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Lecture Two

UNITED STATES ENTERS WORLD WAR I

On January 22, 1917, Woodrow Wilson

delivered a formal presidential address to the
Senate in which he reiterated his vision for peace.
Calling for “peace without victory”, Wilson
reminded his audience and fellow-Americans of
fundamental U.S. principles: self-determination,
freedom of maritime trade, and a world without
binding alliances. Wilson’s envisaged
international peace could be enforced and
protected by a world league.

Wilson’s speech was accepted with

applause by most Americans. However,
Europeans in general, and Germans in particular
had different opinions about it. The French writer
Anatole France, for instance, called this message
of “peace without victory” as useless, obscene and
shameful as “bread without yeast”, “a camel
without humps” or even “a town without
brothel”. For Europeans, who have been
shedding blood in this war for more than two
years, talking about peace without the victory of
the Allies and the undisputed defeat of Germany was not only outrageous but also
disgraceful.

By January 31, 1917, Germany gave its answer to Wilson’s peace speech: resumption
of submarine warfare. It also invited Mexico to enter in a wartime military alliance that
would help it regain territories annexed by the United States (New Mexico, Arizona, Texas).
As the German threat moved from Europe to the U.S. borders, pressure on Wilson
intensified. Believing that “the world must be made safe for democracy”, Wilson asked
Congress for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917. War was declared despite the opposition
and within the first six weeks 73,000 people volunteered. The numbers were far less than
the expected hundreds of thousands which led Congress to institute a draft.

Because the atrocities of the war made their way to the American public, many young
men were very reluctant to join the army when war was declared. To counter the anti-war
sentiment, the Wilson administration had to resort to propaganda. The main focus of the
Committee on Public Information (CPI) was to emphasise the noble nature of the war
America intends to enter and to report with the highest vividity the barbaric atrocities
committed by the Germans. The Great War was devastating and devastatingly simplified. It
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was a war of Good against Evil, democracy against autocracy, civilisation against barbarism.
This oversimplification of the war made the line between right and wrong clearly defined.
Americans were urged to inform on fellow citizens who
criticised the war, who spread rumours about it, or who
even had pessimistic opinions about its outcome. Campuses
became centres for hatred and intolerance. University
professors were fired if they dared speak against the war,
the rest kept silent. Very soon any voice raised in opposition
to the war was immediately encountered with accusations
of sedition and treason.

On October 1, 1918, 140,000 students on more than

500 campuses across the U.S. were simultaneously
inducted into the army. They were given the rank of private
and were subsequently educated, housed, clothed,
equipped and fed at government expense. The Chicago
Tribune reported, “Rah-rah days are over for American
college boys… College hereafter is to mean business—
largely intensive preparation for the business of war.”
Eleven hours per week were slated for military drills, on top of forty-two hours of courses on
largely military-oriented “essential” and “allied” subjects. As part of this training, students
at participating institutions were required to take a propaganda-laden “War Issues Course.”

Anti-German sentiments. All things German were vilified in a wave of intolerance

masquerading as patriotism. Schools, many of which now demanded loyalty oaths from
teachers, banned the German language from their curricula. Iowa, not taking any chances,
went further and, under the 1918 “Babel Proclamation,” banned the speaking of all foreign
languages in public and over the telephone. Nebraska followed suit. Libraries across the
country discarded German books, and orchestras dropped German composers from their
repertoires. German Americans faced discrimination in all aspects of life. Given the
widespread pressure for “100 percent Americanism,” it is no surprise that dissidents were
not only ostracized, they were occasionally murdered by patriotic mobs.

The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition

“In spite of excesses such as Act of 1918. Under the Espionage Act, people
lynchings, it is a healthful and faced $10,000 fines and up to twenty years in jail
wholesome awakening in the for obstructing military operations in wartime. It
interior part of the country. targeted “Whoever, when the United States is at
Enemy propaganda must be war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause
stopped, even if a few insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of
lynchings may occur.” duty in the military or naval forces of the United
The Washington Post, April States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or
1918 enlistment service of the U.S.” The act empowered
Postmaster General Albert Burleson, who, socialist
Norman Thomas said, “didn’t know socialism from rheumatism,” to ban from the mail any
literature he believed advocated treason or insurrection or opposed the draft. The following
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year, Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory convinced Congress to expand the act to ban
anyone who might “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive
language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United
States, or the military or naval forces of the United States… and whoever shall by word or
act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by
word or act oppose the cause of the United States.”

