World War I. In August 1914, nobody living anywhere in the world could imagine a spectacle as violent as the one into which humanity was about to be plunged.The magnitude of the destruction in World War I (1914–1918) strained human comprehension. Yet the conflict proved only a prelude to an even more horrendous tragedy,
World War II. The United States, after an initial period of neutrality, entered the war in April 1917 and played a decisive role in the final outcome and the peace settlement that followed.
Early Stages.
On 28 June 1914, a young Serbian nationalist shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria‐Hungary, and his wife Sophie, as they paid a state visit to Sarajevo, capital of the restive Balkan province of Bosnia. The assassination set in motion a complicated chain reaction. Austria‐Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, which precipitated Russia's decision to mobilize on 30 July. In turn, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France, the latter's ally, two days later. Great Britain entered the war against Germany on 4 August, and against Austria‐Hungary the following week.
Few Americans understood the origins or implications of these catalytic events, but they did not come “as lightning out of a clear sky,” as one U.S. politician wrote. To the contrary, in the years before 1914, European diplomats had constructed a precarious balance of power—the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria‐Hungary, and Italy) on one side and the Triple Entente (France, Russia, and Great Britain) on the other—resting on a complex set of secret treaties. This division was rendered potentially calamitous by intense nationalism; by long‐standing imperial rivalries over Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; by a massive military and naval build‐up forged by rapid industrialization; and by unstable domestic environments, especially in capitals where reactionary governments confronted rising vanguards of liberals and socialists. Ultraconservatives in Germany and Russia, in particular, seized upon the Balkan crisis and exploited patriotic fervor to subdue domestic political challenges.
Once the titanic struggle was underway, it did not take long for the human toll to mount. In September, during the first Battle of the Marne, the Allies and the Central Powers together sustained more than a million casualties. By the end of 1914, France alone counted 900,000 dead, wounded, or missing. In 1915, 330,000 French soldiers were killed and another million wounded. The corresponding figures for Germany were 170,000 and 680,000, and for Great Britain 73,000 and 240,000. The carnage resulting from the five‐month clash in 1916 between the French and the Germans over a single strategic objective (two forts near Verdun, France) equalled that of the entire American
Civil War, or some 600,000 killed. By the time the Russian czar abdicated in March 1917, his country had suffered 3.6 million dead or otherwise incapacitated. Recent innovations in warfare—including machine guns, poison gas,
submarines, and tanks—only added to the horror and outran the strategic calculations of elderly generals whose experience of war bore little relationship to the realities of the new technological age. In all, at least ten million people—mainly Europeans, but also hundreds of thousands of Asians and Americans—would go to their deaths as a consequence of the “Great War.”
The American Response: From Neutrality to Intervention.
When the war began, President Woodrow
Wilson issued a proclamation of neutrality, and his fellow citizens thanked heaven for the Atlantic Ocean. But geographic remoteness alone did not determine America's neutrality. A century‐long tradition of noninvolvement in European affairs and the self‐serving nature of the belligerents' war aims were equally important. Demography may have been even more decisive: according to the 1910 census, one‐third of the U.S. population consisted of immigrants and their children. This ethnic diversity, and particularly the large numbers of
German Americans and
Irish Americans, precluded an overwhelming national consensus one way or the other, notwithstanding a somewhat vague pro‐British sympathy felt by perhaps a majority of Americans.
The attempt to preserve neutrality posed innumerable problems for the Wilson administration. Great Britain imposed a naval blockade of the Atlantic and the North Sea to deprive the Central Powers of vital supplies, and the Royal Navy began to stop American merchant ships suspected of carrying contraband. In March 1915, a British Order in Council authorized the interdiction of all neutral commerce bound for Germany. The Wilson administration protested, invoking the principle of freedom of the seas. But the British were undeterred; subsequently, they went so far as to seize American parcels and mail on the Atlantic and to publish a “blacklist” of hundreds of U.S. businesses that allegedly traded with the Central Powers. By the summer of 1916, Anglo‐American relations had fallen to their lowest ebb since the British burned
Washington, D.C., during the
War of 1812.
