I. The Outbreak of War: 1914
        A. International economics/national politics
        B. Divisions at home
        C. Fear for Progressive Reform

II. American Entry: 1917
        A. Russian Revolution
        B. U-boats
         C. Zimmerman Telegram
        D. Underlying Concerns

III. The New Nationalism Triumphant (?)
        A. Regulation of Business
                Railroad War Board
                Food Administration
                War Industries Board
                War Labor Board
        B. Campaign Against VD
        C. Prohibition (18^th Amendment, 1919)
        D. Woman's Suffrage (19^th Amendment, 1920)

IV. Or, The End of Progressivism (?)
        A. Dissent Stifled
                Espionage (1917) & Sedition Acts (1918)
                Schenck v. U.S and U.S. v. Debs (1919)
                Labor Strikes 
                Red Scare: Mitchell Palmer, F.B.I.
                Race Riots (1919)
        B. Army Tests – Robert Yerkes
        C. Versailles Treaty
        D. The Influenza Epidemic of 1918
                Film Clip: PBS, The American Experience, "Influenza 1918"
                                8:30-18:00

Music Note:

Irving Berlin -- Berlin was born Israel Beline, the son of a Jewish cantor in Russia in 1888. Forced from their home along with thousands of other victims of pogroms, the Belines settled in NYC.  Izzy, as Berlin was known, left school after 5^th grade to support himself. He sold newspapers, slept in doorways, and began to write music, which he did so successfully that he was famous on Broadway by his early 30s.  When he died at age 100 he had written more successful songs than any other composer in American history.  Beginning with "Alexander’s Ragtime Band" in 1911, he went on to write "I Love a Piano" in 1916, in honor of the instrument that more than any other dominated American entertainment in the early twentieth century, and "Oh, How I Hate to get Up in the Morning" in honor of the soldiers conscripted into World War I.  Later he would become famous for "Dancing Cheek to Cheek," "Putting on the Ritz," "Top Hat," "Easter Parade," There’s No Business Like Show Business," "Fools Fall in Love," and most famous of all "White Christmas."

Berlin drew on many sources – Irish ballads, English music-hall songs, American marches – but especially African American music.  Jewish composers in general were drawn to African American music, because it had so much in common with the Eastern and Mediterranean sources they knew, with its complex rhythms and preference for minor keys. This was the music to which America went to war in 1917 – a music that knew no racial or ethnic boundaries in a war that, sadly, ended by reinforcing ethnic and racial boundaries in much of the world.

George M. Cohan - composed the song that became the anthem of the war: "Over There." 

I. The Outbreak of War: 1914

In the summer of 1914, as Congress debated such important reform legislation as the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, events were transpiring in the Balkans that would, within five years, call into question the optimistic spirit that drove progressive reform and inspired its joyous music. Today I want to try to explain why war came, why Americans intervened, and what happened to Progressivism as a result.

It all started in Bosnia. [IMAGE - map of the Balkans in 1914]

 11230 – a map showing World War I boundaries in Europe – Allied Powers v. Central Powers.

On June 28, 1914 a young Bosnian Serb assassinated the heir to the Hapsburg Empire, the Archduke Ferdinand. The assassination took place in the streets of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, which was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For years a group of Serbian nationalists had been arguing that the peoples of the Balkans were all one people -- South Slavs-- and these South Slavs, or Yugoslavs, should be allowed to form a nation of their own, free of Austro-Hungarian influence on one side and the Ottoman Empire on the other. Serbia became the center of this nationalist agitation.

Not everyone accepted the idea of Serbian nationalism. Deep ethnic and religious hatreds extended back hundreds of years. The Balkans had been a battlefield for centuries between the Austro-Hungarians and Turks.  In an attempt to solidify their power the Austro-Hungarians had converted the Slovenes and some Croates to Catholicism; the Turks had converted other Croates and Serbs to Islam. The Austro-Hungarians also resettled some Russian Orthodox Serbs, whom they regarded as particularly brutal warriors, to the border areas of Croatia to act as a bulwark against the Turks. The conflicts were so messy and brutal, that wise European leaders tried to stay out of the Balkans if they could. Germany's Bismarck once announced that the Balkan problem was "not worth the healthy bones of one Pomeranian grenadier."

