The Great War and After, 1914–1919

This is Unit Eight, part two, on the home front: persuasion, dissent, and the Americans the war asked to serve. Part one closed with the government running industry, food and the railroads, and pointed to the agency that shaped opinion. Carry one question through this part. For each group the war asked to serve, women, Black soldiers and workers, ask what service promised and what it brought. And at the laws against dissent, ask the course's standing question for wartime: what was the danger, and who decided? By the end you will be able to describe the wartime government's two methods. To explain how the war tested civil liberties. To describe women's war work and service. To hold both accounts of Black soldiers' service, and describe the backlash. And to explain labour's wartime bargain and what followed it.

Three entries: the agency that shaped opinion, the four wartime agencies read as a set, and how the war was paid for.

The agency that shaped opinion.

USH2 1073 The Committee on Public Information

George Creel's Committee on Public Information enlisted artists, speakers, writers and filmmakers to build public support for the war, and Digital History counts seventy-five million pamphlets distributed. It calls the committee the federal government's first domestic propaganda campaign, and the Yawp says Creel enlisted Hollywood studios and other media.

What the four agencies show together.

USH2 1074 A Government That Ran the Economy

Four agencies show how far the wartime government reached. The War Industries Board under Bernard Baruch directed raw materials and contracts. The Food Administration under Herbert Hoover asked for voluntary conservation. The Railroad Administration under William McAdoo ran the entire railroad industry. The Committee on Public Information under George Creel shaped what Americans read and saw about the war. Read the set for its two methods, command and persuasion: the railroads were taken over, and food was saved by appeal. Hoover's preference for voluntary effort is the key to his response to the Depression in unit ten, and the precedent of a government that could run an industry is one the New Deal of unit eleven reached for.

How the war was paid for.

USH2 1075 Paying for the War

The war cost the United States more than thirty-two billion dollars by nineteen twenty, the anchor says, and liberty bond drives raised twenty-three billion from the public. Digital History notes the brewing industry's claim that liquor taxes paid more for the war than liberty bonds. The claim failed to stop Prohibition.

Five entries on the laws against dissent, the citizens who enforced them, the Court that upheld them, and their best-known prisoner.

The laws against dissent.

USH2 1076 The Espionage and Sedition Acts

The Espionage Act of June nineteen seventeen and the Sedition Act of nineteen eighteen made opposing the war a federal crime, and Digital History describes postal officials empowered to ban newspapers and magazines from the mails. More than two thousand people were charged, and many received twenty-year sentences, the anchor says.

The private citizens who watched for disloyalty.

USH2 1077 The American Protective League

The American Protective League, a group of private citizens, worked with the federal government to watch for disloyalty, the Yawp says. It adds that critics and protesters were imprisoned, and that immigrants, labour unions and political radicals came under suspicion.

The Supreme Court's ruling on the new laws.

USH2 1078 Schenck v. United States

In Schenck versus United States in nineteen nineteen, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the wartime restrictions on speech under the Espionage Act, under Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's test of speech posing a clear and present danger. Unit thirteen returns to the question of loyalty and speech in the second Red Scare.

The best-known prisoner of the war.

USH2 1079 Debs Behind Bars

Eugene Debs, the Socialist leader of unit six, was sentenced to ten years in prison for speaking against the war, and ran for president in nineteen twenty from a prison cell. A man who had twice won nearly a million votes was jailed for a speech. That is what the wartime laws meant in practice.

What these cases add up to.

USH2 1080 Liberty in Wartime

The war produced the course's first sustained test of civil liberties. The Espionage and Sedition Acts made opposition a crime, and more than two thousand people were charged. Private citizens in the American Protective League watched their neighbours. The Yawp says the laws stripped dissenters of their right to resist the war publicly. In Schenck the Supreme Court upheld the laws unanimously, and Debs went to prison for ten years. The pattern is the point: in wartime the government narrowed the right to dissent, and the courts allowed it. Unit twelve's internment of Japanese Americans and unit seventeen's Patriot Act return to the same question. Ask, each time, what the danger was and who decided.

Four entries on the women who took up war work at home and served near the front.

The women who took up war work.

USH2 1081 Women at Work

The war drew more than one million women into paid work for the first time, the anchor says, often in industry, while more than eight million already working moved into higher-paying jobs. The two figures measure different things: new workers and better jobs. Many took work thought of as men's, such as on the railroads.

