7.5 & 7.6: The First World War

7.5: Explain the causes and consequences of U.S. involvement in World War I.

7.6: Explain the causes and effects of international and internal migration patterns over time.

Hello hello hello! In the last set of notes, we went over the Progressive Era, and now we’re going to be going over one of the main features of Unit 7, World War I!

Basic Causes of World War I

So the assumption here is that you took AP World History and already know why World War I started and all of the causes associated with it. Because here, the only important thing is the United States’ side of the war. But in simplest terms, if you don’t already know, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated in the summer of 1914 in Serbia and this set off a chain reaction that can be explained as such:

After Franz Ferdinand’s death, Austria-Hungary sent a list of unacceptable demands (the July Ultimatum) to Serbia in order to investigate the death. Serbia refused, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Serbia went to Russia for support, and then because Serbia was allied with Russia who was allied with France while Germany was also allied with Austria-Hungary, all of these countries declared war on each other, and then because France and Great Britain were in another alliance, Britain declared war on Germany.

So now you have two sides fighting against each other: the Triple Entente (Britain, Russia (dropped out in 1917), France) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy (switched sides in 1915), Ottoman Empire (joined in 1915))

And at first, the United States decided to stay neutral, because they saw the war as a strictly European problem in that they had no involvement. Also, the United States was a country made up of many immigrants from both sides of the war so the United States didn’t want to pick a side. President Woodrow Wilson also wanted the United States to be able to be impartial when making a peace deal. But several things happened that dragged the U.S. into the war anyways.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles

After the war, over 100,000 Americans were dead, and many more died of disease, especially from the Spanish Flu in 1918 that spread all over the world and killed millions globally. In Paris, the combating nations signed the Treaty of Versailles, and there, Woodrow Wilson presented his Fourteen Points as part of the treaty in order to try to prevent future wars. Some of his points included:

  • An end to secret treaties

  • Freedom of navigation on the seas

  • Self-determination for colonies

  • A reduction of arms

  • The removal of trade barriers

  • The creation of a League of Nations for the purpose of guaranteeing political independence and territorial integrity to all states

Unfortunately for Wilson though, many of the other nations wanted revenge against Germany and compensation for all of the losses and damages they faced during the war and this is where we get the Treaty of Versailles which did the following:

  • Blamed Germany solely for the war

  • Forced Germany to pay billions in reparations to the Allies

  • Forced Germany to demilitarize most of their army

  • Transferred all of Germany’s colonies to other powers and forced them to give up some of their territory in Europe

Anti-German Sentiment and the Red Scare

During World War I, there was a lot of anti-German sentiment in the United States. People feared that German immigrants in America could not be trusted because of the war. This led many schools to stop teaching German as a language. Additionally, Germans were shunned throughout society, symphonies and musicians stopped playing German orchestral pieces and music, bars and stores stopped selling pretzels and sauerkraut, and some Germans were even beaten or killed.

Even after the war, the fears of other groups of people in the United States did not end. Instead, it continued in the form of the Red Scare. During World War I, Russia had replaced their government with a communist one in the Russian Revolution. Because of this, starting in 1919, although Russia was on the other side of the world, Americans began fearing the existence of communists in the United States. This culminated in the Palmar Raids, in which Attorney General Mitchell Palmar ordered the mass arrest of socialists, radicals, union leaders, and more, leading to roughly 6,000 arrests and 500 deportations. Another famous case during the Red Scare was the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists that were executed by an electric chair due to their beliefs. This was a heavily controversial case and many saw this as fear, xenophobia, and nativism having gone too far.

The United States Joins the War

Firstly, the United States was already lending a lot more money to the Triple Entente/Allies than they were to the Triple Alliance/Central Powers.

Secondly, neither Germany nor the British wanted the U.S. to be trading with their enemy. Because Britain had the superior navy, they were able to do this by just confiscating goods from the United States. But Germany had a weaker navy and so relied on unrestricted submarine warfare and was using submarines to sink any ship that entered the war zone. This led to the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, a British ocean liner, in 1915. In the sinking, most of the passengers died, including 128 Americans. This enraged the Americans, including 28th President Woodrow Wilson, but the country still remained neutral. But even after the sinking, the Germans continued sinking more ships and as a result, the U.S. threatened to break diplomatic relations with Germany, which is the step right before declaring war.

So Germany stopped, for a little bit. In the end, Germany continued practicing unrestricted submarine warfare and soon started sinking all of the ships that entered the war zone again, including some American ships. Even then, the U.S. still stayed neutral.

