1World War I -tr and Wilson I. Summary of European events

1World War I –TR and Wilson
I. Summary of European events:

Expansionist Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II allied with Austro-Hungarian Empire

vs. Great Britain and France with Czarist Russia

June 28, 1914 a Serbian terrorist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo.

Germany declared War on Serbia and Russia and her ally France–Russia had come to Serbia’s defense against Austria. Hoping for a quick victory Germany struck France through Belgium which resulted in bringing Britain into the fray. Soon Turkey and Bulgaria joined Germany creating the “Central Powers” against the “Allies” France, GB, and Russia and eventually joined by Italy and Japan. The war was waged in Europe as well as in Africa, the Middle East and East Asia.

WWI was characterized by brutal trench warfare in which the technology and the war strategies had not caught up to each other. The British suffered 300, 000 casualties in one offensive that only gained a few square miles before being pushed back. If men didn’t die from gunshot they did from disease due to cold, mud, shock, from being trenches with decaying bodies and human waste. The “Great War” had become a grave of nations.

II. Preparedness vs. Neutrality

A. Economy of War

1. Sales only to Britain – Britain prevented America from selling to Central Powers

2. Allied war trade strengthened US ties to Allies

3. Loans from American Banks –WJBryan tried to pursuade Wilson from loaning to the Allies..but as the economy was affected by the War Wilson acquiesced.

-April 1917 war loans exceeded $2bil

B. Diplomacy

1. Wilson gave in to Britain but refused to yield to Germany

–Britain was viewed as a gang of thieves—Germany murderers

2. British blockade and German submarine warfare against merchant ships

—German sunk the Lusitania in 1915–had been carrying arms and 128 Americans and 1,198 people lost their lives.

–even with this provocation TR estimated that 98% of Americans opposed entering the War.

–WJBryan resigned over what he believed to be Wilson’s hypocrisy of demanding more from Germany and giving favoritism to Britian. Wilson had demanded that Germany end submarine campaign. Bryan object to Britain using American ships to shield contraband cargo. “This country cannot be neutral and un-neutral at the same time. He proposed that Americans be prohibited from traveling on belligerent ships which was eventually introduced into by Congress. Wilson opposed the Gore-McLemore resolution asserting that it impinged on his ability to control foreign policy.

–1916 Wilson threatened to brake diplomatic ties with Germany over the submarine sinking of the French ship Sussex if Germany did not abandon all submarine warfare. Germany in the Sussex pledge only would agree if the US would agree to hold Britain to rules of international laws.

B. Peace movement

1. Supporters included Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Carrie Chapman Catt who formed the Women’s Peace Party in 1915.

–Jane Addams: Newer Ideals of Peace

2. Bryan led Democrats for peace and denounced TR call for preparedness

3. Radicals opposed to the war

4. Intellectuals opposed

—William James: 1910 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.”

—Both Addams and James believed that society had progressed to point of not needing war–for means of demonstrating self-sacrifice or to fulfill the need for adventure.

–While James tended to ennoblize war–Addams on the other had saw it in an opposite way and her solution was the formation of a moral community in which all people worked together for the common good. James was a traditionalist with respect to gender roles and wanted roles to remain the same unlike Addams who hoped that as men gave up war they would take up the cause of nurturing human life and relationships.

—Addams looked to the modern city as a place to see this new ideal

—in the city men of all nations were determining on the abolition of poverty, disease, and intellectual weakness. The city was were men of all nations worked and lived in close proximity and recognized their common humanity. In this way, war would seem inappropriate on another nation as upon our next-door neighbor.

—Addams also believed that women of all classes and countries understood the importance of nurturing and production. Rather than the male model of competition, the female model of nurturance derived from Addams appreciation of “separate spheres”was what needed to be integrated into a public world.

—James, however, clearly had sympathies for those who favored war and exalted the virtues of war such as strength, fearlessness, self-sacrifice, obedience–he saw these as absolute human goods and in a world dominated by public women would be absent of these virtues and softened by women’s participation. On the other hand he could not reconcile his sympathies with the war party with his philosophical reservations about war and imperialism. He sought “A moral equivalent” to war which would preserve the “psychological benefits of war without the destruction. Like Addams he sought some sort of collective effort such as a national service for “young men” doing civil service projects roads, bridges etc. His project omitted women and was clearly aimed at the needs of the affluent who were the only ones who had lost contact with the “hard foundations of life.”