It is easier to understand the extreme reluctance of European powers to intervene in Bosnia in the early 1990s, and the continuing troubles down to this very day, if you know this background, and if you know, in addition, what happened after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.

The Austrians, upset at the assassination of their Archduke, and determined to put an end to the nationalist agitation that was eating away at their empire, turned to their ally Germany and asked whether the Germans would back them up if they went to war with Serbia.  Germany, no longer led by the wise Bismarck, gave Austria a "blank check." Russian Orthodox Serbia then turned to its Russian Orthodox neighbor Russia for support, which Russia, in turn, guaranteed. The Russians, in turn, counted on support from their allies the French, who in turn, relied on support from Britain, which was determined to keep Germany in check. For several decades the Germans had been embarked on a tremendous naval build-up, and the British were alarmed that they might soon be overtaken by the Germans both militarily and economically, a development that could threaten its empire. On August 1, 1914 everyone began declaring war on everyone else.

 A. INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS/NATIONAL POLITICS: Historians have been arguing ever since about the causes of World War I. The largest reason seems to be that by 1914 economics operated in an international realm, while politics remained organized on a national level. To compete economically in the international realm, countries relied on a network of political alliances to maintain the stability that world trade required. France, for instance, was too weak to protect its economic autonomy; it needed Russia and Britain to balance the growing power of Germany and Austria. Once Austria declared war on Serbia, the complicated network of political alliances suddenly produced a rapid chain reaction throughout Europe, drawing every major country into the conflict.

Once the war had started, most observers assumed it would be brief. The German armies swept quickly through Belgium and France. But in September 1914 the French stopped the Germans at the River Marne, and the Great War in Europe settled into a grisly stalemate. Slanting from the Channel to the Swiss frontier, an unmovable line of battle congealed across northern France. [POWERPOINT MAP]

Throughout 1915 and 1916 the Germans on one side and the French and British on the other burrowed into trench works. And there they stayed, fighting a bitter war of attrition in which the front never moved. As the war ground on, millions died -- of bullets -- of disease -- and of the mud that swallowed men, machines, and horses without a trace.

Far to the east, in Poland, the Central Powers inflicted two million casualties on the Czar’s armies, but still the Russians held on. From one end of the continent to another the war had become a military stand-off. [IMAGE]

11256 – For three years the British, French, and Germans endured increasingly costly trench warfare. These British troops are shown in the front line in the Somme area in August 1916. The Battle of the Somme, in the summer and fall of 1916, achieved almost no change in the position of the German and Allied armies, but 420,000 British, 200,000 French, and almost 450,000 Germans lost their lives. Moreover, the area was almost totally destroyed.

Then, in the winter of 1916-1917 Germany began to crack.  Inflation had wrecked the economy. The British blockade of German ports had effectively prevented food from getting through to the Germans who were beginning to die of starvation. And internal dissent was mounting. In a last desperate move German leaders decided on unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic to break the blockade.

The risks, they knew, were great. More than once since 1914, submarine attacks on merchant and passenger ships had brought the U.S. to the brink of war with Germany, most notably in May 1915 when a German U-2 sub sank the British luxury liner Lusitania, killing more than 100 Americans. The German embassy had warned Americans that any Allied ship in the war zone would be considered a fair target, but 128 Americans ignored this warning and went down with the ship. Wilson charged the Germans with brutality and refused to bar Americans from British ships. [IMAGE]

German military leaders worried that an irate America might enter the war on the side of the British, but they argued that merciless U-boat warfare would bring England to her knees within 6 months, well before a distant, unprepared and reluctant America could mount an effective war effort.

 Americans were reluctant for good reasons. Since the guns had first sounded in Europe in August 1914, Americans profoundly disagreed about the conflict and about America's relation to it.

