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World War I
On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked a special session of Congress
for a declaration of war against Germany, stating that "The world must be made safe
for democracy." For three years, the United States had managed to remain neutral
in World War I, which was wrecking widespread destruction on Western Europe.
U.S. relations with Germany had deteriorated throughout that period, however,
particularly as German submarines had torpedoed many American merchant
vessels crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Congress adopted a declaration of war a few
days later by a strong vote.
Though the U.S. Army was ill-prepared, and Wilson himself had campaigned for reelection in 1916 on the
slogan, "He kept us out of war," Americans now entered the greatest and most destructive war in history up to
that point. World War I was a significant event in the emergence of the United States as a global power and set
in motion many of the important political and social trends that would intensify during and after the war.
Dubbed the Great War or the War to End All Wars, World War I began almost three years before the United
States became directly involved. The June 1914 assassination by Serbian nationalists of the heir to the throne of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, in Sarajevo had provoked the conflict. As the
Austrians determined to punish Serbia for the crime, Russia came to the aid of its Serbian ally.
Germany then stepped in to defend its ally Austria-Hungary (an alliance known as the Central Powers), while
France honored its treaty of alliance with Russia. Great Britain, angered by the German Army's invasion of
neutral Belgium on its way to attack France and fearing the consequences of a powerful German state ruling
continental Europe, joined Russia and France (a coalition that became known as the Allied Powers). By 1915,
Italy had joined the Allied Powers, Turkey had joined the Central Powers, and the smaller countries of Eastern
Europe had aligned themselves with one side or the other.
The war rapidly took on a global dimension. Germany, France, and Britain all possessed colonial empires that
provided workers and soldiers for the war effort, and some fighting even took place in the colonies, especially in
Africa and the Middle East. Countries as far away as Japan and Canada also entered the fray, and limited naval
actions took place on virtually all of the world's seas. Despite the widespread fighting, the United States hoped
to stay out of the war, which many Americans viewed as a strictly European affair.
Though there was significant fighting in several theaters, including enormous battles on the Eastern Front
between Russia and the Central Powers, the decisive area was the Western Front in northeastern France and
Belgium. Here the Germans faced the French and British armies in a series of defensive trench works that
stretched hundreds of miles from the Swiss border to the Belgian coast on the North Sea. The German effort to
take Paris early in the war failed, resulting in a stalemate that would persist until 1918, with neither side making
any appreciable gains.
Throughout the rest of the war, the Western Front would barely move more than a few miles in either direction,
despite the waging of huge battles and massive offensives by both sides. This type of warfare was costly,
however, as the staggering losses of the opening campaign in 1914 were only a foretaste of the slaughter that
would ensue as each side threw masses of men at enemy trenches in a futile effort to break the stalemate.
Battles like the Somme and Verdun, both in 1916, resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties and devoured
gigantic amounts of supplies without resulting in any significant movement of the front. This unmitigated tragedy
for the peoples of Europe, though, provided the U.S. economy with a significant stimulus.
Shortly after the war broke out, Wilson issued a proclamation of neutrality on August 4, 1914, outlining the U.S.
intention to stay out of the war and urging Americans to remain "impartial in thought as well as in action." U.S.
neutrality proved difficult to maintain, however, especially when it came to trade. It soon became clear that the
Allied Powers would be the primary beneficiaries of American financial resources and industrial and agricultural
production. In response, Germany used newly invented submarines to attack shipping traveling between North
America and Europe, but the British blockade of the Central Powers was much more effective in choking off
trade. While American commerce with the Allies increased threefold between 1914 and 1916, during the same
two years trade with Germany plunged to less than 1% of its original worth.
The American government complained about such British actions as publishing a list of contraband items and
blacklisting American companies that traded with Germany, but it was the German Navy's submarine warfare
that caused the most resentment. Many Americans, and Wilson in particular, regarded the sinking of
defenseless merchant ships from beneath the waves as inherently unfair and a violation of the rules of war, to
say nothing of the rules governing the civilized behavior of human beings in general. The question was not
merely one of impediments to free trade, but, as with many of Wilson's positions, a moral issue. It was the use of
submarines that would eventually bring the United States into the war, and in his request to Congress for a
declaration of war in 1917, Wilson described the actions of German submarines as "warfare against mankind."