C. War declared in April 2, 1917.

Wilson initially opposed preparedness but reversed his position with Germany’s submarine warfare. But he also began to champion military expansion lest the country be unprepared.

—National Defense Act and Navel Construction Act was passed in 1916 stripping the Republicans of on e issue.

–TR had urged many of the Progressive Bull Moose Party to join him back into the Republican Party but many joined the Democrats and Wilson won with a close majority of the electoral(52-48) and popular vote –49% to 46%
–Jan–Germany had declared boarder sub warfare measures

–Wilson sought to arm merchant vessels over Congress’ objections

–Zimeremann Note—Germany sought to have Mexico side with the Central Powers with the promise that they would recover the lost territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

–Russian Revolution 1917

–March 1917 4 American freighters were sunk

—Wilson framed the war in the following words:

“The US would not fight for conquest or domination but for ....the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples...The World must be made safe for democracy.”
III Managing War: Enlarging the Federal Government

A. War Industries Board– July 1917

1. Reorganized Industry for wartime production

2. Lead by financier Bernard Baruch

3. Price setting, allocations of materials, standardizing of products and efficiency

4. WIB promoted Business interests, suspended antitrust laws, and guaranteed huge corporate profits.

B. RR Administration

1. Led by William McAdoo

2. Centralized management and eliminated competition, improved equipment, brought profits to the owners and higher prices to the public

C. Food Administration

1. Increased ag. production

2. Led by Herbert Hoover

3. Controlled food production and distribution.

4. Women went door to door securing food conservation pledges, victory gardens,

5. Woman’s Land Army organized large numbers of women to work the land while men were drafted

D. National War Labor Board– Selective Service Act May 1917 took 3mil men, 2mil volunteered and 10,000 women served in the navy; one fifth of US soldiers were foreign-born, 367,000 were black

1. Resolved labor management disputes

2. Improved labor conditions–eight hour day–increased wages

3. Recognized union rights to promote efficiency and production

3. New opportunities for Women and AA–although temporary

–100, 000 women were in munitions plants

–40, 000 in steel and 20% in electrical machinery

–AA migration to North–half a million

–new jobs for white women opened new jobs for black women in domestic, clerical and industrial employment

–lead to middle-class reform achievements: suffrage and prohibition

eg. Women physicians

1. Initially represented opportunity

2. Held special attraction for honing medical skills –surgical/bacteriology

3. Women physicians were legally excluded even tho they had been practicing medicine in large numbers and graduating from medical schools

—they could apply for positions in bacteriology, sanitation, Public Health Service or a “contract surgeon.” Which meant they could work but with none of the benefits of service employment–rank, salary etc. The Red Cross was another avenue. Though in that case work was primarily with women and children. The Medical Women’s National Association was caught in a rock and hard place —between professionalism and feminine altruism. The very success of their American Women’s Hospital overseas meant a reinforcement of separation more than equality.

E. Committee on Public Information

1. Led by George Creel

2. Sought “manipulate” public opinion

3. Creel flooded country with press releases, advertisements, cartoons and canned editorials, newsreels, war movies. 75,000 speakers. It targeted women in stereotyped emotional terms.

–Carrie Chapman Catt dropped her peace activism and headed up the Woman’s Committee on the Council of National Defense.

–Three themes: national unity; demonize the enemy; war was a grand crusade for democracy and liberty.

–Creel promoted a “trimphant Americanism” through fear, hatred and prejudice. Dissent was unpatriotic and dangerous to national survival and led to hysteria attacks on German-Americans and suppression of all things German ie. town names, streets, people changed their names;, radicals and pacifists.

F. Suppressing Dissent

1. Espionage Act–fines and 20yrs in prison

2. Sedition Act of 1918

–designed to suppress radicals–penalties for writing/speaking against the draft, bond sales, war production, or against the government personnel or policies.

