Wars for Democracy, 1914-1920

In the summer of 1914, Europe plunged into a devastating conflict, known then as the Great War and later as World War I. For the next four years, the Allies (France, Great Britain, and Russia) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) faced each other in a horrific standoff. Industrialization provided new weapons of destruction that killed more than nine million people in battle while millions more died from war-related disease and hunger.

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Prinčip, a Serbian nationalist, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Less than three weeks after the assassination, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and European nations joined in, declaring their loyalty to one side or the other. Russia quickly came to Serbia’s aid, and Germany rushed to Austria-Hungary’s defense by attacking France, Russia’s ally. The next day, Britain joined the conflict on behalf of both France and neutral Belgium, which had come under attack by German troops. Within five weeks, virtually all of Europe was at war.

How did a single shot from an unknown terrorist set in motion a conflagration that would leave millions of people dead? Part of the answer lies in the intense ethnic and nationalist rivalries in the Balkans in southeastern Europe. The nineteenth century had seen the decay of the long-standing Turkish Ottoman Empire and the rise of nationalist sentiment and conflicts among the different ethnic groups living in the Balkan: Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians, Montenegrins, and others. These conflicts would not have led to global war had they not played into larger European tensions. Rising nationalism posed a fundamental threat to Austria-Hungary’s already crumbling multicultural empire; Serbian expansionism would further stir up those nationalist aspirations. Even more important, Russia—a fierce defender of the Serbs—and Austria-Hungary sat on opposing sides of two sets of alliances that had emerged in Europe in the previous half-century: the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy and the Triple Entente of France, Great Britain, and Russia. These competing alliances fostered an arms race in which each major power feared falling behind its rivals.

This lethal mix—ethnic tensions, nationalism, global imperial ambitions, escalating militarism, and a convoluted system of alliances and treaties, many of them secret—proved explosive. When Germany decided to back Austria-Hungary against Serbia and Russia, the die was cast. Neither the Allies (Britain, France, and Russia) nor the German-led Central Powers could or would back down. The chain reaction that followed would turn a seemingly obscure incident into a war that was more terrifying and destructive than anything Europe had ever seen.

Even though the Allies and the Central Powers each confidently predicted a quick victory, the war turned into a gruesome stalemate. By fall of 1914, the French and British had stopped the German advance toward Paris in northeastern France in a narrow strip of land known as the Western Front, where millions of troops fought from a vast network of parallel trenches filled with mud and rats. Machine guns mowed down soldiers who were ordered “over the top,” out of the trenches, in a “no man’s land” strung with barbed wire to separate the opposing front lines. During 1915 and 1916, both sides tried to break through enemy lines. The German attack on Verdun, France, in February 1916 involved unprecedented firepower. Ten months and almost 700,000 deaths later, the position of the front had barely changed. The new strategy became one of wearing down the enemy in an intentional war of attrition In July, the British launched an offensive on the Somme River; 19,000 soldiers died on just the first day. Before the attack ended (and the Allies gained a pathetic 125 miles of mud), casualties on both sides would exceed one million.

For the European participants, World War I meant “total war,” a phrase suggesting the war’s global character, exceptional intensity, and utter destructiveness. The armed forces on each side required huge mountains of supplies and equipment, provided by the new technologies and large-scale production of the industrial age. Well-developed railways and telegraph lines made it possible to move and manage these mass armies; long-range artillery and rapid-fire infantry weapons multiplied their firepower. Machine guns, flamethrowers, tanks, and chemical weapons such as poison gas changed warfare forever. Airplanes and zeppelins dropped bombs from the sky. At sea, submarines altered traditional naval strategy with their stealth, surprise, and capacity for sudden destruction.

Crucial to these operations were the working men and women who labored on the “home front” to produce the materials that were used in this prolonged conflict. These workers and other civilians became, for the first time, “legitimate” military targets. Each side bombed cities from the air and blockaded or shelled ports and seaside resorts. The blockades cut off food supplies, causing widespread malnutrition and vulnerability to disease among civilians, especially the young and the old.

Initially, America benefited from the catastrophe engulfing Europe. Its demand for food and weapons proved profitable for the United States, stimulating the economy and pulling it out of recession. But the profits of wartime commerce inevitably drew the United States into the conflict, particularly as Germany viewed the pro-British tilt in American trade and loans as a growing threat. Although Americans were deeply divided in their allegiances and their views of the European conflict, the German use of submarine warfare against “neutral” commerce finally pulled the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. After the American declaration of war in April 1917, the federal government mobilized not just militarily but also ideologically by suppressing dissent and economically by taking a more active hand in the economy than it had in more than half a century

In 1914, Wilson’s administration urged strict U.S. neutrality. The war seemed to have little to do with the United States, which confined its international activity to the Caribbean, South and Central America, and the Pacific. But the war drew in U.S. citizens who carried goods from the United States to Europe, traveled on American and European ships, and did business with the warring governments and their citizens. Both sides turned to the United States to finance the war: the British sold Americans more than .5 billion worth of investments they had in the United States, and the Allies borrowed over billion from American banks and the federal government. By the end of the war, the United States had reversed its historic position as a debtor nation and become a net lender. New York was well on its way toward replacing London as the world’s financial capital, and the United States was on the verge of becoming the world’s strongest economy.

Much of the money the United States loaned European nations came back immediately in payment for food, raw materials, and manufactured goods. J. P. Morgan & Co., the exclusive purchasing agent for England and France, placed more than billion worth of wartime orders. As the conflict dragged on, U.S. businesses developed stronger ties to England and France and a greater economic stake in their victory. Between August 1914 and March 1917, the United States sold the Allies about .2 billion in armaments—an amount nearly equal to the value of all American exports in 1913. It also shipped iron, steel, copper, and oil to the Allies, paid for by loans from U.S. bankers. By 1917, the nation’s gross national product—the sum of all the goods and services the United States produced—rose 20 percent higher than that three years earlier.

But war profits also posed a problem. Under international law, the belligerents could intercept and detain neutral ships, inspect them, confiscate goods they considered contraband, and remove enemy personnel. The United States, which based its foreign policy on freedom of the seas, found neutrality difficult to maintain in this total war. Countless supplies were needed to sustain massive armies and civilians, and each side tried to prevent neutral countries from supplying its enemies. In February 1915, the British navy, the most powerful in the world, began turning back ships carrying war-related goods, including food, to Germany. The Germans retaliated with their new Unterseeboot, or U-boat, launching surprise submarine attacks on Allied ships.

Incidents involving Americans became inevitable, and the clash occurred in May 1915, when 128 Americans died as a German U-boat torpedoed the British passenger ship Lusitania, which was rumored to be carrying contraband, off the Irish coast. Responding to a huge public outcry, the United States protested immediately. The Germans, unwilling to push the United States into the war on the Allied side, expressed regret and agreed to respect international agreements on naval warfare.

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan urged Wilson to avoid any appearance of taking sides in the European conflict and even recommended breaking commercial ties with the combatants. The president refused, arguing that the United States had to maintain free trade and freedom of the seas and that submarine warfare was immoral, a clear reason to oppose Germany. Bryan—one of the few members of the administration who was genuinely committed to neutrality—resigned over Wilson’s reaction to the Lusitania affair. The British blockade, Bryan insisted, was equally immoral, because it was starving Germany’s civilian population, and he warned that Wilson’s actions would lead to war. Bryan’s successor, the pro-British Robert Lansing, believed as early as 1915 that the United States “would ultimately become an ally of Great Britain.” Lansing’s appointment further skewed U.S. policy toward the Allies.