 
B. DIVISIONS AT HOME: First, in order to enter the war Americans had to settle on which side to support, and Americans were deeply divided. The single largest immigrant group in America came from Germany; the next came from Ireland, where hatred of the British was an article of faith.  If America were to intervene, the Central Powers would seem to have had a strong claim to American support.  On the other hand, many native-born Americans felt their strongest ties to be with the democratically constituted British and French. To complicate matters still further, however, many who supported the British and French found it difficult to side with the Allies so long as they were allied Czarist Russia, which was hardly a model of democracy. With the country so divided, the majority took a "plague on both your houses" attitude toward what seemed to them the dynastic squabbles of decaying imperialist powers. 

C. FEAR FOR PROGRESSIVISM: In addition to conflicts over which side to favor in the war, there was widespread fear about what the war would do to Progressive reform. President Wilson, especially, worried about the impact of war on his newly won domestic programs. "Every reform we have won," Wilson said in 1914, "will be lost if we go into this war." For two and a half years the war continued, as America stood and watched.

II. American Entry, 1917

Note that in February 1917 Columbia trustees calls on students to report unpatriotic statements of Columbia faculty. Franz Boas walks into class and calls for defense of academic freedom.

Then, in March of 1917, a series of startling events occurred that led directly to American intervention.

- A. Russian Revolution: First, riots broke out in St. Petersburg, the capital of Imperial Russia. Troops joined the demonstrators, a provisional government took power, and on March 15 Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.  No longer did tyrannical Russian dictatorship taint the Allied cause. At this point, resistance to American participation in the war began to weaken.

B. U-Boats: Second, The Germans clumsily antagonized American opinion by sinking three unarmed US merchantmen in late March, thereby turning a war against other European powers into a war against American FREE TRADE, and

  C. Zimmerman Telegram: Third, the Germans compounded their diplomatic ineptitude by promising Mexico -- as revealed in the intercepted Zimmerman Telegram -- large chunks of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico if, in case of war, it would side with the Germans against the US.

At this point Woodrow Wilson felt that he had no choice but to ask Congress for a declaration of war.

D. Underlying Concerns: Threat to Free Trade -- These three sets of events brought America into the war because they reinforced an underlying concern shared by many business and political leaders: fear that a continuation of the war would put America's access to markets around the world at risk.  Revolution in Russia meant that  Germany no longer had to fight on two fronts.  That increased the possibility that Germany and Austria - Hungary, both monarchies, would control Europe.   Both Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare and its telegram to Mexico raised the specter of continuing assaults on Free Trade, the basis of America's thriving economy. [IMAGE]

11239 – Here is Wilson on April 2, 1917 Wilson before Congress saying that the US, with no selfish interest, would enter the war "for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government, for the rights and liberties of small nations ... and to make the world itself at last free." "The world," he declared, "must be made safe for democracy."

And then, in a famous peroration, Wilson concluded, "[T]he day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other."

Congress quickly passed a resolution declaring war. But the vote was far from unanimous. Fifty Congressmen refused to endorse the resolution, including the newly elected, first female representative - Jeanette Rankin, of Montana. [IMAGE] Beyond Capitol Hill still others remained opposed to war. Jane Addams, who headed the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, was one. Eugene Debs, who as head of the Socialist Party continued to view the war as the struggle of decaying imperialist powers, was another. Those who opposed the war insisted that the war would have not liberal, democratic consequences, but would have instead anti-liberal, anti-democratic, repressive effects not only in Europe, but also at home in America. They had a point - one to which I'll return in a few minutes.

III. New Nationalism Triumphant

Many historians point to World War I as representing the culmination of Progressivism, especially in its New Nationalist form, espoused by Theodore Roosevelt. In many ways the war created conditions that assured a strengthening of the regulatory state that the New Nationalists championed.

 A. Regulation of Business

The Railroad War Board ran the railroads and greatly improved their efficiency.

The Food Administration, under Herbert Hoover, proved a phenomenal success at saving millions of civilians in Europe from starvation while also supplying Allied troops.