–Postmaster General Albert Burleson banned antiwar/radical newspapers, journals or any literature of that type from the mails

–Att. Gen. Thomas Gregory made little distinction against traitors, pacifists, war critics, or radicals. Eugene Debs was imprisoned for 10yrs. and by wars end one third of the Socialist Party was in jail.

3. American Protective League

–as a vigilante it sought to purge radicals and reformers from nations economic and private life.

–wiretapped phones, intercepted private mail, burglarized union offices, broke up German language newspapers, staged mass raids, harassed immigrants, and seized thousands of people they thought were not doing enough for the war.

4. Business used hysteria to exploit own interests

eg. Phelps-Dodge Company broke a miners strike in Arizona in 1917 by depicting the IWW or Wobblies as bent on war-related sabotage. A vigilante mob paid by the company seized workers one third who were Mexican Americans and herded them into the desert without food or water. Fed. investigators later reported that this was not an act inspired by patriotism but rather a “strike breaking technique. Nevertheless the government continued to support business as it sent in the army to break a WWI loggers strike in the Pacific NW and in 1917 it raided IWW labor halls across the country convicting two hundred in three mass trials in Ill, CA, and KA.

IV. Waging Peace

A. Armistice declared Nov. 11, 1918

–115,000 Americans were among the 8mil soldiers and 7mil civilians who died

B. Wilson’s 14 points

-response to Lenin’s charge that the Allies and US were dividing up the world in secret treaties. Lenin called for immediate liberation of all colonies and self determination of all peoples

–Wilson sought to reassure Allies and American public that the war was not fought for imperialist gains and offered an alternative to Lenin’s “crude formula for peace.”

However: Wilson proposed creating new nations, shifting old boarders

–assured self determination to those countries subject to Austrian, German or Russian empires. Russian self-determination would haunt Wilson resulting in the establishment of the Bolsheviks.

–freedom of seas; open diplomacy; arms reduction; free trade; fair settlement of colonial claims.

C. League of Nations

–While Germans were in agreement with Wilson, the Allies wanted all they could get from Germany in reparations.

–Wilson attended Paris Peace Conference –though no President had gone to Europe while in office.

—Went after seeking a mandate from public via 1918 elections. Domestic concerns led Republican landslide and the peace became Wilsons with no Republican participation.

–One sided treaty–no Central Powers or Russia

–Wilson would break two of his 14 points–ie. open seas and by interfering in Russia’s right to self determination

–Under protest Germany signed in June of 1919. Its terms far more severe than Wilson had proposed. Germany accepted responsibility for starting the war and was forced to pay huge reparations to the Allies; it gave up land in France, Poland, Belgium and Denmark; ceded its colonies; limited its defense; destroyed military bases; and agreed to not manufacture or purchase armaments.

–Empires of German, Austrian, Turkish, and Russia collapsed and self determination was declared for:

–Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czech, Yugoslavia.

–On the other hand Italy, Japan, France, Romania annexed territory

–Britain, France, Japan acquired German colonies and Turkish territories.

D. Opposition to the League

–La Follette and the Irreconcilables feared article ten would require US to suppress rebellions

–Cabot-Lodge and the Reservationists

–Immigrant groups were opposed for a variety of reasons

–Sept 1919 Wilson went across the country to gain support for the League

—stroke in Oct. Wilson’s physican and wife kept his illness a secret from the public, Congress, the VP, and the cabinet. Rumor circulated that Edith was running the government.

–Feb. 1920 Wilson partially recovered the League was defeated in the Senate in March.
V. Readjustment

A. Influenza Epidemic in 1918 among the armies

—700, 000 Americans died far more than the war had killed

–public meeting and facilities were ordered banned or closed

B. Demobilization plans were nil

–Baruch closed the WIB in Jan. 1919.

–troops were returned at rapid speeds

–wartime price controls were abolished leading to runaway inflation

–housing shortages, cost of living doubled

–Wilson was spending more time on League and not enough on domestic issues

–women lost all advances of employment gained during war

–AA were demoralized from housing shortages, job competition which were interjected with racism leading to race riots in 1919 resulting in 120 dead. In Chicago 38 people were killed and more than 500 injured in a five day race riot that began with the stoning to death of a black boy who swam to near a whites only beach. White rioters went through black neighborhoods with machine guns firing at will. Blacks fought back.

