Download HIST 212 Assessment Unit 5: “World War I and the 1920s” Guide to

HIST 212
Assessment Unit 5: “World War I and the 1920s”
Guide to Responding
1. President Wilson’s League of Nations and his domestic policies during World
War I reflect the Progressive faith in democracy and the effectiveness of
government regulation. In his war message to Congress in 1917, Wilson
declared that the United States would see the war as a means to promote
democracy and the rights of men. Wilson’s 14 points, his basis for a
comprehensive peace plan after the war, included the call for a League of
Nations and self-determination of peoples such as the people of Poland. The
Progressive era had witnessed the implementation of democratic reforms such
as the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment. Progressives also pushed for
government regulation to protect society from inefficiency, waste, and corruption.
Wilson’s League of Nations created an Assembly of nations and a permanent
council of the Great Powers that would regulate the relations among nations and
prevent future wars, just as the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade
Commission had been created in the Progressive Era to regulate banks and
businesses. During World War I, Wilson instituted more such federal agencies to
meet the demands of the war on American society. The Food Administration
(1917), for example, served to increase food production and reduce civilian
consumption of food as a means to provide food for the troops. The War
Industries Board (1917) had the authority to order manufacturers to produce war
materials and to set prices for such goods.
2. Movements or historic trends that were speeded up during World War I include
the Women’s Rights movement, the emigration of African Americans out of the
South, nativism, and Prohibition. During World War I, millions of women entered
into jobs traditionally held by men because so many men were drafted into the
military. The praiseworthy performance of women in these positions increased
support for women’s suffrage, which was granted with the Nineteenth
Amendment in 1920. Women activists had been seeking the right to vote since
before the Civil War. In the 1920s some women, most notoriously the “Flappers,”
began to challenge and defy traditional behavior and social expectations for
women. Also as a result of the war, immigration to the United States from
Europe declined and employers in urban areas began to hire African Americans
in large numbers to replace these workers. African Americans thus began
leaving the South and moving to cities such as Chicago and New York City.
Emigration of African Americans out of the South began after the Civil War, but
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this emigration increased dramatically with the onset of World War I. The
presence of a large and prosperous African American community in New York
City created the environment that saw a cultural flowering known as the Harlem
Renaissance in the 1920s. Due to war propaganda and surging patriotism,
Americans became increasingly hostile to foreigners and recent immigrants who
were not “100% American,” which many Americans equated with being white,
Protestant, and native-born. Opposition to immigration from nonwhite, nonProtestant regions had existed earlier, as evidenced by the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882, but in the 1920s after World War I, “nativists” supported the
Immigration Act of 1924, which greatly restricted immigration to the United
States. The Prohibition Movement predated World War I with the establishment
of the Anti-Saloon League in 1893, but the hostility to German American brewers
and distillers during World War I, as well as the public’s association of heavy
drinking with recent immigrants who were not “100% American,” resulted in the
ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment by 1919. In the 1920s, especially in
large urban areas, many Americans flouted the new law, which forbade the
consumption of alcohol, and this era saw the growth of organized crime to
provide these consumers with this illegal product.
3. Reactionary movements of the 1920s were the Red Scare, Isolationism, the new
Ku Klux Klan, Fundamentalism, and the Republican Party in this decade. After
the Russian Revolution in 1917 and other communist revolutions in Europe and a
wave of violent, postwar labor strikes and anarchist bombings in the United
States, Americans in 1919–1920 feared that a Communist revolution in the
United States was imminent. U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered
the arrest of hundreds of “Reds” or radicals who were deported in 1919 to
Russia. Americans were also disillusioned by the outcome of World War I and
concluded that the war had been a terrible waste of lives and resources.
Isolationists wanted the United States in the future to avoid all foreign alliances,
and in 1920, Isolationists succeeded in persuading the U.S. Senate to reject the
Versailles Treaty and membership in the League of Nations. The new Ku Klux
Klan defined “real” Americans as white, Protestant, and of northern European or
“Nordic” ancestry. This organization grew rapidly in the early 1920s in rural
areas and small towns across the country as a reaction to the growth of large
cities, whose populations in previous decades had come to include large
numbers of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as African
Americans from the South. Fundamentalism was a religious revival among
Evangelical Protestants in largely rural areas and small towns. Fundamentalists
opposed the materialism of the new consumer society in the 1920s and the
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modern materialism of Marxism, Freudian Psychology, and Darwin’s Theory of
Evolution. Fundamentalists supported laws to enforce Prohibition and ban the
teaching of evolution in the public schools. The Republican Party in the 1920s,
during the presidencies of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, advocated a
return to the laissez-faire (“hands-off”) policies of the earlier Gilded Age and
opposed the expansion of the Federal government through increased regulation
of the economy during the earlier Progressive Era. Instead, it maintained that
government should keep its “hands off” the economy and allow market forces to
operate without interference.
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