Germany's actions strengthened Wilson's private conviction that the struggle in Europe was between the forces
of democracy and those of authoritarianism. While the American president remained suspicious of the
imperialistic aims of France and Great Britain, and was especially wary of the motives of an autocratic Russia
still under the rule of the czars, it was the aggressive, ambitious actions of the German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm
II, that concerned him most. Thus, Wilson blocked an attempt by Congress to end the shipment of arms to
Europe that was intended to enforce more strictly the spirit and letter of neutrality. In 1915, he also canceled a
measure forbidding loans to belligerents, opening up America's financial resources to the Allied Powers.
Still, the United States did not immediately enter the war, despite damage caused by the German submarines.
On May 7, 1915, a torpedo struck the British passenger liner Lusitania, killing 128 Americans and prompting a
strenuous U.S. protest. In response, the German government promised to give warning to passenger ships
before firing on them. This protocol of giving warning before a submarine attack was one of Wilson's main
demands, calculated in the president's mind to render the actions of submarines less unfair. However, surfacing
to warn targets eliminated the submarine's most effective characteristics—stealth and surprise—and exposed it
to enemy battleships. Nonetheless, the Germans scaled back their effort, knowing that they did not have enough
resources to win the war at sea with submarines alone and hoping to avoid direct American intervention on the
side of the Allies.
By January 1917, the German High Command decided to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, believing that
Germany could win the war against the exhausted Allies before the United States could bring its full force to
bear in the conflict. During the next two months, the German Navy sunk several American merchant vessels,
and Wilson broke off all diplomatic relations with Germany. Still, he hoped to keep the United States out of the
war.
In late February, the British government revealed that they had intercepted a telegram from German Foreign
Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador in Mexico. The so-called Zimmermann Note proposed
a German-Mexican alliance against the United States and promised the return of former Mexican territory in
Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. When word of the telegram leaked out in the United States, the American
public turned decisively against Germany. After the Germans sunk several more American ships in the following
weeks, Wilson finally asked for a declaration of war.
Unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Note having propelled the United States into war, the
country now faced a task for which it was ill-equipped. The army numbered only a little more that 200,000 men,
the economy was decentralized and not on a war-footing, and public opinion, though largely unfavorable to
Germany, was not significantly mobilized. The European powers, in response to the pressures and demands of
modern war, had all addressed these primary issues—manpower, the war economy, and propaganda—and the
United States would have to confront them as well if it was to participate fully in the conflict.
Wilson's administration moved quickly to organize a viable fighting force. The Selective Service Act of May 1917,
instituting a draft, raised 2.8 million conscripts, while almost 2 million more men enlisted. Of these, about 2
million eventually served in France, making up the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) under Gen. John J.
Pershing. The army instituted a mammoth training program in 32 camps around the United States, and as early
as June 1917, Pershing led an initial contingent of 300,000 men to France. As the year wore on, more troops,
along with tons of supplies, arrived to help defend the Allied lines on the Western Front.
The AEF, however, was only loosely tied to the other Allied armies. Wilson, suspicious of the war aims of France
and Britain, refrained from becoming a formal ally. Instead, the United States technically became an Associated
Power, rather than a full-fledged Allied Power, and Pershing's instructions specified the AEF as "a distinct and
separate component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved." Thus, Pershing resisted
persistent British and French demands that the American soldiers be fed as reinforcements into Allied units
already in the field, insisting instead that the AEF take the field with its own separate identity intact and defend
its own separate sector of the front. Though he eventually made some exceptions to this policy when German
attacks threatened to break through weakened Allied lines, Pershing largely succeeded in preserving the
integrity of the forces under his command.
Despite the friction between the Allies that this policy caused, the French public
cheered the arrival of American troops. American gestures of goodwill contributed to
this welcome. Soon after the American arrival, there was a ceremony at the tomb of
the Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman who had fought alongside the patriots in
the American Revolution. During the ceremony, Lt. Col. C. E. Stanton declared,
"Lafayette, we are here," implying that Americans were returning the favor of French
help during the revolution.