—3,600 strikes were waged in 1919 alone.

C. Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919

–reflected a combination of: anti-union employers; ambitious politicians; sensationalist journalists; zealous veterans; and racists who sought to exploit the panic to their own ends.

—Fear of the Communist infiltration in the US following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was the topic of various journalists

–Bombs mailed to US government leaders led to further hysteria

–Wilson, Veterans and JD AG Palmer sought for more stringent measures

–J. Edgar Hoover was appointed head of a new agency to suppress radicals

–collected files on radicals and labor leaders including Jane Addams and Senator La Follette; gave misleading information about strikes, race riots, and essentially promoted the Red Scare through propaganda.

–Nov. 1919 began to raid groups suspected of subversion–deported 249 foreign radicals including Emma Goldman. 1920 rounded up 4000 in 33 cities without warrants entered pool halls, labor unions, private homes and jailed people without legal access, and some were beaten into confessions.

–Palmer predicted the overthrow of the government in 1920 when it came to naught people began to lose interest in the Red Scare as well as begin to articulate disfavor at the tactics used by Palmer. However, the 1919 Red Scare left behind a climate of hostility toward immigrants, organized labor, and dissent that would endure for more than a decade.

VI. Memory of WWI: War and Peace in America

A. Anti-War Movie–the Night mar Vision

1. Represents the views of the “Lost generation” –Hemingway, Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Somerset Maughm

2. Examples

–All Quiet on the Western Front

–The protaganist Paul Bremmer, enters the struggle as an idealist, but months of shelling and death convince him that “We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness.”

–Based on the anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque which captured the disillusionment mood of many intellectuals

Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms” who’s protaqonist rejected the shibboleths in a famous passage from the book: “I was always embarrassed by the words of sacred, glorious, sacrifice and the expression in vain. . . I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards in Chicago if notion was done with the meat except to bury it.”

–“All quiet” provided audiences with a vivid vison of the battle fields. One in particular is where Paul Bremmer finds himself in a crater with an injured French soldier. The result of the claustrophobic experience, Baumer–an persumably each audience member comes to realize that the world’s ordinary people are victims of bureaucracy, the nation state, industrialization and “progress.” “All Quiet” won awards for best picture and bdst director was a sign that the nightmare vision at least temporarily was the fad in Hollywood. In Germany under Joseph Goebbles, first disrupted screenings of the “American propoganda” and then found legislative methods to prevent distribution. By 1933 Remarque’s novel was burned the courtyard of the national library. This film more than anything reflects the ambivalence toward both the war and the evolving wonders of motion pictures. War may have been hell but All Quiet was a film not be missed.

B. The Heroic war movie –returns just in time for WWII

1. Pleas for military preparedness

2. 1941 Warner Brothers came forward with “Sg. York” staring Gary Cooper

3. A landmark picture that marked the turning point in America’s mood.

4. York:

—Tenn. Who killed 25 Germans at the Argone Forest in 1918 and captured another 132–a spectacular feat in any battlefield.

—Won the Congressional Medal of Honor

–Director Howard Hawks took the story about York a man of natural virtue and exploited it to expose the flaws of isolationism. York was dramatically converted as a young man which portrayed by Gary Cooper in order to reach those who said we should remain out of the coming fray. As late as July 1941 70% of Americans opposed intervention. The film by the time it was released was used as a propoganda tool for the aid of Britain. Concerned citizen York had been converted from being a pacificist and conscientious objector in WWI. By the time of the movie he agreed to have his story told because filmmaker Jesse L. Lasky convinced him that Americans must stand up for democracy. In addition because of his devote religious views that opposed movies as being sinful, Lasky had to convince him that this film or the “devils tool could be used for good works.”

—York became an important film to focus on the intervention debate, The film accuracy captured the atmosphere of the country as it pondered the responsibilities to a world at war. York’s transformation from pacifist Christian to Christian soldier was presented dramatically and represented those who fought for Christian ideal of peace.

—York restated an American belief that all Americans are potential heros because of the strength of their religious and political heritage. York became one of the most important call for arms in WWII.