War Industries Board, which under Bernard Baruch regulated industry, did much to overcome business fear of governmental regulation – although some historians question how much Baruch actually regulated industry; many argue that the War Industries Board gave business the opportunity to regulate government.

War Labor Board: Samuel Gompers was put on the War Labor Board. He promised to prevent strikes. In return the Board imposed an 8-hour day, equal pay for equal work, right to unionize for workers in war industries. Union membership grew from 2.5 million workers in to 4 million in 1919. [Not all laborers supported the war. IWW staged more than 6000 strikes.]

B. Campaign Against VD: In some ways the culmination of the New Nationalism worked, as Progressives had hoped, to promote the public welfare. The government conducted a public health campaign to try to stamp out VD. At first officials worked to control prostitution.  But finally they threw up their hands and started handing out condoms.

C. Prohibition: Prohibitionists secured ratification of the 18thA, which they hoped would improve public welfare by preventing the liquor interests from taking advantage of working men, who too often drank up their wages and, in a drunken state, beat their families.

D. Women’s Suffrage: Women finally won the suffrage (Wilson, who had long opposed women's suffrage went to Congress and asked the House and Senate to pass the 19thA as a war measure, necessary to guarantee female support for the war effort).

Women won Wilson’s support because of their extraordinary efforts on behalf of the war effort. Despite strong pacifist leanings among many women leaders, most women supported the war effort and took advantage of the mobilization of young men to seek new opportunities.

 11249 - here is an American Red Cross nurse in uniform.  At first the government refused to grant women the right to serve in the military, but women provided medical services through the Red Cross, where they worked as doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and medical technicians. By the end of the war the military recognized women’s contributions by forming the Army Corps of Nurses. Female medical personnel served a vital function in a war in which about 100,00 Americans were killed in action and another 200,000 were wounded.

 11268 – here is a picture of a woman welder. The war cut off the supply of immigrant labor, and the draft in 1917 took 2 million men out of the work force. Women helped fill the labor shortage.

 Video Encyclopedia – videodisc #2 – side A – Ch. 12, 0096 – "Women in World War I" – 59 seconds – here are women who undertook jobs traditionally performed by men.

The war also also brought new opportunities to African Americans. Although they had been moving north and west ever since the end of slavery, they began what has since come to be known as the great migration when the critical labor shortage created by the war opened up job opportunities to them for the first time in northern industry. [Note that depopulation of African-American communities in states like South Carolina guarantees that whites become the majority.]

African Americans also distinguished themselves on the battlefield. Although at first mobilization plans took no account of African Americans, when NAACP leaders protested the army created segregated units, and army created segregated units led by white officers. [IMAGE]

11250 – here are members of the 369^th Infantry Regiment on their way home, having served in combat longer than any other American regiment. All of the men shown here were awarded the French Crois de Guerre for heroism in battle.

IV. The End of Progressivism

In some ways, then, the war saw the triumph of the brand of Progressivism that T.R. championed, the kind that emphasized the need for a strong government giving direction to the economy. The war also marked the end of some of Progressivism's finest impulses, and brought profoundly anti-liberal and anti-democratic consequences.

 
A. Dissent Stifled at Home: At the time of the first world war, about one-third of all Americans were either immigrants or the children of immigrants, and of these about a third were from Germany and Austria-Hungary. Whereas before the war, progressives like Jane Addams had worked to celebrate the diversity and cosmopolitanism of American life created by immigration, the war drew out the darker side of progressivism and turned the public toward 100% Americanism and vicious xenophobia.

Anything associated with German culture suddenly became taboo. A person who had a hankering for hamburger learned to ask for a liberty sandwich. The governor of Iowa forbade the speaking of German on streetcars.  In St. Louis one young German was stripped, bound with an American flag, dragged barefoot and stumbling through the streets and then lynched to the lusty cheers of 500 patriots.

To xenophobia was quickly added anti-radicalism, for socialists continued to oppose the war as a capitalist squabble.