The American war economy proved even more difficult to organize than the AEF. As European states had
mobilized massive armies to fight at the front, they had also organized their nations' productive capacities under
close government supervision. American ideology and the attitudes of big business in the United States were
much more distrustful of intervention by the state in the economy. Despite the enormous effort required to meet
the demands of the war, American mobilization remained largely private.
The Wilson administration did, however, undertake limited actions toward directing and channeling war
production. In July 1917, the president created the War Industries Board (WIB) to coordinate the activities of
government and business. In subsequent months, Congress grudgingly yielded power to Wilson to regulate food
and food supplies, and to set some agricultural prices. The creation of more government agencies followed,
including the War Trade Board, the War Labor Board, and the War Finance Corporation, and Wilson eventually
enlarged the WIB's operations even further.
Despite these steps and the relative success of the United States in meeting the demands of the war effort, the
centralization of the war economy remained limited. Even the WIB had only moderate powers and was often
hesitant to exercise those. Economic mobilization was more a result of cooperation than the powerful statedirected efforts of the European powers.
As with the economy, the government took steps to mold public opinion in support of the war. Wilson created the
Committee on Public Information (CPI) in April 1917 to produce propaganda favorable to the Allied cause. The
CPI sent thousands of men around the country to give prowar speeches and stimulate patriotism, printed
pamphlets, and even produced propaganda films.
Shortly after the creation of the CPI, the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917 intensified the wartime
atmosphere. This act, in conjunction with the Sedition Act of 1918, restricted Americans' freedom of expression
and led to the prosecution of many pacifists, socialists, communists, and members of the Industrial Workers of
the World. Americans opposed to the war were not the only victims of what became in many cases war hysteria.
German Americans, who made up a significant component of the large immigrant population of the United
States, often became the targets of discrimination and abuse. Speaking or teaching German was suspect and
often forbidden outright; objects with German names were renamed (as in the case of "sauerkraut," which
became "liberty cabbage"); and an American of German descent was even lynched by a mob near St. Louis,
Missouri.
Meanwhile, Wilson continued to press the Allies to envision a just peace and a rejuvenated world order that
would follow the war and justify its horrible sacrifices. After the Bolshevik communists prevailed in the Russian
Revolution of 1917, they withdrew Russia from the conflict and published some of the secret diplomatic
correspondence of the fallen czar's regime. These documents revealed to the entire world the confidential
agreements that the Allies had negotiated among themselves to carve up the German and Austro-Hungarian
Empire after the war. Such naked imperialism cast into doubt the lofty rhetoric of the Allies about defending
democracy and struggling against German authoritarianism and militarism, and also deeply offended Wilson,
whose moralistic view of the world held no place for such imperialistic greed and its attendant secret diplomacy.
In response, the president set down the principles for which he believed the Allies were fighting, his famous
Fourteen Points. He presented them to Congress on January 8, 1918, and they embodied such ideas as free
trade, open (not secret) diplomacy, the right of peoples to be free to choose their own form of government
(national self-determination), the reestablishment of inviolable national borders, and the creation of an
association of nations to guarantee adherence to these principles. Though Wilson would have a very difficult
time persuading his own allies that these were the ideas that should govern the peace, they would remain a
notable statement of the liberal goals of Western democracy.
In France, the AEF was seeing its first combat by the end of 1917. The untrained Americans made little direct
contribution to the fighting, however, until the Germans launched a massive offensive on the Western Front in
the spring of 1918. Freed from fighting Russia, as the Bolsheviks had concluded a separate peace, the Germans
were able to concentrate their efforts in France, and they finally broke the stalemate that had characterized the
fighting since 1914. By May, the German Army was within striking distance of Paris, and the situation looked
grim for the Allies. American units took part in fierce combats in Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood at this time,
taking heavy casualties. The German attack stalled, mostly because the kaiser's soldiers were too exhausted
after four years of war to sustain such a long offensive effort. Fighting continued over the summer and into
autumn, however.
