, demanding an eight-hour day and recognition of their union
- The wave of strikes was a reflection of the high expectations workers had in the aftermath of a war they believed had been fought, in part, to secure their rights
- The return of the black soldiers had a profound effect on black attitudes as it accentuated African-American bitterness and increased black determination to fight for their rights
- For many other American blacks, the war had raised economic expectations, as they moved into industrial and other jobs vacated by white workers, jobs to which they had previously had no access
- Just as black soldiers expected their military service to enhance their social status, so black factory workers regarded their move north as an escape from racial prejudice and an opportunity for economic gain
- By 1919, the racial climate had become savage and murderous. In the South, there was a sudden increase in lynchings, more than seventy blacks, some of them war veterans, died at the hands of white mobs in 1919 alone
- In the North black factory workers faced widespread layoffs as returning white veterans displaced them from their jobs
- Racial violence and even racially motivated urban riots were not new. The deadliest race riot in American history had occurred in New York during the Civil war.
- much of the white middle class a the time, the industrial warfare, the racial violence, and other forms of dissent all appeared to be frightening omens of instability and radicalism
- Concerns about the communist threat grew in 1919 when the Soviet government announced the formation of the Communist International whose purpose was to export revolution around the world
- Antiradicalism accompanied and reinforced, the already strong commitment among old-stock Protestants to the idea of "100 percent Americanism" and it produced what became known as the Red Scare
- Antiradical newspapers and politicians now began a portray almost every form of instability or protest as a sign of a radical threat
- Race riots, one newspaper claimed were the work of "armed revolutionaries running rampant through our cities"
- Perhaps the greatest contribution to the Red Scare came from the federal government
- On New Year's Day, 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his ambitious assistant J. Edgar Hover orchestrated a series of raids on alleged radical centers through the country and arrested more than 6,000 people
- The ferocity of the red Scare soon abated but its effects lingered well into the 1920's, most notably in the celebrated case of Sacco and Vanzetti
- Case; In May of 1920, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartomlmeao Vanzetti were charged with the murder of a paymaster in brantree, MA
- The evidence against them was questionable because both men were confessed anarchists, they faced a widespread public presumption of guilt. They were convicted in a trial of extraordinary injudiciousness before an openly bigoted judge, Webster Thayer, and were sentenced to death