1) Stifling Free Speech: In 1917 Congress passed the Espionage Act which made it a crime to obstruct military operations.  [Note that at CU Butler fires faculty who opposed conscription; Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson resign] In 1918 Congress passed the Sedition Act, which expanded the meaning of the Espionage Act to make illegal any expression of opposition to the war. Anyone who opposed the war became subject to prosecution. For the first time since the Civil War, America made it a crime to criticize the government. Many people thought at the time that the Sedition Act was a clear violation of the First Amendment. But when cases brought under the act finally reached the Supreme Court after the war, they were declared constitutional. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who is often praised for having articulated a "clear and present danger standard" as a protection of free speech, articulated that standard in Schenck v. US in which a Socialist opposed to the war was fined and sent to jail for arguing that America's policy of conscription amounted to a violation of the 13th Amendment ban on involuntary servitude  Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for criticizing the war.

2) Labor Strikes and the Red Scare: The importance of conformity to 100% Americanism did not stop with "liberty sandwiches" or the incarceration of draft resisters. Indeed, the greatest fear over the dangers of dissent and the future of Americanism came not during the war but only in its aftermath.

The working class in America had long been the despair of radicals. Lenin dismissed Samuel Gompers, head of the AF of L as an "agent of the bourgeoisie." But the experience of the war provided radicals with new hope. First, there was the example of the Russian revolution, which demonstrated that even a small group could bring about a revolution. Second, there was the experience of the war itself, which gave unprecedented power to American unions. Laborers who had formerly been relatively conservative were beginning to talk about the nationalization of the railroads. The Wobblies, Industrial Workers of the World (which had its greatest strength in the West among miners) gained increasing power, emphasized the need to organize the unskilled, and declared that it was the "historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism."

Labor militancy increased in 1919 as prices started to climb, touching off a series of strikes by workers attempting to keep up with rising prices.

As labor strikes spread across the country, a series of bombings took place. The most important was at the home of Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer in Washington, which shattered the front of his house. Palmer and many Americans believed that the violent overthrow of the government was imminent.

11287 – Here is a picture of Mitchell Palmer – who reacted to the bombings by forming the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover.

No one today thinks that revolution was imminent in 1919. But Attorney General Palmer wasn't taking any chances. He launched the now famous Palmer Raids to nip revolution in the bud. About 6,000 people were rounded up in the Palmer Raids (many of them unconnected with any radical cause) and held for weeks while the authorities tried to find evidence against them. In the end, the government was able to deport about 500 of the 6,000.

11265 - here is a picture of the deportation of IWW strikers. In its ransacking of communist homes and meeting places they turned up 3 guns, but otherwise the raids accomplished little.

The Red Scare finally began to die out in the spring of 1920. Palmer predicted a gigantic terrorist demonstration for May Day and planned for it by placing federal troops on alert. But the demonstration failed to materialize and Palmer looked rather silly. The Red Scare swiftly subsided.

But it had a lingering effect. Labor organizing declined precipitously and the Socialist Party virtually disappeared in America. The decade of the 1920s would be the worst decade for labor organizing in the this country until the 1980s.

3) Race Riots: There were, as well, a series of race riots at the end of the war -- in the South, not surprisingly, but also in the North. Although white employers had welcomed black workers in the midst of the war-time labor shortage, white workers had resisted the hiring of blacks from the beginning.

11272 – here a white mob attacks an African-American man (in front of the streetcar) during a riot in East St. Louis in 1917 – 40 blacks and 9 whites were killed

After the war white workers were determined to regain their place in the economy and to ensure that African Americans would not challenge white supremacy. One especially brutal riot occurred in Chicago. A young black boy was swimming in Lake Michigan one day, and he inadvertently drifted toward a white beach. White youths started stoning him and knocked him unconscious.  He sank and drowned. Angry blacks gathered in crowds and marched into white neighborhoods to retaliate. Even larger white crowds invaded black neighborhoods shooting, stabbing, and beating passersby and destroying homes.  For more than a week Chicago was virtually at war. In the end 38 died -- 15 whites and 23 blacks -- 537 were injured.