Increasingly, the war presented Americans with a profound dilemma. Wilson agreed with most business and political leaders that continued U.S. prosperity and tranquility depended on international investment and trade. The main obstacle, in his view, was European-style imperialism—the competitive rush for colonies and exclusive spheres of influence that had secured European domination of world markets and, indeed, the world’s people. Wilson opposed high tariffs and advocated an international free-trade system. U.S. producers, Wilson explained in 1912, “have expanded to such a point that they will burst their jackets if they cannot find a free outlet to the markets of the world.” Wilson meant his policies not simply to aid industry and raise the standard of living in the United States; a devout Presbyterian, he also saw the spread of free trade and democratic capitalism as a concrete expression of Christian values.

The war that was raging in Europe epitomized the very sort of imperialism Wilson detested, and violations of neutral rights now threatened U.S. peace. The United States faced no immediate military threat. But the president sympathized emotionally and ideologically with Great Britain and feared that an Allied defeat would make Germany a dangerous economic and military rival and an opponent of the U.S. Open Door policy. Furthermore, he worried that a neutral America would be powerless to help shape the postwar world and ensure the openness of world markets to what he called “righteous conquest” by American business.

The public was deeply divided over the war. One in nine Americans had been born in a Central Powers country or had a parent who was born there. German Americans generally favored the Central Powers; those with British backgrounds tended to back the Allies. Most Irish Americans, though no special friends of Germany, opposed aid to Britain. Their opposition intensified—as did the struggle for independence in Ireland— after the British crushed the abortive Easter Rebellion of 1916. Nonetheless, when war broke out, the strongest impulse in America was for peace. Peace forces mobilized activists who had previously focused on the domestic reforms favored by progressives.

Across the country, people rallied to oppose U.S. intervention in the conflict. Many radicals and reformers argued that war would suspend domestic reform, endanger civil liberties, and profit big business. Some activists joined an internationalist movement that promoted world order based on international law. Those who opposed the war included the midwestern progressives, such as George Norris and Robert La Follette, and a large bloc of Democratic congressional representatives from the South and the Midwest. William Jennings Bryan, commenting on what he saw as the pro-British, prowar bias of the East Coast, complained to his daughter that “the president does not seem to realize that a great part of America lies on the other side of the Allegheny Mountains.” Most feminists and suffragists also opposed the war. Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, together founded the Women’s Peace Party, which attracted 40,000 members.

Almost all political and labor radicals opposed U.S. intervention. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, also known as Wobblies), the Socialist Party, and most anarchists denounced the war as an imperialist conflict—rich men sending poor ones to fight for the cause of empire. “We as members of the industrial army,” announced the IWW, “will refuse to fight for any purpose except the realization of industrial freedom.” Although relatively few Americans belonged to radical organizations, a growing number were sympathetic to their perspective. In 1914, voters from New York City’s Lower East Side elected a Socialist to Congress; two years later, Milwaukeeans elected a Socialist mayor. Tens of thousands of recent immigrants joined Socialist-sponsored ethnic federations.

Americans urging preparedness—a military buildup that would outfit the United States for war—stood at the other extreme. Many advocates of preparedness had ties to banking and commercial interests and therefore strongly backed Britain and France; they anticipated that they would make more money in war profits than in neutral trade. Conservative businessmen used preparedness as a patriotic cover for antiunion, antiradical, and nativist campaigns. Theodore Roosevelt and other militarists argued that military discipline would restore men’s masculinity in the same way as the strenuous life of competitive sports and outdoor activity he had long promoted. When “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” became a popular song in 1915, Roosevelt found it so antithetical to his notion of manhood that he suggested that it was akin to singing, “I Didn’t Raise My Girl to Be a Mother.” Preparedness sentiment grew particularly strong in the spring and summer of 1916; in May, 137,000 supporters marched in a thirteen-hour procession in New York City. Even labor leader Samuel Gompers, once a pacifist, endorsed preparedness and won appointment to the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense, the group set up by Wilson in the summer of 1916 to develop a mobilization program.[

As the debate over the war raged, President Wilson vacillated. After first supporting neutrality, in the fall of 1915 he recommended a military buildup. A few months later, he again switched positions, this time with an eye on the 1916 presidential election. In 1912, Wilson had won the presidency in a three-way contest, with only a minority vote; to be reelected, he would have to woo a sizable bloc of new supporters.

He therefore launched a liberal campaign that was aimed at attracting progressive, labor, and anti-interventionist voters. In 1916, he appointed the progressive leader Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court. Next, he supported important bills to benefit labor and farmers. Once the presidential campaign got under way in the summer of 1916, Wilson began to champion the cause of peace. Although his foreign policy positions did not differ much from those of the Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, Wilson campaigned on the slogan “He kept us out of war.”

This election-year stance won Wilson strong progressive support. Wilson seemed to back everything progressives believed in: an active federal role in upgrading working and living conditions; the settlement of domestic and international conflicts through conciliation rather than war; and, more broadly, the notion of a new world built on principles of rationality and social harmony. Still, Wilson won the popular vote only narrowly, by fewer than 600,000 votes.

Many progressives believed that Wilson’s reelection would usher in an era of peace, progress, and social cooperation. Beginning in 1915, Wilson had attempted to play the role of peacemaker, sending his confidant Colonel Edward House on two peace missions to Europe and urging the establishment of an international organization to enforce peace treaties. Operating on the assumption that world peace was linked to domestic stability and the global expansion of American capitalism, Wilson promoted foreign trade. “Go out and sell goods that will make the world comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America,” he told a group of businessmen visiting the White House.

Wilson renewed his peacemaking efforts after the 1916 election, but neutrality became increasingly difficult to sustain. The million a day the Allies were spending in the United States tied Americans ever closer to the British-French alliance. For Wilson, the “moral obligation . . . to keep us out of this war” conflicted with the “moral obligation . . . to keep free the courses of our commerce and finance.”

Meanwhile, sensing imminent victory over the Russians on the Eastern Front, the Germans gambled that blocking vital American supplies would bring quick victory on the Western Front. On February 1, 1917, Germany announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. Two days later, Wilson broke diplomatic relations with Germany. Later that month, British intelligence officers intercepted a telegram from the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, to Mexican leaders, proposing that if the United States were to enter the war, Mexico should ally itself with Germany to recover its “lost provinces” in the southwestern United States. Although such an alliance was never a real possibility, the Zimmermann telegram further inflamed U.S. public opinion against Germany, especially since it came at a time of unsettled relations with Mexico in the aftermath of that country’s 1910 Revolution.

At the same time that Americans began to look more harshly on the Central Powers, they also began to view the Allies more favorably. In March 1917, when Russians replaced their autocratic tsar with a liberal democratic government, Wilson could argue that the Allied cause was the cause of democracy. But what finally moved the president to action was his belief that he had to defend U.S. commerce and that he could have a hand in the peace only by joining in war.

Still, when the president went before Congress on April 2, 1917, to seek a declaration of war, he spoke in soaring tones of the need to make the world “safe for democracy.” “We shall fight,” he told an applauding Congress, “for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, . . . and [to] make the world itself at last free.” Even though commerce and practical politics underlay the decision for war, this democratic rhetoric would inspire many Americans and Europeans during the closing year and a half of the war.

Nevertheless, some Americans remained skeptical. When Congress voted for war four days later, six senators and fifty members of the House of Representatives dissented, including Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress. Some progressives who had supported Wilson joined the antiwar camp, bitterly disillusioned with the president. Ideological opponents of the war included isolationists, internationalists, pacifists, socialists, Wobblies, and agrarian radicals. In local elections held during the summer and fall of 1917, the Socialists did unusually well—an expression, observers felt, of antiwar sentiment. In the Southwest, clandestine tenant farmer groups urged armed resistance to military conscription. “Now is the time to rebel against this war with German boys,” read a poster for an abortive antiwar insurrection in eastern Oklahoma, dubbed the Green Corn Rebellion. “Get together, boys, and don’t go. Rich man’s war. Poor man’s fight.”

