U.S. History II:
Chapter 22: Wilson, World War I
Europe exploded on 28 July 1914, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. Initially, the United States declared neutrality and sought to stay out of the war.
The U.S. traded $754 million in goods to Britain and France, and $190 million to Germany, in 1914. At first, the U.S. had a vested interest in maintaining neutrality. However, the British blockade of Germany in the North Sea quickly eliminated trade with Germany. Meanwhile, trade to Britain and France grew to $2.75 billion in 1916.
There were more than 5 million German Americans in the Midwest, many of them voters. In addition, there were 3 million Irish Americans who hated Britain and thought the U.S. should do nothing to support her in her war with Germany. The British, on the other hand, had numerous supporters in the Northeast.
The Germans did themselves no favors in public opinion when they began unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic Ocean. At first, submarines would stop ships, identify them, and sink them only if they were British. This proved fatal to many subs, leading the Germans to begin sinking any ship in the Atlantic.
On 7 May 1915, a German sub sank the Lusitania off the Irish coast. Among the 1,200 dead were 128 Americans. Wilson immediately demanded an apology from Germany. Berlin said instead that it would no longer attack ocean liners. However, in the following year, the Germans sank 37 liners in the Atlantic.
Wilson and others realized the U.S. was unprepared militarily to enter the war. The Army had only 128,000 men in 1917, far too few to make much of a difference in the war. Wilson began working in 1916 to build support for entering the war, but he faced entrenched opposition from Germans, Irish, and other Americans who remembered George Washington’s farewell address.
Pre-War Reformers
Women’s suffrage and Prohibition workers continued their push for reforms leading up to the war. Many reformers feared that American involvement in the “Great War” would sidetrack the nation and end the Progressive Era. (They were right.)
Prohibitionists won nearly 21 states by 1915 and continued the push for a Constitutional amendment banning the sale of alcohol. The Prohibitionists would succeed in pushing Congress to pass the 18th Amendment in 1918 under the guise of feeding the Allies instead of diverting grain to alcohol production.
Suffragists benefited from Wilson’s reelection campaign in 1916. Wilson realized he needed Progressive votes and stated that individual states should give women the right to vote if they wished.
Wilson played a greater role in reform with the nomination of Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916. Brandeis became the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice.
1916 Events & Elections
On 24 March 1916, the Germans sank the Sussex, an unarmed ship in the English Channel. Americans were among the wounded. Wilson threatened the Germans with American involvement in the war if they sank another unarmed ship. The Germans issued the Sussex Pledge not to attack merchant vessels without giving them a warning first. Wilson became a national hero for avoiding the war and winning the pledge from the Germans.
On another front, America experienced problems with Mexico. The U.S. had recognized the government of Venustiano Carranza, leading Pancho Villa, a Mexican rebel, to raid American towns in New Mexico and Texas. Wilson sent the Army into Mexico under General John J. Pershing. The Mexicans protested, but troops remained in Mexico for 2 years.
In the 1916 elections, Wilson’s motto was, “He kept us out of war.” Given American sentiments against entering the war, this was a winning slogan — but only barely. Wilson won only by a vote of 277 electoral votes vs. 254 votes for his Republican opponent.
After the election, Wilson began working for a negotiated peace. He approached both the British and the Germans, asking what it would take to end the war; both sides rejected Wilson’s offer to mediate. Wilson continued to hold out hope that the 2 sides would win a “peace without victory.”
America Enters the War
Wilson’s views changed in 1917. First, Germany decided in January to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. In February, Wilson responded by breaking diplomatic relations and asking Congress for the authority to arm U.S. merchant ships. Congress was reluctant to act.
Then, the British released the “Zimmerman Telegram” or “Zimmerman Note” from German foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman to Germany’s ambassador to Mexico. Zimmerman offered to assist Mexico in winning Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas from the U.S. in return for Mexican entry into the war on Germany’s side. When Wilson released the Zimmerman Telegram, Congress quickly passed a bill to arm merchant ships. Although the pro-isolationist Senate filibustered the bill, Wilson armed the ships on his own authority as Commander-in-Chief.
On 2 April 1917, Wilson spoke to a special session of Congress. Wilson told Congress, “The world must be made safe for democracy.... It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace.” Congress declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, but the nation remained divided over entering what most perceived as a strictly European affair.
The Allies were in dire need of help. Both Britain and France had suffered tremendous casualties in the war. The French army actually mutinied after one horrific battle.
The American Army did not want a volunteer force. Instead, Congress passed the Selective Service Act in May 1917, requiring all men between 21 and 30 to register for the draft. Roughly 24 million men registered, with 3 million of them called into the armed forces.
Wilson asked General John J. Pershing to command the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in Europe. Pershing faced tremendous obstacles: The Army was ill-equipped for a modern trench war, and the U.S. Army had no battle plan involving fighting in Europe.