[IMAGE - white men stoning black man to death]

11288 – Here are army troops being rushed to the South Side of Chicago to quiet rioters on July 31, 1919.

This and other race riots were especially tragic in light of the service given by black troops during the war. Over 400,000 African-Americans served in the military -- half of them in Europe.

B. ARMY TESTS: In addition to the various ways in which dissent was stifled at home, World War I had another effect on American society that is worth pointing out: It raised experts to a new level of influence in American society and made clear that expertise could have anti-democratic consequences.

The field of psychology offers a striking case in point. Before World War I, psychology was a struggling enterprise, a sub-discipline within philosophy whose practitioners found employment possibilities strictly limited. The war put psychology on the map by giving psychologists the opportunity to devise tests whereby recruits could be readily assigned to different areas of responsibility. For me the Army Tests that psychologists devised during World War I are symbolic of the impact of World War I on American life. They gave psychologists unprecedented power in categorizing their fellow citizens, and they gave a scientific imprimatur to the xenophobia that was rife in the land.

Working at breakneck speed, psychologists trained at Harvard, Columbia, and other universities under the direction of Dr. Robert Yerkes came up with a series of tests which they claimed to be reliable measures of native intelligence. When the tests were given, and the results assessed, Yerkes reported that the tests proved that about half of the American population was feebleminded - that half was made up overwhelmingly of immigrants, esp. those from southern and eastern Europe, and blacks. The tests did not make Americans racists. What they did was to provide scientific sanction to justify the closing of American doors to a large percentage of immigrants through the Immigration Acts of 1924.

C. THE VERSAILLES TREATY: While American society stifled dissent, lashed out against foreigners, denounced radicals, and burned black neighborhoods, European powers rejected Wilson's idealistic 14 points at the Versailles peace negotiations. Indeed, not only did the victorious Allies refuse to recognize Wilson's principles of free trade and open diplomacy, they proceeded to carve up Europe and levy punitive reparations on Germany that some historians believe lay the foundation for Hitler and World War II.

-- (Ho Chi Minh story)

-- Note naivete of Wilson in believing that self-determination would solve problems in such regions as the Balkans. He is assuming a homogeneous society, or a society like his native South where heterogeneity was rendered invisible by a single group with overwhelming power.

Finally, when Wilson returned home, he found himself opposed by many in the Senate whose support he needed to ratify the Versailles treaty. What in Wilson's eyes was the beginning of a democratic world, was to many Americans the beginning of the very entangling alliances that Founding Father George Washington had long ago exhorted Americans to avoid.

 
D. THE INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC OF 1918: Your reading mentions only in passing one final event of this period – the terrible influenza epidemic of 1918. No one enjoys the flu, but most people survive it, especially if they are not very young or very old. The flu epidemic of 1918 was another matter altogether. It was the first epidemic ever to hit America. At a time of war in which about 60,000 soldiers died in combat – 600,000 Americans died of the most virulent flu the country had ever known. In a world-wide war that claimed 20 million lives, 30 million died of the flu.

What did the flu have to do with the war? No one is really sure. It’s origins are obscure. It began sweeping through the country in the spring of 1918 and was tapering off by Armistice Day in November. It spread more rapidly, no doubt, because of the war – parades, troop ships, the trenches, the extraordinary mobility of wartime.

What relevance does it have to Progressivism? Simply this: the flu epidemic, in common with the war itself, contributed to an erosion of faith in the inevitability of progress and the ability of experts to contend with any problem that might arise. The fact is that doctors, research scientists and governmental officials were totally powerless before this virus. They didn’t understand it; they didn’t know how to respond to it. With the flu epidemic, as with the war, a certain naïve innocence vanished in this country.

Does the war represent the triumph or the death of PROGRESSIVISM?   I'd like us to talk about that in our sections this week.   On Thursday we will talk about what happened to Progressivism in the 1920s and examine the birth of modern culture in those years.