Fearing that dissent would hinder the nation’s ability to win the war, the Wilson administration launched a prowar propaganda campaign. A week after the declaration of war, Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to sell it. The CPI distributed 75 million pamphlets explaining government policy, placed slick ads in magazines, produced prowar films, and sent out 75,000 speakers to give short talks before any audience they could find, often in movie theaters. As the war went on, the CPI abandoned the pretense that it was a neutral source of information and began to spread exaggerated stories alleging German atrocities.

Employers, civic groups, local governments, and the U.S. Congress eagerly joined the crusade. Steel companies sponsored parades, flag-raising ceremonies, and bond drives. School districts instituted loyalty oaths and offered federally prepared “war study courses.” More ominously, Congress passed the Espionage Act (1917) restricting freedom of speech during wartime through harsh penalties for antiwar activity and banning treasonous material from the mails. Congress strengthened the law the next year by adding the Sedition Act, which made it illegal to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government or the military. The government arrested thousands of pacifists and radicals who opposed the war—Eugene Debs among them.

The government also moved to mobilize the nation economically. Through agencies such as the War Industries Board, it took greater charge of the nation’s economy than it had at any time since the Civil War. Businessmen literally went to work for the government, attempting to rationalize the economy through cooperative agreements. They worked in federal agencies that determined production priorities, fixed prices, and facilitated orderly operations. This system of government-sponsored industrial self-regulation partially fulfilled the progressive vision of the promotion of social well-being through public-private cooperation. The government also took direct control of a few strategic industries: the Railroad Administration ran the nation’s entire railroad system as a single unit, while the Shipping Board managed existing merchant ships and launched a massive shipbuilding program. The Bureau of Indian Affairs encouraged Native peoples to increase food production on reservations, which brought short-term prosperity to some. Yet the same government policies, which aimed at Native assimilation into white commercial culture, also hastened the breakup of several Native nations' holdings and ultimately led to a dramatic increase in landlessness for many Native nations.

Other wartime agencies increased production by standardizing parts, products, and procedures. Before the war, for example, manufacturers produced typewriter ribbons in 150 different colors; by its end, there were only five. Industrialists expanded their facilities and introduced new production methods, taking advantage of steady wartime demand and “cost-plus” government contracts, which guaranteed a fixed profit plus costs. Thus, the government’s military budget subsidized private innovation, laying a foundation for postwar profits.

But the wartime measures with arguably the most lasting significance were the Revenue Acts of 1916 and 1917, which set up a progressive tax on incomes. The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1913) had sanctioned a federal income tax but had affected few Americans and brought in little money. Now, faced with the necessity of raising billion to underwrite the cost of the war—an enormous sum for a federal government that was then relatively small—Wilson and progressive Democrats turned to taxes on incomes and corporate profits as sources of federal revenue. Their approach was progressive because it placed the largest tax burden on the wealthiest individuals and corporations (in contrast to a national sales tax, which would have applied equally to rich and poor). By the end of the war, a corporate excess profits tax was generating .5 billion per year—more than half the federal government’s tax revenues.

The wartime economic boom dramatically benefited working people. Union membership skyrocketed, and workers won higher wages and shorter hours. The labor shortage also drew new workers into industrial employment. Rural migrants from the South and Appalachia—both Black and white but especially African Americans participating in what came to be called the Great Migration—headed for the cities, where they found better wages and some relief from the oppressive Jim Crow regime of the South. Meanwhile, in the Southwest, Mexican migrants found employers seeking their labor even as they faced discrimination and segregation. Women’s experience was more unambiguously positive; they not only found jobs in industries where they had previously been disdained, but also triumphed in their century-long struggle to win the right to vote.

Expanded industrial production—and, after May 1917, the draft—created labor shortages, which benefited the organized labor movement. Individually, workers switched jobs and even moved across the country seeking better wages and working conditions. Collectively, they formed new unions and joined established ones. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union doubled in size. The railroad brotherhoods mushroomed. Total union membership increased by nearly 70 percent between 1914 and 1920, to over five million. Close to one of every five nonagricultural workers belonged to a union.

But even as the number of jobs expanded and companies with steady, highly profitable orders accepted higher labor costs, labor unrest intensified. Consumer prices rose sharply in 1915 as a result of the war; by 1920, they had doubled. Despite steady employment and higher wages, workers found themselves falling behind as inflation cut their purchasing power. Once the United States entered the war, workers had more complaints: state governments suspended safety, hour, and child labor regulations that had been hard won by progressives and unions, and wartime regulations capped workers’ wages but not employers’ profits.

As the war went on, strikes and threats of strikes became common. Each year from 1916 through 1920, more than one million workers went on strike—a higher proportion of the workforce than during any similar period before or since. And all kinds of workers struck: union and nonunion, skilled and unskilled, male and female, immigrant and non-immigrant, day laborer and steady worker. Many war era walkouts were huge, involving workers from different companies and different industries striking in support of one another.

During the six months following the U.S. declaration of war in April 1917, union workers in shipbuilding, coal mining, and the metal trades led a massive wave of strikes, collectively withholding more than six million workdays. Most hoped to offset higher prices with increased wages; many sought shorter hours or union recognition. Often, strikers made radical demands for control of their work processes, challenging the scientific management and incentive plans employers had implemented in response to government pressure to increase production. Because the thriving economy required full employment, workers gained enhanced power and won many strikes.

Wartime labor militancy forced the federal government to establish labor relations agencies, which built on the progress labor had made during the first Wilson administration. Labor representatives sat on a number of commissions, along with business and government representatives, a system that was pioneered by the National Civic Federation. Never before had unions secured so extensive a role in determining and administering federal labor policy. Wilson appointed progressives who were sympathetic to unionism, such as Frank Walsh, to key positions in agencies such as the War Labor Board.

The wartime labor bureaucracy generally accepted the then-novel idea that strikes resulted from real grievances and the denial of collective bargaining rights. Hoping to forestall strikes and reduce job turnover, government officials pressured employers to raise pay, shorten working hours, and improve working conditions. Many believed that a strong union movement would channel workers’ discontent into orderly contract negotiations and conflict resolution. As President Wilson declared, in a historic reversal of the antiunionism of the federal government, “Our laws and the long-established policy of our government recognize the right of workingmen to organize unions if they so desire.” Wilson’s support for labor convinced most union leaders to rally behind the war effort. Not only the labor movement, but also working people themselves, benefited. Steady work and higher pay raised their living standard.

Even before the United States entered the war, expanding industrial production had dramatically altered patterns of work and residence. Just when mines, factories, and fields needed more workers than ever, the flow of immigrants across the Atlantic dropped sharply because of the war. In 1914, more than one million Europeans had come to America; in 1915, the number fell to less than 200,000, and in 1918, it was only 31,000. That year, the unemployment rate fell to just 2.4 percent, down from over 15 percent just three years earlier. In this context, previously disdained groups—immigrants, African Americans, Appalachian white people, and women—suddenly became desirable employees.

The war also accelerated the movement of Americans from the countryside to the city. The rapidly expanding auto industry, in particular, attracted workers from rural areas in the Midwest, Canada, and the South. Between 1910 and 1920, more than half a million white southerners moved out of their region. The mountainous areas of the Upper South (known as Appalachia) were particularly ripe for an exodus. When the war opened up high-paying jobs in nearby northern cities, an estimated 50,000 West Virginians moved to Akron, Ohio, center of the booming rubber industry.