For all of its severity, Allied economic warfare was more than matched by the German government's novel method of retribution. On 4 February 1915, Berlin commenced submarine (U‐boat) warfare against all enemy vessels, a policy that also imperiled American lives and commerce. Wilson's vow to hold Germany to “strict accountability” was soon put to the test. On 7 May 1915, a submarine sank the British passenger liner
Lusitania without warning, off the southern coast of Ireland, drowning 1,198 men, women, and children—civilians all, among them 128 Americans. (Later research revealed that the
Lusitania was also carrying a small cache of munitions bound for Britain.) With this seemingly wanton murder of innocents, in tandem with their trampling of neutral Belgium in their drive toward Paris, the Germans forfeited the contest for American public favor. Even so, the vast majority of Americans expected Wilson to keep them out of the war.
The U‐boat issue came to a tentative resolution in the spring of 1916, in the wake of another torpedo that severely damaged the unarmed French steamer
Sussex in the English Channel. Four Americans were among the eighty casualties, and Wilson demanded that the Germans henceforth observe the rules of cruiser warfare—to “visit and search” enemy vessels before sinking them and to provide for the safety of noncombatants. Because Wilson did not insist that Germany abandon submarine warfare altogether, and because its fleet of twenty‐one U‐boats was not yet large enough to justify the risk of a diplomatic break, Germany, in the so‐called
Sussex pledge of 4 May 1916, acceded to the ultimatum. For the rest of the year German‐American relations stayed on a relatively even keel. This unexpected accord outraged the British, especially when, in two days during October 1916, a long‐range German U‐boat sank nine Allied merchant ships off Nantucket while American destroyers looked on and then picked up the crews.
Nonetheless, the Central Powers continued to complain bitterly that the Wilson administration was pro‐British, citing America's economic ties with the Allies. Owing mainly to the British blockade, U.S. exports to Germany had plummeted from $345 million in 1914 to barely $2 million by 1916. During the same period, exports to England and France had shot up from $754 million to $2.75 billion. The administration also allowed American banks to finance this commerce through loans to the Allies. Yet, for the United States to have curtailed trade with (and loans to) the belligerent that enjoyed the advantage on the high seas would have been, under
international law, an unneutral act in favor of the belligerent that did not. But those who doubted the commitment to neutrality, especially activists in the peace movement, complained of the policy's one‐sided effects and pointed to Wilson's endorsement of a military “Preparedness” campaign, which was led by large industrialists and bankers who stood to profit from increased spending on munitions.
In any event, neither the Central Powers nor the Allies wanted to provoke the world's most powerful neutral to armed retaliation. As each side made aggressive moves and well‐calculated concessions at critical moments, Wilson, for some thirty months, alternately protested and accommodated the belligerents' conduct, while striving to preserve American neutral rights and public sensibilities.
Wilson's adroit diplomacy enabled him to campaign for a second term in 1916 on the slogan,
He Kept Us Out Of War! He could boast, as well, of recently having pushed through Congress an array of social justice legislation—the eight‐hour day for railroad workers, restrictions on
child labor, and a progressive
income tax weighted against corporations and the wealthy to pay for the military preparedness program. During the campaign he also championed American membership in a future association of nations, a theme that complemented his peace platform. On election day, a coalition of liberal reformers, progressive internationalists, and socialists swelled the normal Democratic vote. By a narrow margin Wilson prevailed over his Republican challenger, Charles Evans
Hughes.
Although the election may have constituted a referendum on progressivism and peace, American neutrality remained fragile. The best way to avoid war, Wilson reasoned, was to bring about a negotiated settlement between the warring alliances. Twice, in 1915 and 1916, he had sent his emissary, Colonel Edward M. House, to Europe for direct (albeit futile) parlays with the belligerent governments. Successful at the polls, Wilson now decided on a bold stratagem for ending the conflict. On 22 January 1917, he went before the Senate and called for “peace without victory.” In this manifesto, the president offered a penetrating critique of European imperialism, militarism, and balance‐of‐power politics—the root causes of the war, he said. In their place, he advanced the vision of a new world order sustained by procedures for the arbitration of disputes between nations, a dramatic reduction of armaments, freedom of the seas, self‐determination, and security against aggression. The chief instrumentality of this sweeping program would be a league of nations.