But then, the last straw came in the Zimmermann Telegram. Germany, seeing that what they were doing was bringing the U.S. closer and closer to war, decided to send the Zimmermann Telegram, a note to Mexico, encouraging them to go to war against the U.S. Germany promised that after the war in Europe was over, they would help Mexico take back the land Mexico lost during the Mexican Cession. But the British intercepted this telegram and deciphered it and showed it to the U.S.

With that, the United States declared war against Germany on April 2, 1917. The year before this, Wilson had pushed Congress for “preparedness” for the war and they approved an expansion of the armed forces, passing the National Defense Act in 1916 to increase the regular army to roughly 175,000 soldiers. With the United States joining the side of the Triple Entente (Britain and France), these three nations and their allies became known as the Allies of World War I.

The War on the Home Front

So now we talked about how fighting was during World War I and what the end result of it was. But still, we have to go back and analyze what was happening on the homefront within the United States. For the United States, World War I was a total war, meaning that they mobilized almost all of their economic, industrial, and social resources in order to win. In the United States, Wilson established many wartime agencies that operated on Frederick Taylor’s ideas of Scientific Management. For example, the War Industries Board was created in order to make sure factories were creating enough war-related materials like weapons, armaments, and uniforms. The Food Administration was created to make sure that enough food was being created for both troops and the people at home. They also encouraged Americans to eat less food.

As a result of the war, many people moved from the rural United States to urban cities in order to find work. Because some workers were drafted and factories needed to expand to increase production, these factories also started hiring more women and African Americans. But not everybody was happy about all of the mobilization that the country was doing and some people began speaking out against it. In response, the government passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts which made it a crime to speak out against the government, criticize the war effort, or interfere with the draft (Sedition). As for the Espionage Act, it made it illegal to spy and obtain secret intelligence information from the United States or record it, and give it to other countries.

These acts led to the case Schenck v. United States, in which the Supreme Court ruled that freedom of speech is not absolute, meaning that the government is allowed to silence speech if it constitutes a “clear and present danger”, such as interfering with the draft or war effort. The government also suppressed reports about the Spanish Flu that was spreading around the country. While thousands of Americans were dying from the flu, the government hid the actual death toll out of fear that it would hurt morale and damage the war effort. They did it because they feared that Americans would be less willing to fight if they suddenly learned that over half a million Americans were dead from the flu.

Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and Racism

Additionally, the rise of communism made Americans fearful and distrusting of people from other countries, especially immigrants. A lot of people had immigrated to the U.S. from Europe due to World War I and as a result, there was a large Nativist backlash against them. Immigrants had been arriving in the country by the millions ever since the Gilded Age, and this led to the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 along with the National Origins Act of 1924, which severely limited the number of immigrants that could arrive in the country. As for migration, the Great Migration also occurred during this time and this was when a huge portion of the southern black population began migrating to the urban north. They did this for many reasons, including Jim Crow Laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and a lack of good jobs, all of which they had to deal with in the South. Because many northern cities were experiencing a boom in industry and also losing their immigrant workers due to the immigration quotas, they needed a new source of labor and so black migrants took their place.

But even when black people migrated to the North, they still experienced discrimination, it just wasn’t as prevalent or engrained into the laws. In just 1919 alone, there were over 25 race riots. Two years later, the Tulsa Race Riots, or Tulsa Massacre, occurred, in which a white mob gathered to lynch a black man accused of assault. A group of black people rose up to intervene and in the end, violence sparked and chaos erupted, causing 35 square blocks to be destroyed over the course of two days, leaving 10,000 people homeless and 300 black people dead.

Although the war would only last another year and a half, the U.S. was still able to play a pretty major role in it. World War I was the first truly industrialized war of the 20th century, with many weapons being used for the first time to kill millions of humans such as automatic machine guns, airplanes, tanks, tear gas, mustard gas, and the use of trench warfare.

In 1917, the Selective Service Act was passed, drafting 9.5 million men in the United States. By late 1917, the U.S. began shipping soldiers overseas. In early 1918, the American Expeditionary Forces fully arrived in France and began facing combat. The American involvement in the war ended up turning the tide of the war in the Allies’ favor because at this point, all of the European nations were already exhausted and struggling to continue fighting. With new support from the United States, the Allies overwhelmed Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, winning the war.

Wilson kept fighting for his Fourteen Points and trying to get Britain and France to agree to a treaty that would not ruin Germany as a nation. But he soon came down with the Spanish Flu and then also had a stroke so in the end, Britain and France got what they wanted and the U.S., in response, began isolating themselves again in the 1920s. When the League of Nations was created, Congress refused to agree to join it because they feared that the League would drag the United States into more overseas wars without congressional approval. And so while the League was created, the United States, its “creator”, was not a member.