The “Great Migration” of Black southerners offered the most visible example of the shift from country to city. Although African Americans had been moving north in small numbers since the end of Reconstruction, the geographic distribution of the country’s Black population was much the same in 1910 as it had been half a century earlier. Nine of every ten African Americans lived in the South, chiefly in rural areas. During the next ten years, about 500,000 Black people left the South, most of them after 1916. The African American population of Chicago nearly doubled, to more than 100,000. New York, with 150,000 Black residents, became the largest African American center in the country.

Black Americans had plenty of reasons to leave the rural South: disfranchisement, segregation, poverty, racial violence, lack of educational opportunities, the drudgery of farm life, and just the daily indignities of living under Jim Crow laws. For Joseph Brown, the turning point came when he was ill and asked an Atlanta druggist for a glass of water. Despite a shelf of glasses and a soda fountain, the druggist directed Brown to a bucket of dirty, soapy water out back. “When I left that store and walking back up the hill home, I said, ‘God, if you give me strength and give me my health . . . this will never happen to me again.’”

Hard times accelerated the migration of rural Black farmers. In 1916, a particularly bad year in the South, the boll weevil attacked the cotton crop, and floods caused extensive damage. Of course, neither the push of southern poverty and racism nor the pull of northern jobs caused most Black southerners to migrate. As late as 1940, three-quarters of all African Americans remained in the South. Leaving, after all, was not always easy. Plantation overseers used violence and threats to prevent an exodus of workers who were crucial to southern agriculture, and state and local governments passed laws designed to put labor recruiters out of business.

Leaving the South did not mean escaping racism. Kept out of Northern white neighborhoods by law or custom, African Americans migrants crowded into inner-city neighborhoods that became ghettos. Heavy industries—steel, meatpacking, autos, shipbuilding, and mining—restricted Black men to unskilled jobs, which were often the dirtiest and most physically taxing. Employers generally paid Black workers less than white workers, though more than they received in the South. Black women usually worked as domestic servants; in 1920, fewer than 7 percent of them worked in industry.

Despite the residential and occupational segregation, racial tensions developed over real or perceived competition for jobs, housing, and political power. White workers, motivated by a deep-seated racism and fearful that Black workers would take their jobs or force down wage levels, staged wildcat strikes against employers who hired Black workers. Most unions either barred Black workers entirely or segregated them in all-Black locals with restricted voting and job rights. Black ministers, politicians, and editors often argued, as had Booker T. Washington, that Black workers were more likely to find allies among white employers than among white workers. Though the American Federation of Labor (AFL) used Black organizers in its wartime campaign to organize Chicago stockyard workers, only 15 percent of African Americans joined, compared with nearly 90 percent of Poles and Slovaks. One southern Black migrant expressed a common view: “Unions ain’t no good for a colored man. I’ve seen too much of what they don’t do for him.”

In spite of all the problems African Americans encountered, many kept coming North. One former southerner wrote back home: “I should have been here twenty years ago. I just begin to feel like a man. . . . . My children are going to the same school with the whites and I don’t have to humble to no one.’”

A Mississippi barber and a sharecropper woman tell how they organized African Americans to escape Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and forced labor. The promise of freedom and full citizenship drew them to Chicago. View 30-minute video in full or in sections.

While African Americans headed north, U.S. relations with countries in Central and South America grew tense. Though Wilson supported nonintervention in Europe, he took a different stance toward the Western Hemisphere, using troops to defend U.S. property in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!” the president declared. American Marines and naval forces intervened in Haiti in 1915, and the next year began an eight-year military occupation of the Dominican Republic. In these places, Americans appointed financial advisers, supervised elections, and maintained law and order by putting down popular insurrections. The United States also became deeply involved in the Mexican Revolution.

The Mexican Revolution had begun in 1910 with an armed revolt against the thirty-five-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. At first a fight over the presidential succession, the conflict broadened into widespread strife that lasted a decade and cost a million lives. Wilson backed first one Mexican faction and then another, hoping to protect U.S.-owned property, especially oil interests. In 1914, U.S. troops occupied the city of Vera Cruz. Two years later, General Pershing led a U.S. expedition into northern Mexico, after Mexican troops loyal to the agrarian radical Francisco “Pancho” Villa raided a town in New Mexico. There was talk of war, but both countries stepped back. Still, U.S. leaders greeted Mexican self-rule warily, in part because Mexico’s new constitution gave the state control of that country’s mineral resources and restricted foreign ownership of its oil. Samuel Gompers and the AFL supported Mexican workers in their efforts to modernize the country and set up a national labor federation. The AFL’s fear of radical unionism and desire to cooperate with economic expansionist policies helped it to align its efforts with U.S. strategic interests in Mexico.

To avoid the inflation, violence, and social chaos that accompanied the revolution, many Mexicans fled to the United States. In the years before the war, new railroads had opened up the northern part of Mexico, drawing many individuals from the crowded central provinces to the region near the U.S. border. Soon, economic opportunities in the rapidly growing American Southwest pulled them across the border. The United States imposed no quota on Mexican immigration, and according to official statistics, more than 185,000 Mexicans entered the United States between 1910 and 1919. Many more crossed the border unofficially. Some estimates indicate that the total number of people of Mexican heritage living in the United States doubled during the decade, to about 750,000.

Crossing the border was easy. Officials and border patrols understood that the economy of the American Southwest, not legal restrictions, determined Mexican immigration. They were concerned primarily about Chinese immigrants who might try to enter the country through Mexico. As Charles Armijo, who crossed the border between Juárez and El Paso during the Mexican Revolution, explained, “Well, we just came over. . . . Everybody was allowed to go back and forth whenever they wanted. . . . . We came over on the streetcar.”

Some Mexicans came temporarily, hoping to save money and return home quickly. Others, intending to stay, settled in established Mexican American communities. However long they planned to stay, most worked in agriculture, especially in Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Railroads and mines also hired large numbers of workers; by 1911, about 60 percent of Arizona’s smelter workers were Mexicans. Wages were seven to twenty times those paid in Mexico, though still very low by U.S. standards. As the southwestern labor supply swelled, some Mexican Americans, including many with roots in the region that went back to the 1840s, left for better-paying industrial jobs in the Midwest.

World War I created some new opportunities at military bases around San Antonio, especially in construction, transportation, and maintenance work. After the United States entered World War I, many Mexicans working in the United States feared that they would be drafted. But Mexican labor had become vital to the southwestern economy, and employers pushed the federal government to assure Mexican workers that they would be exempt from the draft. To protect agricultural, mine, and railroad workers, the government also suspended a 1917 immigration law that banned contract labor and imposed a literacy test and a head tax on immigrants. Nevertheless, like African Americans in the South, Mexican Americans encountered discrimination all over the Southwest in segregated schools, theaters, restaurants, and neighborhoods. Often, Mexican workers were paid less than the Anglos who worked beside them. Most unions ignored or excluded Mexicans or relegated them to separate locals.

Here, as elsewhere in the United States, discrimination sometimes produced violent reactions. In the lower Rio Grande Valley, Mexicans and Mexican Americans fought the Texas Rangers in hundreds of incidents between 1915 and 1917. Anglo farmers often used violence and intimidation to wrest away Mexicans’ land. Displaced ranchers fought back by raiding farms and sabotaging trains and irrigation systems. Twenty-one Anglo Americans were killed in these clashes; in reprisal, Texas officials executed 300 Mexican Americans without trial. The sheriff of Cameron County, Texas, attributed the conflict to the “unwillingness of American newcomers to the valley to accept the Mexican” and claimed that the Rangers often shouted, “We have to make this a white man’s country!!” In the end, the Mexican ranchers were reduced to being wage laborers.