But events were rushing forward with grim indifference to Wilson's interposition. One week later, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare against all flags. With their U‐boats now numbering over 100, the German High Command gambled that the Allies would founder within a few months—before the United States could bring to bear sufficient force to tip the scales. In March, German submarines sank 600,000 tons of Allied and neutral shipping. Public opinion shifted markedly after three American vessels were sunk without warning and the Zimmermann Note (a sensational German plan to induce Mexico to invade Texas) came to light. By then, Wilson had reluctantly concluded that belligerency had been “thrust upon” the United States. In his war message to Congress, on 2 April 1917, he declared, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Americans, he went on, would be fighting “for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and the world itself at last free”—a program attainable, apparently, only through the crucible of war. By a vote of 82 to 6 in the Senate and 378 to 50 in the House, Congress approved the call to arms.
America at War.
The United States mounted a mobilization effort of phenomenal proportions. Newly created federal agencies coordinated every sector of the economy to harness America's agricultural and industrial might for military purposes. The
War Industries Board, though shunning full‐scale state control, exercised unprecedented powers in organizing and stimulating production and superintended remarkable feats of miltary‐industrial output. The Railroad Administration took over and modernized the country's transportation system. The Fuel Administration regulated coal production and consumption to assure that the needs of the
military and war plants were met. (Daylight saving time was introduced in March 1918 to conserve fuel.) The National War Labor Board, in order both to spur output and to avoid strikes, established a minimum wage and the eight‐hour day in most industries, and settled labor disputes almost always in favor of workers. The Food Administration, headed by Herbert
Hoover, exhorted American families to observe “Meatless Mondays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays” and guaranteed farmers high prices for their commodities so that foodstuffs could be shipped to the Allies. Under the Selective Service Act, the size of the armed forces grew from 100,000 to five million within a year. Draftees and volunteers were hastily prepared in army training camps across the nation, and, in an innovation of great significance for the future, the War Department introduced large‐scale intelligence testing of recruits.
Any undertaking so enormous could not help but strain the nation's social and political fabric. Fifty‐six members of Congress had voted against the war resolution. Countless other Americans, many with ethnic roots in central Europe, had grave doubts about the crusade, while leading progressives and socialists divided up into pro‐ and anti‐war factions. To build support for the war and to discredit all things German, the administration created the Committee on Public Information, chaired by George Creel, to inaugurate an extraordinary
propaganda campaign. An estimated 75 million pieces of pamphlet literature spread the official line on the war. Stirring poster art to encourage enlistments and homefront patriotism appeared everywhere; 75,000 “Four Minute Men” made speeches that were heard by tens of millions of people in theaters and other public gatherings. Movie stars such as Charlie
Chaplain, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford appeared at rallies to urge citizens to buy “Liberty Bonds.”
As a result, a tidal wave of anti‐German hysteria and superpatriotism known as “One Hundred Percent Americanism” swept the country. Local ordinances banned Brahms and Beethoven from concert halls and prohibited the teaching of the German language. Acts of political repression and violence, abetted by federal legislation such as the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, were committed against pacifists and radicals as well as German‐Americans. Dissenters expressed their views in public only at great risk. For example, for speaking against the war, the socialist leader Eugene V.
Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson denied second‐class mailing privileges to left‐wing publications such as the
Appeal to Reason, The Masses, and the
Milwaukee Leader, virtually shutting them down.