Meanwhile, the Germans continued submarine warfare, sinking 900,000 tons of shipping in April 1917. The U.S. Navy began running convoys across the North Atlantic to fight the submarines. The convoys were immensely successful; the Navy shipped over 2 million men across the Atlantic Ocean to Germany without losing a single life.
America not only provided men, but she also provided food to Britain. Congress passed the Lever Act to establish a Food Administration to gather crops for the Allies. Led by Herbert Hoover, the Food Administration touted “meatless days” and “wheatless days” to provide food to Belgium and Britain. U.S. farmers were raising 921 million bushels of wheat by 1918, up from 637 million bushels in 1917.
The federal government expanded greatly to fight the war and manage the war effort. Railroads were placed under federal control, as was most American industrial production. Labor unions vowed not to strike during the war if the government allowed unions to participate in economic policy making. As a result, the AFL gained more than 2 million members between 1917 and 1920. The government enacted the nation’s first minimum wage and maximum weekly working hours during the war.
American troops began arriving in France in early 1918. As the American troops arrived, an American officer exclaimed, “Lafayette, we are here!” The U.S. remembered French help in the Revolutionary War; payback was here.
Russia left the war in November 1917 when the Communists took over the government and the tsarist regime fell. The Germans began shifting troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front in an effort to defeat Britain and France before the Americans arrived in great numbers. Instead, the Germans ran into American troops in the battles of Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry in June 1918. The Americans pushed the Germans back to the Hindenburg Line, their defensive line in France, in the Second Battle of the Marne.
In Flanders, the British attacked again on 8 August. The attack included 414 tanks. The Germans lost nearly 30,000 casualties — and their morale. From this point forward, German efforts to fight were severely hampered by morale issues. The German army began crumbling across the front. On 29 September, the British broke through the Hindenburg Line. The German High Command knew the end had come. The Germans approached American President Woodrow Wilson about an armistice.
The Central Powers’ collapse was sudden and complete. Bulgaria fell in September, and the Turks sued for peace before the Allies could take Constantinople. Austria-Hungary’s army had relied heavily on German support, but this support had ended with Russia’s surrender. The Italians finally broke through Austro-Hungarian lines in October 1918. On 3 November, the Austro-Hungarian Empire signed an armistice, effectively ending the Hapsburg empire that had stood for centuries.
On 26 October, Ludendorff was dismissed. On 29 October, the High Seas Fleet experienced a mutiny at the port of Kiel when the admirals tried to take the fleet on a final glorious end against the Royal Navy; the sailors had no desire to die in a glorious but futile effort. In an attempt to quell the mutiny, the government spread the mutineers throughout the country; instead, the mutineers took the revolution with them. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated on 9 November, and a republic was proclaimed in Germany.
On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, World War I came to an end. 11 November was known as Armistice Day.
The casualty rates were enormous:
The Peace Settlement and After
Wilson had proposed 14 Points for settling the war in a speech to Congress in January 1918. The Points included freedom of the seas, freedom of trade, arms limitations, and open diplomacy that excluded secret deals. The major points also called for what is known as self-determination — that nationalities determine their own sovereignty — and an international body to arbitrate between nations.
Although Wilson thought his 14 Points were a grand idea, he had two problems. First of all, the Republicans in Congress were upset with Wilson’s habit of proposing solutions without consulting them. When Wilson broke with tradition and left America to go to Europe (no sitting President had ever visited Europe), he refused to take any Senators with him rather than have to take Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.
Secondly, the other Allies had little time for such idealism. Georges Clemenceau, premier of France, reminded everyone that even God had given only 10 Commandments. When the draft treaty was presented to the German delegation, Clemenceau stated, “The time has come to settle accounts.” There was no doubt as to what he meant.
The Treaty of Versailles was presented to the Germans in May 1919. The Treaty:
Wilson lost on every point except for the founding of a League of Nations as a means of enforcing the treaty. Even then, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty by which the U.S. could join the League. Instead, the U.S. signed a separate treaty with Germany in August 1921, the Peace of Berlin.
German reaction was swift and bitter. The new German government, the Weimar Republic (named after the city in which the constitutional assembly met after the Kaiser’s abdication), was saddled with the responsibility of signing the treaty and accepting its dictates. Matthias Erzberger, the politician who accepted the role of signing the treaty on behalf of Germany, was assassinated in 1922. French Field Marshall Ferdinand Foch said of the Treaty, “This is not a peace; it’s a 20-year truce.”
Wilson’s inability to sell the nation on the League of Nations was a crushing blow. On 2 October 1919, Wilson suffered a massive stroke. His wife and doctors did not reveal to the nation how sick he truly was. Without Wilson, the government was rendered ineffective in the transition back to a peacetime economy.
The Progressives had been right: The “war to end all wars” really ended the Progressive Era. The 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, but most other reforms — including fights against segregation — were ended. By the 1920 elections, Americans were ready for a conservative. Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio fit the bill. Harding was elected by over 7 million votes.