The Mexican American community contained many radicals, including members of .the Socialist Party and the IWW. In New Mexico and Arizona in 1917, the Western Federation of Miners and the United Mine Workers of America brought Anglo and Mexican miners together to cooperate in a series of mine strikes. But their struggle to eliminate unequal wages and win union recognition ended when officials arrested and then deported thousands of Mexican-born strikers.

Other Mexican immigrants avoided political activity, concentrating instead on saving money to buy land or businesses back home. But like many Slavs and Italians before them, many Mexican immigrants gave up plans to return home and settled permanently in the United States. Over time, the long-established Spanish-speaking communities of the West and Southwest became increasingly important in this, the fastest-growing region of the country. Unlike European immigrants, however, Mexican Americans lived not across an ocean from their homeland, but across a nearby border. Many went back and forth to work or to stay with family. In individual lives and in the character of the border towns, two cultures coexisted.

How did notions of racial superiority and paternalism shape U.S. actions and policies in Haiti?

How have vigilantes and government agents justified using violence to police the border between the United States and Mexico? 

Like Mexicans, women workers found new opportunities in the wartime economy. For the first time, employers offered them traditionally male jobs—for example, as railroad workers and streetcar conductors. Others found metalworking and munitions jobs, often as part of a management decision to hire less-skilled workers. Most of these women moved up from lower-paying jobs they had held before the war in female-dominated occupations, although some had never worked for pay. But the gains women made in traditional blue-collar work proved temporary; once the war ended, most women left or were forced out of their jobs.

The war did, however, hasten the expansion of one area of work that had been open to women since the 1890s: clerical jobs. Women worked in government bureaucracies, which expanded with the U.S. entry into the war. Even more women worked for the growing corporations, which found that achieving and then maintaining horizontal and vertical integration of production and resources demanded considerable paperwork. By 1920, there were nearly eight times as many women clerical workers as there had been in 1900. Despite the loss of blue-collar jobs at the end of the war, there were still 700,000 more women in the labor force in 1920 than in 1910.

The war also opened up some new opportunities for Black women, the least advantaged group in the workforce. Even in Southern cities such as Atlanta, some factories hired Black women; between 1910 and 1920, the percentage of Black women in domestic service dropped from 84 to 75 percent. Worried employers used legal and illegal coercion to reverse this trend. They took advantage of “Work or Fight” laws, which were ostensibly intended to force unemployed men into military service, to prosecute Black women who declined jobs as household workers. A vigilante group in Vicksburg, Mississippi, harassed “idle” Black workers, a group that included women who did not want to work as domestics. They tarred and feathered Ethel Barrett while her husband was away fighting in France.

On other fronts, some women war workers were better situated to demand social and political rights and advance the movement for woman suffrage. In New York City, working-class suffragists saw a close link between the vote and the conditions on the job. “Why are you paid less than a man?” asked a leaflet put out by the Wage-Earners’ Suffrage League there. “Why are your hours so long?” The answer: “Because you are a woman and have no vote. Votes make the law. . . . The law controls conditions.”

The war years saw new divisions within the suffrage movement, particularly over tactical questions. A new militant suffrage group, the National Woman’s Party (NWP), formed in 1916. Led by Alice Paul, a social worker who had studied in England, the NWP was founded on the tactics of British suffragists, who held the party in power responsible for the denial of the vote to women. To publicize their grievance, the antiwar NWP began picketing the White House to demand voting rights. Arrested, the imprisoned pickets went on a hunger strike and were brutally force-fed. Meanwhile, more conservative women’s groups energetically supported the war by knitting socks, selling war bonds, and preparing Red Cross supplies. They cemented an alliance with Wilson and united local and state suffrage groups in a centrally directed effort.

In different ways, both groups tried to use Wilson’s democratic rhetoric to their own advantage. As one historian points out, “Wilson’s ‘safe for democracy’ speech was analogous to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which did not free any slaves but probably made freeing them inevitable.” By asking Americans to fight for “democracy versus autocracy,” Wilson put compelling logic behind the drive for universal suffrage.

The combination of the NWP’s militant agitation and NAWSA’s pragmatic political alliances worked. By 1914, women had acquired the right to vote in the territory of Alaska and in eleven states, all of which, except Illinois, were west of the Mississippi. NAWSA spent the next three years conducting vigorous campaigns throughout the East, while the NWP kept up the pressure in Washington. Three years later, women had won at least partial voting rights in eight additional states, including New York, long a major battleground, and Arkansas, the first southern state to grant suffrage.

In January 1918, the House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. Despite Wilson’s endorsement of the measure as “vital to the winning of the war,” antisuffrage Republicans and southern Democratic Senators blocked the amendment. In response, the NWP and NAWSA mobilized a massive outpouring of marches, parades, and meetings to overcome lingering opposition in the Senate and state legislatures, three-quarters of which had to ratify the amendment. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the crucial thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, after a twenty-four-year-old legislator changed his vote at his mother’s insistence. The Nineteenth Amendment went into effect in time for that year’s presidential election. Among the first voters was ninety-one-year-old Charlotte Woodward, who as a teenager had witnessed the start of the women’s rights movement at Seneca Falls seventy-two years earlier.

How did suffrage activists use visual images to sway public opinion in favor of votes for women?

The same radical wartime spirit that infected the most militant suffragists infused some working-class struggles as well, especially those led by the IWW But radical protesters quickly faced repression, as federal agents (armed with the repressive Espionage and Sedition acts) and local police arrested thousands of Wobblies and critics of the war. Immigrants—especially German Americans—also encountered attacks and suspicions about their loyalty. In the nativist atmosphere, prohibitionists won the banning of alcoholic beverages, in part by associating liquor consumption with immigrants, especially the beer-drinking Germans.

In some cases, the new wartime radicalism had foreign sources. Many Europeans who came to America in the decade before World War I had supported socialism, anarchism, and trade unionism in their countries of birth. As their influence spread through immigrant communities, workers grew increasingly receptive to collective action and political radicalism. The sense of radical possibility—that society could be fundamentally transformed—grew in November 1917, when V. I. Lenin and his Bolshevik Party led a successful Communist revolution in Russia. Other leaders, such as Eugene Debs, drew their radicalism from American sources and insisted that the United States live up to the democratic promises Wilson and others trumpeted.

The new militancy often came from people who had previously seemed indifferent to radicalism and collective action. Among them were many unskilled immigrant workers who had planned to return to their homelands but now were stranded by the wartime disruption of transatlantic travel. Miserable job conditions that had once been seen as temporary became intolerable when viewed as permanent. In Bayonne, New Jersey, Polish refinery workers had long accepted low pay, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. But when they walked off the job in 1915, virtually the entire Polish community supported them. Only police violence and hired thugs broke the strike; five strikers were killed by gunfire. Visiting Bayonne, wrote journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, “you realize that you are in a terrorized city, and that fear is in the very air that you breathe.” Still, refinery workers struck again the next year.

Housewives as well as workers took to the streets, protesting high food prices. Wartime inflation had pushed food prices to astonishing levels—for instance, potatoes more than doubled in price during one month in 1916—and wages, though increasing, could not keep up. In early 1917, a desperate Brooklyn woman overturned a peddler’s pushcart. Running after her, the vendor was attacked by hundreds of other women; eventually a thousand rioters battled police. One officer, who refused to arrest rioting women in another Brooklyn neighborhood the next day, explained, “I just didn’t have the heart to do it. They were just crazy with hunger, and I don’t see how I could blame them.”

In this atmosphere of militancy, the IWW found new life. The organization had been in decline when the war started, but during the war years, it shifted its focus from eastern factory towns such as Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey, to the West and the Midwest. There, the Wobblies recruited migratory workers: semiskilled and unskilled farm workers, lumberjacks, railroad men, and miners who moved from job to job, often weathering long bouts of unemployment. Most were single; many were immigrants. The IWW attracted them because they were alienated—literally rootless and terribly exploited, both on the job and in the miserable barracks that employers provided to house them. The IWW organizers understood their needs and offered social networks as well as union leadership.