For some, however, the war brought unaccustomed opportunity. The prohibition movement gained momentum in part because of the prominence of German‐Americans in the brewing industry. Anti‐prostitution crusaders succeeded in closing red‐light districts near military installations, including New Orleans' famed Storyville. The
woman suffrage movement won its century‐long struggle for the right to vote, in part by invoking Wilson's rhetoric about democracy. At least one million women streamed into the workplace, augmenting the female labor force and taking all kinds of jobs traditionally reserved for men. Thousands of other women served in noncombatant roles in the military and in voluntary agencies such as the
Red Cross in both Europe and America. As many as 500,000
African Americans left the
South to find employment in northern industrial centers. But this migration into predominantly white communities such as St. Louis and
Chicago spawned the worst outbursts of racial violence since
Reconstruction. A similar blend of hope and humiliation awaited the 400,000 blacks who joined the military. Whereas France awarded the
Croix de Guerre medal to many African Americans for courage under fire, the United States maintained a strictly segregated army and handed three out of four black servicemen a shovel or a potato peeler instead of a gun. Yet African Americans played a vital part, albeit in a segregated capacity, in unloading U.S. supply convoys at the French port of Le Havre.
As for the fighting itself, before American troops had begun to arrive in prodigious numbers, the Allied military position had been dealt a potentially mortal blow. In late 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, seized power in Russia and pulled their ravaged nation out of the war, thus enabling the Germans to transfer an additional forty divisions to the Western Front. Because the Bolsheviks challenged both the Allies and the Central Powers to repudiate plans for conquest and imperial expansion, the military crisis also carried serious political overtones. It fell to Wilson to respond. In his celebrated
Fourteen Points address of 8 January 1918, the president reiterated much of his anti‐imperialist “peace without victory” formula, once again making the League of Nations the capstone. Greeted by near universal acclaim, this statement of progressive war aims reassured doubters that their cause was just and their sacrifices worthwhile. The Fourteen Points became the ideological cement that held the Allied coalition together during exceedingly ominous days.
In March and April the Germans mounted a ferocious spring offensive across northeastern France. By May, as the Germans advanced westward several miles a day, the French government prepared to evacuate Paris. Just then, sizeable contingents of the American Expeditionary Force, which totaled some two million by summer's end, at last reached France. The American commander, General John J.
Pershing, ordered his troops—untested, but fresh and well‐equipped—into action at Cantigny in May and at Chateau‐Thierry and Belleau Wood in June. Pershing later endured criticism for hurling masses of soldiers into combat and incurring very heavy casualties, especially at Belleau Wood; but, butchery or no, the Americans fought bravely and effectively. In an independent operation in September, the doughboys completely wiped out the salient at St. Mihiel, bringing the German assault to a standstill. By the end of the month, Pershing had amassed 1,200,000 men and hundreds of heavy guns and tanks along a two‐hundred‐mile‐long front in preparation for a climactic joint counteroffensive with the Allies. Pounding the Hindenburg Line, the combined armies pushed the enemy out of the Argonne Forest, across the Meuse River, and back toward Belgium and Germany. On 6 October 1918, the German government appealed to Wilson to facilitate an armistice based on the Fourteen Points. Although the Allied governments had previously declined to endorse the president's progressive peace program, they now assented. At 5
A.M. on 11 November, in a railroad car in the Compiègne forest, the Armistice was signed. Six hours later the guns fell silent.
Aftermath.
Deciding to take part personally in the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson seemed on the threshold of achieving his supreme ambition. In the meantime, however, a crucial mid‐term congressional election had taken place. The Republicans had mounted a fiercely partisan campaign against the Democrats, denouncing the Wilsonian peace plan as pacifistic and socialistic. The president answered by imploring the public to keep his party in power. When the Republicans captured both houses of Congress, they claimed that the voters had repudiated him.
In contrast to his domestic troubles, Wilson's arrival in France was triumphal. In Paris, London, Rome, and Milan, millions turned out to hail “the Savior of Humanity.” These extraordinary demonstrations strengthened his hand and helped to ensure the inclusion of the
League of Nations Covenant (its drafting supervised by Wilson himself) as an integral part of the peace treaty. But “the Moses from across the Atlantic” paid a heavy price. His fellow peacemakers—Britain's David Lloyd George, France's Georges Clemenceau, and Italy's Vittorio Orlando—held grave doubts about “the New Diplomacy.” (“God gave us the Ten Commandments, and we broke them,” Clemenceau quipped. “Wilson gives us the Fourteen Points. We shall see.”) The statesmen of Europe exploited their acceptance of the Covenant to gain concessions on other contentious issues. During six months of acrimonious negotiations, the president was able to moderate some of the Allies' more extreme territorial and other punitive demands against Germany, but he was just as often compelled to compromise his principles. On the verge of physical collapse, he permitted the Allies to impose upon Germany an exorbitant reparations burden as well as a “war guilt” clause, saddling it with the moral responsibility for having started the war. Wilson's hope was that eventually the League would rectify the injustices contained in the Treaty of
Versailles itself.