In September, the AEF undertook two separate major offensive efforts to drive the Germans back. On
September 12, the Americans attacked a German salient at St. Mihiel and rapidly succeeded in gaining ground
because the Germans had already begun to evacuate the area when the attack began. A U.S.-led attack on
September 26 along the Meuse River through the Argonne Forest was a different matter altogether. The
Germans put up fierce resistance, slowing the attack significantly. By the time the AEF finally broke through the
remaining German defenses in late October, Pershing had deployed 1.2 million men, and the force had suffered
120,000 casualties in the campaign. It was the largest battle that any American army had been involved in up to
that point.
With its Western Front collapsing and wartime shortages crippling both its military and civilian populations,
Germany finally signed an armistice with the Allied Powers on November 11, 1918 to take effect at the 11th hour
of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year. The war had wrought unimaginable death and destruction:
American casualties—over 320,000, with more than 112,000 killed—were small in comparison with the total for
the war, which reached 40 million casualties and nine million dead.
The American contribution was more significant in other ways, however. American supplies kept the Allies going
through the long war, American loans helped finance the Allied war effort, and American manpower, even if not
directly decisive on the battlefield, helped boost the morale of the exhausted Allies and convince Germany that it
could not win the war.
The war began a process, completed by the end of World War II, of transferring the balance of world power from
within Europe to the United States and the Soviet Union. Before World War I, the financial capitals of the world
were Paris and London; by its end, New York had begun to supersede them in importance. In addition, though
Americans sought to stay out of world affairs for a time after the war, retreating into isolationism and away from
foreign entanglements, 1917 and 1918 were years that saw the United States emerge as a global military and
economic power. A second involvement in European affairs between 1941 and 1945 would complete the
process. Moreover, though Wilson had a difficult and frustrating time influencing the Allied leaders at the
negotiations for the Versailles Peace Treaty, his Fourteen Points laid the groundwork for a morally and
democratically based crusading spirit in American foreign policy that would persist throughout the 20th century.
The United States underwent domestic transformations as well during the conflict. The absence of so many
men, away in France or in army camps around America, necessitated the entry of women into the workforce in
ways that had hitherto been unimaginable. Middle-class and rural women tended fields, cared for livestock, and
delivered the mail. Though many working-class women had always worked as wage laborers, even more
women from different social backgrounds found themselves working in factories or offices for the first time.
African Americans also experienced significant social change, as hundreds of thousands moved from the South
to the North in search of jobs in the expanded industrial concerns that were turning out products for the war
economy. Though they often found the same kinds of discrimination in the North as they had experienced in the
South, many blacks also found new economic opportunities.
In addition, African Americans made a significant contribution to the war effort by entering the military. Though
they faced harsh discrimination, were constituted in segregated units with white officers, and were primarily used
by the AEF as laborers unloading cargo ships, many did see combat. The French, desperate for soldiers,
employed several units of African-American infantry. Outfitted with French equipment and fighting alongside
their French comrades, several units received citations for bravery. These units proved that African Americans
could fight just as well as white Americans, though the poor performance of the black 386th Regiment of the
93rd Division, due largely to poor training and white leadership, confirmed the U.S. Army's racist ideas about
black soldiers.
The short duration of American involvement in the war prevented any significant lasting social changes from
occurring in the United States, but the groundwork had been laid for changes in race relations, demography, and
women's roles in the coming decades. In addition, the limited efforts toward state-directed economic mobilization
and the molding of public opinion would foreshadow much more far-reaching changes in these areas during
World War II. On both the foreign and domestic fronts, then, World War I proved an important stage in the
development of the United States as a modern nation.
References:
Barbeau, Arthur, and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: African-American Troops in World War I, 1996;
Farwell, Byron, Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917-1918, 1999; Ferrell, Robert H., Woodrow
Wilson and World War I: 1917-1921, 1986; Harries, Meirion, and Susie Harries, The Last Days of Innocence:
America at War, 1917-1918, 1997; Keegan, John, The First World War, 1999; Tucker, Spencer, The Great War,
1914-1918, 1998.
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