In 1916, the Wobblies led a strike of 10,000 miners in the Mesabi iron range of northern Minnesota, and they then began an intensive campaign to organize northwestern lumber workers. Around the same time, the IWW signed up thousands of midwestern harvest workers and won better pay and working conditions from wheat farmers who were more eager to take advantage of high grain prices than of cheap labor.

In response to these successes, government at all levels attacked the radical Wobblies, trying to stigmatize them as illegitimate. Police (and hired thugs) beat and shot strikers and repeatedly arrested IWW organizers. In Everett, Washington in 1916, sheriff’s deputies removed 40 Wobbly prisoners from jail, took them to a wooded park, stripped them, and made them run a gauntlet of vigilantes, who beat the naked prisoners with guns and whips. The next year, federal agents raided every IWW office in the country and put 2,000 Wobblies in jail, including the entire executive board. Courts convicted most of violating wartime statutes and sentenced them to long jail terms. The IWW would never recover.

The attack on the IWW was only one part of a government effort to end protest and silence dissent. Officials engaged in extensive press censorship. In the summer of 1917, the Post Office Department refused second-class mailing privileges to newspapers and magazines that were critical of the war, the draft, or even the way the war was being conducted. It banned socialist periodicals, which had a combined prewar circulation exceeding half a million, from the mails. The foreign-language press was closely watched; a federal law required that articles discussing the war or the government be submitted in translation for prior approval—a process that was so costly that many papers folded and others adopted a progovernment stance in hopes of winning exemption from the rule.

Critics of the war were also silenced through arrest. The government put 1,500 people on trial for opposing the war or counseling draft resistance. And federal officials detained more than 6,000 German and Austrian nationals as potential threats to national security. The Wilson administration worried particularly about antiwar sentiment among workers. To counteract the widespread belief that the United States was fighting a businessmen’s war, the Department of Labor and the Committee on Public Information deluged factories with posters, slogans, and speakers.

Government repression bred a vigilante spirit. Members of “loyalty” organizations harassed and beat radical opponents of the war and even those who simply refused to buy Liberty Bonds. They also spied on neighbors and coworkers; in the name of patriotism, reactionaries and businessmen used their reports of these organizations to harass radicals and unionists. The Department of Justice granted funding and quasi-official status to the largest loyalty organization, the American Protective League.

Immigrants had a particularly hard time. Even before the United States had joined the conflict, Allied sympathizers question the loyalties of “hyphenated” Americans (German Americans, Polish Americans, and so forth). They depicted immigrants as potentially more loyal to their countries of birth than to their adopted land. In fact, the opposite was often true: the experience of war led many immigrants to identify closely with the United States. Tens of thousands of them entered the armed forces, fought in the war, and embraced the rhetoric of democracy and self-determination that Wilson trumpeted.

Even so, fears of divided loyalties lingered. Wilson spoke of the need for “100 percent Americanism,” while Theodore Roosevelt called for “America for Americans.” Suspicion and hostility focused particularly on German Americans. Mobs attacked German American stores and drove German American performers off the stage. German Americans were harassed, beaten, tarred and feathered, forced to kiss the flag, and, in at least one instance, lynched.

Amid this hysteria, Congress passed several nativist measures. In 1917, a law that was enacted over Wilson’s veto imposed a literacy test and other restrictions on immigration. The same year, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which banned the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages; it was ratified in 1919. Though temperance supporters had long advocated Prohibition on moral grounds or as a means of increasing productivity, nativism was involved, too. Many people associated alcohol with immigrants, specifically German Americans, who dominated the brewing industry.

Like many other aspects of the wartime loyalty campaign, Prohibition had little to do with the direct requirements of fighting a war. Rather, the international crisis seemed to validate nativist fears, legitimizing the use of government power to enforce social, political, and cultural orthodoxy. But Prohibition was also a “progressive” measure in its embrace of an activist government, its moralistic impulses, and its promise of a more orderly society and culture. Although many wartime measures were only temporary, the campaign for enforced consensus also had permanent effects: radical groups were severely weakened, and in the next decade, immigration was nearly cut off. The atmosphere of fear and intolerance would persist in the postwar era.

Although American troops entered the war late and suffered only a tiny fraction of the war’s casualties, they played a crucial role in the Allied victory in November 1918. Nevertheless, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson could not shape the peace according to the principles of self-determination that he had advocated. Moreover, many Americans, suspicious of foreign entanglements, rejected Wilson’s internationalist vision embodied in the League of Nations, and the U.S. Congress refused to ratify the Versailles treaty.

Workers, African Americans, and radicals also, in effect, lost the peace. Most of the immense strikes that shook the nation in 1919 resulted in labor defeats. African Americans found themselves the objects of antiBlack riots. And radicals suffered arrest and deportation in a “Red scare” that featured massive violations of civil liberties. Some wartime gains—woman suffrage, for example—persisted into the 1920s, but the soaring promise of a “war to make the world safe for democracy” remained unfulfilled.

When the United States declared war in 1917, the Allies had hoped that U.S. troops would quickly be integrated into the French and British combat units that were already fighting in Europe. Instead, Wilson accepted his military staff’s recommendation to organized separate American units under U.S. command. To this end, Congress authorized the draft in May 1917. The U.S. Army—about 122,000 strong when war was declared—would grow to 3,623,000 by the time the war ended.

Proponents of conscription had argued that a draft would strengthen American democracy by bringing young men from different ethnic and class backgrounds into close, cooperative relationships. The reality was sometimes different. The draft law exempted immigrants who had not filed naturalization papers. And military officials put some foreign-born draftees into ethnically segregated “development battalions,” where they were taught English and civics. The army at first declined to take Black draftees but eventually established separate units for them. The marines remained exclusively white, and the navy employed African Americans only as cooks and kitchen help.

In the fall of 1917, African Americans began to be drafted in large numbers; eventually nearly 370,000 were inducted. But segregated units and racist harassment (including demeaning insults from white officers) continually reminded them of their second-class citizenship. Under pressure from African Americans, the army put more than half the Black soldiers into combat units rather than support groups. But these men remained segregated from white soldiers.

Standardized testing, administered as part of the induction procedure, lent a pseudoscientific gloss to prejudices that lay behind the segregation of troops. The military gave nearly two million soldiers a newly developed “IQ” test, which purported to measure innate intelligence. The psychologists in charge maintained that the tests “proved” that northern and western Europeans were more intelligent than southern and eastern Europeans, who in turn were thought to be more intelligent than African Americans. In reality, the IQ tests were flawed in both design and administration, and the results were virtually meaningless. The tests actually measured literacy in English and familiarity with mainstream American culture, not intelligence. A typical question read: “Christy Mathewson is famous as a: writer, artist, baseball player, comedian.” (Many recent immigrants did not know that the correct answer was “baseball player.”) Nonetheless, the army’s program legitimized IQ testing, and nativists would use it in the 1920s to justify quotas limiting immigration from southern and eastern Europe.

Segregated or not, the American troops and the supplies that accompanied them proved crucial to the Allied victory, in part because it undercut German resolve to continue the war. General John Joseph Pershing commanded the American Expeditionary Forces. Between May and September 1918, a million American troops arrived in France; another million came in the next two months. They reinforced French positions in June 1918, and large numbers joined the combat by mid-September.