When he returned home in July 1919, the vast majority of Americans seemed to favor both the treaty and League membership. But an untoward combination of factors—ideological and partisan opposition in the Republican‐controlled Senate, a debilitating stroke that Wilson suffered, and the unraveling of his progressive coalition—dashed the president's great hope. Three times, in November 1919 and March 1920, the Senate voted on and rejected the treaty. The United States would never join the League of Nations, the capstone of Wilson's idealistic war aims. In the summer of 1921, the Republican administration of Warren G.
Harding ratified a new peace treaty with Germany that embraced all the terms of Versailles, minus the League. For the United States the war at last officially came to an end.
Some 113,000 American soldiers died in the First World War—51,000 in battle, 62,000 from disease. The direct financial costs to the United States totaled $33 billion—one‐third raised by taxes, the rest by loans (mainly in the form of bonds). But the overall impact could not be calibrated in blood and treasure alone. Although the network of wartime agencies was quickly dismantled, the government's experiment in managing the economy provided important models that the New Deal would later adapt in combatting the Depression of the 1930s. Belligerency also released forces of intolerance and political reaction, including a postwar “Red Scare” that choked off the progressive reform impulse. In reaction to Wilsonian idealism, the country embraced a policy of noninvolvement in European politics during the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, the war had thrust the United States upon the world stage, transformed the nation into the world's leading creditor, and propelled it into a period of unprecedented overseas economic expansion—from Latin America to the Middle East to Asia.
The war and its aftermath profoundly affected American intellectual life as well. During the months of belligerency, most ministers, journalists, poets, and reformers had echoed Wilson's interpretation of the conflict as “the culminating and final war for human liberty.” But when it ended, the mood quickly gave way to disillusionment. In
The Enormous Room (1922), the poet e. e. cummings captured the absurdity of bureaucratic officialdom in wartime, recounting his experiences in a French military prison on unfounded charges of espionage. Ernest
Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms (1929) presented a searing indictment of the war's ultimate futility and of the emptiness of wartime propaganda. World War I remains a watershed in American cultural history, separating the optimism and reformist energy of the
Progressive Era from the alienation of many young writers and intellectuals in the 1920s.
Neither the Great War nor the twenty years' truce that followed remedied the deeper sources of Europe's political, economic, and social ills. Indeed, the death toll and destruction and the vindictive aspects of the Versailles Treaty helped create the conditions that led to an even more disastrous conflict in 1939. In retrospect, the ordeal was only the first terrible phase of a protracted struggle that would culminate in World War II, the Nazi Holocaust, and the advent of the nuclear age.
See also
Antiwar Movements;
Economic Regulation;
Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency;
Department of Defense;
Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate;
Foreign Relations: The Economic Dimension;
Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe;
Isolationism;
Literature: Since World War I; Nativism;
Pacifism;
Peace Movements;
Prostitution and Anti‐Prostitution;
Socialism;
Socialist Party;
Temperance and Prohibition;
Racism;
Twenties, The.
Bibliography
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Arno J. Mayer , Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1967.
Edward M. Coffman , The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I, 1968.
N. Gordon Levin , Woodrow Wilson and World Politics, 1968.
Patrick Devlin , Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson's Neutrality, 1974.
Robert Ferrell , Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1985.
Paul Fussell , The Great War in Modern Memory, 1975.
David M. Kennedy , Over Here: The First World War and American Society, 1980.
Thomas J. Knock , To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, 1992.
Stephen Vaughn , Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information, 1980.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius , Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective, 1987.
Kendrick A. Clements , Woodrow Wilson: World Statesman, 1987.
David Stevenson , The First World War and International Politics, 1988.
Ronald Schaffer , America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State, 1991.
Thomas J. Knock