Hundreds of people were jailed for criticizing the war, including IWW leader “Big
Bill” Haywood and Socialist Eugene Debs. Debs spoke out repeatedly against the war and
was finally arrested in June 1918 after addressing a large crowd outside the prison in Canton,
Ohio, where three Socialists were being held for opposing the draft. Debs ridiculed the idea
that the United States was a democracy when it jailed people for expressing their views:
“They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that
we are a free and self-governing people. This is too much, even for a joke.” He spoke only
briefly of the war itself: “Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and
plunder… And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles.”

“Let the capitalists do their

own fighting and furnish their
own corpses and there will
never be another war on the
face of the earth.” Eugene
Debs, 1912.

Socialist publications were banned from the mail. Patriotic thugs and local authorities
broke into socialist organizations and union halls. Labor organizers and antiwar activists
were beaten and sometimes killed. The New York Times called the Butte, Montana, lynching
of IWW Executive Board member Frank Little “a deplorable and detestable crime, whose
perpetrators should be found, tried, and punished by the law and justice they have
outraged.” But the Times was far more upset by the fact that IWW-led strikes were crippling
the war effort and concluded, “The IWW agitators are in effect, and perhaps in fact, agents
of Germany. The Federal authorities should make short work of these treasonable
conspirators against the United States.”
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War propaganda and drafting played an important role in increasing the number of
recruits from around 127,000 at the beginning of American intervention in the Great war to
4 million men by the end of it. By October 1918 on the eve of Allied victory, more than 1.5
million American soldiers were deployed in France.

The United States role in WWI

Even after the official involvement of the U.S. in the war against the Central Powers,
Wilson hoped that America’s contribution would be limited to supplies, financial credits,
and moral support. However, the imminent collapse of the Allied Powers forced the United
States to play a more crucial role in ending the war. The U.S. Navy was able, for example, to
help the British break the submarine blockade imposed by Germany. It also played an
essential role in patrolling the Western Hemisphere. On land, the intervention of the
American army was not less effective. In March 1918, 85,000 American soldiers helped
Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the leader of the French army, resist the German attack and push
back their army to the Belgian border. In November, American troops took an important
part in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. The battle of the Meuse-Argonne was fought over 47
days from September 26 to November 11 and it is still the largest offensive in the military
history of the United States. It involved 1.2 million American soldiers 26,277 of them lost
their lives. Despite the enormous sacrifice, the offensive succeeded in cracking Germany’s
Hindenburg Line.

The American entry into the war gave the Allied Powers a long-needed numerical
advantage. The 1.5 million fresh American soldiers that were injected in the European fronts
forced the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Turkey and Germany to stop fighting and ask for
armistice. The end of the Great War on November 11, 1918 was not only due to the military
supremacy of the Allied Powers and the United States, but was also the result of President
Wilson’s contribution to the war aims and objectives. Wilson insisted that the war was not
waged against the German people but against the autocratic government. He also believed
that reaching a peace agreement with Germany might be the basis for the establishment of
a new world order founded on principles of freedom, democracy and justice.

Woodrow Wilson’s vision was developed in his Fourteen Points which he submitted
to the Senate in January 1918 and which called for: abandonment of secret international
agreements, a guarantee of freedom of the seas, the removal of tariff barriers between
nations, reductions in national armaments, and an adjustment of colonial claims with due
regard to the interests of the inhabitants affected. Other points sought to ensure self-rule
and unhampered economic development for European nationalities.

The League of Nations

The culmination of Wilson’s peace dreams was to create an association of nations that
could guarantee and protect the “mutual political independence and territorial integrity to
great and small states alike.” To materialise his dream, Wilson had to compromise on some
of his principles during the peace negotiations in Paris. He was aware that the creation of
the League of Nations would never happen without the endorsement and support of the
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Allied Powers. For this, he was willing to tolerate some of the Allied demands that went
against self-determination and open diplomacy. However, he opposed some of the most
severe demands made by France. He objected to the detachment of the entire Rhineland and
the annexation of the Saar Basin. He also refused to charge Germany with the whole cost of
the war.

Wilsonian idealism was once again challenged at home and abroad. Failing to attract
the support of Republicans for the peace negotiations, the Versailles Treaty and the League
of Nations were both rejected by the Senate in 1919. Very soon, the United States was forced
to retreat back into isolationism as postwar unrest grew and new economic challenges
started to appear.