At the end of September, Pershing launched a drive through France’s Argonne forest, pushing the Germans back. German troops, exhausted by an offensive the previous spring and undercut by revolution in Berlin, began to mutiny. One by one, Germany’s allies surrendered—Bulgaria in September, Turkey in October, and Austria-Hungary on November 3. Eight days later, the Germans signed an armistice. Argonne was America’s major contribution to the war. Though many American soldiers saw battle, few experienced the prolonged trench warfare that ended the lives of 1.8 million Germans, 1.7 million Russians, 1.4 million French, 1.2 million Austro-Hungarians, and over 900,000 British. In contrast, only 112,000 American soldiers and sailors died, over half of them from disease.

At the end of the war, Europe was devastated. Governments had collapsed, and widespread famine had decimated whole populations. In 1918, a worldwide influenza epidemic killed between twenty million and forty million people, as one-fifth of the world’s population contracted the virus.

In promoting the war as a crusade that would make the world “safe for democracy,” Wilson argued that all the Allies—including Russia, which had overthrown its tsar in the 1917 revolution—were democracies, battling an autocratic German Kaiser and an Austro-Hungarian emperor. Casting the conflict in this light helped Wilson to win popular support for the war.

But the second phase of the Russian Revolution, which began in November 1917, created a profound crisis for Wilson and the Allies. When Lenin’s Bolshevik Party seized control of Russia, it quickly initiated peace talks with Germany and urged European workers and soldiers to stop the war. Lenin also published secret treaties in which Allied governments had agreed to carve up the territory and colonies of the Central Powers at the war’s end. This revelation undercut Wilson’s claims of a war for democracy. Finally, the Bolsheviks promised a far-reaching social transformation that appealed to downtrodden peoples around the world. For some, the revolutionary Lenin, not the reformist Wilson, seemed the towering figure of the age.

In March 1918, Lenin’s new government signed a separate treaty with Germany and withdrew from the war. Within months, the United States, England, and France sent troops to Russia in an ill-fated effort to weaken Bolshevik forces and maintain military pressure on Germany’s Eastern Front. Even before the war ended, Wilson seemed to repudiate his principle of national self-determination.

Nonetheless, that principle that each nation had the right to choose its own government became central to Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points, which he first proposed in a speech to Congress in 1918. The Fourteen Points called for free trade, freedom of the seas, arms reduction, arbitration of international disputes, and the adjustment of European borders along ethnic lines—all to be achieved through open negotiation of public treaties. To maintain peace, Wilson proposed that a League of Nations be formed to guarantee its members’ “political independence and territorial integrity.” Although the Allies never formally endorsed the Fourteen Points, they were the main platform on which the war was sold, in both the United States and Europe, during the last year of the war.

Wilson was a popular hero, and when he arrived in Europe late in 1918 to begin peace negotiations, cheering crowds, grateful for American intervention in the war’s final months, greeted him. Some diplomats did not share in the popular adulation. French President Georges Clemenceau complained that “Wilson thinks he is another Jesus Christ come upon earth to reform men.” And at the peace conference in Paris, Wilson found little support for a treaty based on his Fourteen Points. Italy, France, and Britain had suffered great losses, and their delegates to the conference focused on imposing severe penalties on Germany and promoting their own interests at their enemy’s expense. The victors excluded both Germany and Russia from the peace conference.

A number of factors weakened Wilson’s bargaining position. First, the United States had contributed least to the war, having declared war last, spent fewer of its national resources, and lost relatively few men. Second, Wilson refused to ally with European socialists, who offered the strongest opposition to the punitive peace treaty the Allied leaders envisioned. Third, Wilson compromised his commitment to self-determination when he agreed to the takeover of German colonies by the Allies. Continued U.S. intervention in the Caribbean, including the occupation of Haiti and the stationing of troops in Cuba in 1917, did not help matters. Irish Americans decried Wilson’s acquiescence to the British, who refused to consider granting independence to Ireland. Finally, the president had just suffered political defeat at home; in the 1918 elections, the Republicans captured control of both houses of Congress.

The treaty that was signed at Versailles forced Germany to acknowledge guilt for the war, to cede territory to other countries, and to make huge reparation payments to the Allies for damage to their land and economies. To fulfill the national aspirations of various ethnic groups (and to surround Russia with hostile states), the treaty carved new countries—sometimes illogically—from the old Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires and from parts of Germany. The new nations of Austria, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and Lithuania took their places on the redrawn map of postwar Europe.

Wilson’s major achievement at the conference was persuading the other Allies to include his plan for a League of Nations in the peace treaty. But when the president returned to Washington after months of bargaining, it became clear that Congress disapproved of the plan. Even before he presented the Versailles treaty to the U.S. Senate for ratification, isolationist Republicans, who believed that the United States should avoid foreign entanglements, voiced strong opposition. The treaty empowered the League—which was meant to resolve disputes and guarantee member nations’ territorial integrity—to consider collective action in response to aggression. Opponents suggested that the League would restrain U.S. foreign policy and that the treaty restricted congressional authority to declare war. Frustrated by lengthy hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Wilson embarked on a speaking tour in September 1919 to arouse popular support for the pact. Late that month, exhausted by the trip, he collapsed from a severe stroke. For the remaining seventeen months of his presidency, Wilson lay in bed, often unable to conduct business. The U.S. Senate twice refused to ratify the Versailles treaty and instead concluded separate peace treaties with the Central Powers. The League of Nations was established without U.S. participation, and it never became an effective force for peace.

While Congress debated the Versailles treaty, strikes and riots erupted across the country. African Americans and workers sought to consolidate and expand gains they had won during the war, to make good on the war’s democratic promise. Their opponents sought to roll back wartime advances. A series of titanic clashes rocked the nation. Four million workers—one-fifth of the nation’s workforce—struck in 1919. Organized labor and political radicals put forth the most startling and fundamental challenge to the established order that had been seen in the twentieth century; business and government responded with a wave of repression.

In city after city and industry after industry, workers struck in 1919. In the Seattle General Strike, a General Strike Committee, which set up milk delivery for children and laundry service for hospitals and organized some 500 uniformed war veterans to patrol the streets, ran the city for five days. In New York, 50,000 men’s clothing workers struck for thirteen weeks, winning a forty-four-hour workweek. Theater workers walked off stage, under the banner of Actors’ Equity. In New England and New Jersey, 120,000 textile workers stayed away from their jobs. Striking women telephone operators in New England forced the Post Office Department, which still ran the nation’s telephone system under wartime authority, to grant higher wages. Late in the year, 400,000 coal miners walked out, defying a plea from Wilson and a federal court injunction that barred them from striking. Despite determined federal efforts to put down the uprising, the miners stayed off the job until owners granted them an immediate wage hike of 14 percent and arbitration of their grievances.

In Boston, even the police struck, walking out when the police commissioner suspended nineteen officers who were leading a movement to affiliate with the AFL. During the walkout, the city was hit by a wave of rowdyism, theft, and violence. Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge, outraged, established a national reputation by announcing that none of the strikers would be rehired. Coolidge mobilized state troops while he recruited unemployed veterans for an entirely new police force.

Although the demands of these strikes centered on wages, hours, and other traditional issues, the radical spirit that had been evident during the war continued to pervade the labor movement. The war had given railroad workers and miners experience with coordinated bargaining and government administration of industry. In 1919, the railroad unions endorsed a plan for government ownership of all rail lines, and the United Mine Workers debated nationalization of the coal industry. The Bolshevik victory in Russia and the growing strength of Britain’s Labour Party encouraged their fervor. “Messiah is arriving,” the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Sidney Hillman had written to his daughter the year before. “He may be with us any minute. . . . Labor will rule and the world will be free.”

