Download The United States in World War I

The United States in World War I
Preparing for war
The Draft
Wilson took a number of steps to mobilize the
nation. He raised income taxes, organized a
vigorous Liberty Bond campaign, and initiated
conscription (4 million men will be drafted)
• Many progressives supported the war and the
draft, believing that service to a common
cause might promote a sense of equality
among men of many different backgrounds.

• 11,000 Women volunteered as nurses,
clerical workers, and telephone operators.
Race and the military


The military, however, was not an equalizer
for African Americans, who were segregated.
One African American unit was integrated into
undermanned French units.
Although the NAACP won some officer
commissions, the military did not give high
rank to any African American.
The US arrives



The first doughboys with the American
Expeditionary Force (A.E.F.) arrived in France
in June 1917, boosting Allied morale.
By the summer of 1918, 10,000 American
troops were arriving in France a day
US military strategy called for frontal assaults,
a doctrine long since abandoned by the other
combatents
US involvement in the war
• Of the more than 2 million American
soldiers who went to France, nearly 1.4 million took
part in active combat. United States troops helped
stop a German advance at Château-Thierry, captured
Cantigny, and proved a decisive presence
in the Second Battle of the Marne. They
then achieved a major victory at St. Mihiel.
• A joint Allied effort near Argonne Forest broke the
German resolve to fight, leading to an armistice on
November 11, 1918.
Impact of the war
• United States troops, who served just over a
year, felt neither the despair nor the suffering
endured by their European counterparts. For
many, the “Great War” was an adventure.
The war at home


Propaganda campaigns reached every
corner of the United States. Women and
teenagers conserved food, pitched in with
farming, and took jobs in wartime industries
Big businesses joined with the government in
forming cooperative committees that
supervised the purchasing of war supplies
and the granting of contracts.
The war and labor
• Progressives lauded the efficiency of centralized
regulation, forgetting, in the heat of the moment, their
former distrust of big business. Corporate profits
tripled between 1914 and 1919.
• Labor and women’s suffrage leaders were divided on
whether to back the war. Samuel Gompers, who
headed the AFL, calculated the gains war might bring
to labor. Gompers pledged to support the war and, in
return, funds were secretly channeled into his
American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, a group
organized to discredit Socialists.
The American Federation of Labor
• The AFL attracted workers and won an 8-hour
work day. However, they also labored under
no-strike contracts and lost some of the
Socialist firebrands who might have helped
fight an anti-labor backlash after the war. In
addition, women of all races and Hispanic
and African American men quickly lost their
jobs when soldiers came home to reclaim
them.
Free speech during the war
• During the war, freedom of speech took a
severe beating. The Espionage Act of 1917
and the Sedition Amendment of 1918 made
any obstruction of the war effort illegal and
curbed the civil liberties of those who spoke
against the war.

Wartime hysteria led to the imprisonment of
Socialists such as Eugene Debs and, in some
cases, mob violence against radical worker
groups and people of German descent.
• Not all Americans were caught up in the wartime
frenzy. Some Americans spoke out against the
espionage and sedition laws. Groups such as the
American Civil Liberties Union assisted pacifists and
conscientious objectors who had been subjected to
abuse.

After the war, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., ruled that a citizen’s freedom of speech
should only be curbed when the words uttered
constitute a “clear and present danger.” However, the
question remained whether critics to the war
constituted such a danger