The most important strike of 1919 began in September, in the steel industry. Once again, working people took Wilson’s democratic rhetoric farther than he intended. As a Hungarian-born steelworker named Frank Smith told a Senate Committee, “this is the United States and we ought to have the right to belong to the union.” When the steel companies rejected workers’ demands, the unions struck. On September 22, more than 350,000 steelworkers left their jobs, shutting down virtually the entire industry in ten states. The steel companies responded by unleashing a reign of terror. Strikers and their supporters were beaten, arrested, shot, and driven out of steel towns. In Pittsburgh, the sheriff deputized 5,000 loyal U.S. Steel employees and prohibited outdoor meetings. In Clairton and Glassport, Pennsylvania, state troopers clubbed strikers who were attending peaceful gatherings.

The steel companies’ refusal to meet with the unions, even at the president’s request, won them widespread scorn. To gain popular sympathy, they portrayed the conflict as an attempted revolution by foreign-born radicals. They split the strikers along ethnic and racial lines by bringing in African American and Mexican American strikebreakers. And they launched campaigns to encourage skilled and native-born workers to go back to work. Many native-born skilled workers had joined the strike, but some—reflecting long-standing tensions between unskilled immigrants and skilled “American” workers—stood on the sidelines. Over time, growing numbers of skilled workers fell away from the strike. One Youngstown, Ohio, steelworker, John J. Martin, professed satisfaction at wages and working conditions, maintaining that “the foreigners brought the strike on.” Slowly, the strike weakened; in January 1920, the union threw in the towel.

It was a terrible defeat. The immigrant steelworkers had demonstrated a capacity for sustained militancy and discipline, but the steel industry had shown itself capable of crushing even the most massive of walkouts. It would be fifteen years before the next major effort to organize basic industries such as steel, automobile, and electrical equipment manufacturing.

African Americans, too, found 1919 to be a cruel year. A resurgent Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations urged terrorist attacks on Black communities. Meanwhile, African Americans, many of them returning veterans, sought to defend the gains they had won during the war and redeem the war’s democratic promise. The resulting tensions—over jobs, housing, and the basic position of Black Americans in postwar society—erupted in twenty-five race riots during the second half of 1919. In July, a white mob attacked Black people in Washington, D.C., in a riot that killed six people and injured a hundred. Perhaps as many as twenty-five African Americans and several white people died in rural Arkansas, where Black sharecroppers had begun to organize and arm themselves.

Chicago was the site of the worst riot. Like many racial clashes, it began on a hot summer day at a public facility—a beach—that was being shared uneasily by white and Black bathers. When a young Black swimmer drifted toward a white section of the beach, someone threw a rock and killed him. Fighting broke out and quickly spread to the city proper, fed by pent-up resentment over housing, job competition, and segregation. In the past, when white rioters had invaded Black neighborhoods, the inhabitants had hidden or fled. But in 1919, Black Chicagoans fought back, refusing to accept second-class citizenship. Full-scale battles erupted along the borders between Black and white neighborhoods. By the time the violence ended five days later, 38 people had died and more than 500 had been injured.

The mobilization of municipal police forces, state militias, and federal courts against strikers and rioters was part of a larger postwar offensive against radicals and labor militants, which focused on the foreign-born. “Loyalty” organizations intensified their antiradical crusade, even though the worldwide advance of radicalism—often associated with the Bolshevik Revolution—had been largely checked by fall 1919, after an attempted revolution was violently suppressed in Germany and a Soviet government was toppled in Hungary.

In the United States, the radical movement had been seriously weakened. The IWW was feeble, its energies drained by defending members who were facing trial on wartime charges. The socialist movement had splintered, weakened by repression, Debs’s imprisonment, and internal disagreements. In the summer of 1919, the party split. One faction kept the name Socialist Party and continued to field candidates, believing that they could win enough votes to legislate democratic control of the economy. Debs received nearly a million votes for president in 1920, running from his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. A small group modeled on the Bolsheviks went underground to organize a revolutionary movement and eventually established the U.S. Communist Party.

American radicals posed little threat to the status quo, but their opponents were unrelenting. Foremost among the “Red hunters” was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who led arrests and deportations of thousands of immigrants and radicals. Most had never been charged with a crime. Some, like the well-known anarchist Emma Goldman, had lived in the United States for decades.  The largest of the “Palmer raids” took place in January 1920: in one night, federal agents arrested 6,000 alleged radicals in thirty-three cities. They held many without warrants or formal charges and prevented them from contacting lawyers or relatives. Some of them had no connection to radical activities; others signed coerced confessions. Officials eventually deported 600 of them.

The excesses of the January raids eroded support for the anti-Red campaign. The Labor Department, which had legal jurisdiction over alien deportations, stopped cooperating with the Justice Department. Palmer finally overplayed his hand when he warned that revolutionaries were planning a wave of violence on May Day. Police mobilized to protect buildings and political leaders, but the day passed quietly. Discredited, the anti-Red drive went into decline.

Nevertheless, the Justice Department continued its antilabor, antiradical activities until 1924, working closely with state governments, businesses, and private detective agencies. Military intelligence agents issued an infamous Spider-Web Chart showing connections between activists in national women’s organizations, including the American Home Economics Association and the Parent-Teachers Association, as well as political and pacifist groups. The chart implied that they were all part of an international socialist conspiracy.

One case in particular would keep the issue of political repression alive for much of the 1920s. Two Italian-born anarchists, shoemaker Nicola Sacco and fish peddler Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested on May 5, 1920, and charged with killing two men during an armed robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Both men professed their innocence, insisting that they were being persecuted for their political beliefs. Following a trial that was marred by questionable evidence and judicial procedures, the court convicted Sacco and Vanzetti of first-degree murder and sentenced them to death.

For many people in the United States and abroad, Sacco and Vanzetti’s case came to symbolize governmental injustice. Protests flared, first among Italian Americans, then among non-Italian radicals, and finally among a broad spectrum of intellectuals and civil libertarians. Under pressure, the governor of Massachusetts appointed a committee of prominent citizens to review the case, but it found no reason to reverse the sentence. On August 23, 1927, as crowds gathered throughout the world to protest, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. A few months before he died, Vanzetti offered an eloquent summary of his case. His words, as rendered by a New York reporter, were “If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out of my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by an accident.”

World War I began as the culmination of long-standing European rivalries, but it ended in a political and economic crisis that seemed to threaten the very existence of capitalism. The war undercut the moral, political, and economic bases of all the old European regimes. In Russia, the collapse was complete: a revolutionary socialist government replaced the tsarist regime and in 1924 officially became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In half a dozen other countries, revolutions were either attempted or threatened. Never before had the foundations of capitalism seemed so shaky.

America’s domestic battles in 1919 were part of this larger struggle over the shape of the postwar world. For a brief moment during and just after the war, progressives thought their hopes for domestic reform and international order might be realized, and radicals thought socialism might spread beyond the Soviet Union. But neither of these came to pass. Indeed, U.S. isolationism and the failure of the peace helped to set the stage for another global confrontation twenty years later.

The United States was nevertheless forever changed by the war. The government continued to play a larger role in the economy, in labor relations, and in shaping public opinions. Workers continued to move from the South to the North and West and from Mexico to the southwestern United States. Women gained the vote. Although alien radicals were silenced or deported and wartime suspicion of “foreigners” contributed to the end of open immigration a few years later, most immigrants continued to think of themselves as full-fledged Americans.

When the war ended, so did many of the conditions that favored working-class activism and the development of strong, radical unions. As production levels returned to normal and four million military men reentered the civilian workforce, the labor shortage abated. Intolerance, fear of foreigners, and a dread of radicalism played into employers’ hands. Factional bickering and government repression weakened labor and its radical allies, while wartime profits bolstered corporations, enabling them to withstand long interruptions in production. By the early 1920s, businessmen no longer had to deal with a confident, politicized working-class movement. It would be well over a decade before the labor movement would again be able to exert its power nationally.