The women who ran the farms.

USH2 1082 Farmerettes

The Women's Land Army sent some twenty thousand women, mostly college-educated city dwellers, to run farms as men left for the armed forces, and farmerettes brought in the harvests men had left behind. Some joined to serve the country; others, the anchor says, hoped to advance the fight for women's rights.

The women who served near the front.

USH2 1083 The Hello Girls

Two hundred thirty bilingual American women, the Hello Girls, ran telephone lines for the army in combat areas of France, for the Signal Corps, the Yawp says. More than eighteen thousand American women served as Red Cross nurses, and close to three hundred of them died in service.

Women in the armed forces.

USH2 1084 Women in Uniform

About thirty thousand American women served in the military or with relief organisations during the war, according to the anchor, with navy women enlisting as yeomen and the first women joining the Marine Corps in July nineteen eighteen. The Yawp says the war opened uniformed occupations to women where none had existed before.

Six entries on Black Americans in the war: their service, two accounts of it, the migration north, and the violence that followed.

The African Americans who served.

USH2 1085 African Americans in Uniform

About three hundred fifty thousand African American men served, thirteen percent of enlisted forces, in segregated units, and W. E. B. Du Bois urged Black Americans to support the war and seek a place at the front. The Yawp says Black leaders hoped service would prove the case for full citizenship.

What their service looked like.

USH2 1086 The 369th

The Yawp says the War Department barred Black troops from combat and relegated Black soldiers to segregated service units, where they worked as general labourers. The anchor gives a different part of the record: the three hundred sixty-ninth infantry regiment, the Harlem Hellfighters, spent six months on the French front line, a longer stretch than any other American unit. Both statements come from the course's sources, and both are stated here. They describe different parts of the same army: most Black soldiers were kept from combat, and one regiment fought longer than any American unit. Neither source explains how both could be true, and the course does not invent the explanation.

The migration the war accelerated.

USH2 1087 The Wartime Migration

Nearly three hundred fifty thousand African Americans moved north between nineteen ten and nineteen twenty, into steel, mining, shipbuilding and automobile work, and Black women in manufacturing rose from seventy thousand to more than one hundred thousand. The Yawp says the migration sparked conflict as White northerners fought to reclaim jobs and neighbourhoods.

How this course divides the story.

USH2 1088 One Migration, Two Units

This course teaches the Great Migration in two parts: unit four's frame of nearly two million migrants from eighteen sixty-five, and this wartime surge, one movement across six decades with its sharpest rise during the war. Unit four gave the push and pull; this unit gives the war's pull and the backlash that followed.

The backlash.

USH2 1089 East St. Louis

Race riots broke out in twenty-five cities in nineteen seventeen alone, and in East St. Louis thirty-nine Black residents were killed. The anchor ties the riots to the tensions the migration created in northern cities.

The violence that followed the war.

USH2 1090 Lynchings Rise

Recorded lynchings rose from thirty-eight in nineteen seventeen to eighty-three in nineteen nineteen, the anchor says, and many of the victims were Black veterans returning from the war. Service had not brought the citizenship Black leaders hoped for. The violence reached its peak in the Red Summer later in this unit.

Two entries on the bargain the government made with labour, and what it did to wages and unions.

The bargain made with labour.

USH2 1091 The National War Labor Board

In April nineteen eighteen Wilson created the National War Labor Board to keep war production running without strikes, and the American Federation of Labor promised not to strike in exchange for federal protection of workers' rights. The bargain brought collective bargaining and the eight-hour day to war industries.

What the bargain did to wages and unions.

USH2 1092 Labour's Wartime Bargain

The no-strike pledge brought labour into the war effort on new terms. Union membership grew from two point six million in nineteen sixteen to four point one million in nineteen nineteen. But prices rose fifteen to twenty percent a year from nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty, while corporate profits rose nearly a third. When the war ended and the pledge lapsed, workers struck in numbers never seen before or since. Read the numbers as a sequence: wartime gains in membership came with losses in real wages, and the pledge held labour's anger in check only until peace. The strike wave of nineteen nineteen, and the Red Scare that broke it, follow from this bargain later in this unit.

Two entries on two amendments that took effect after the war: prohibition, and the final vote for suffrage.

The amendment that took effect after the war.

USH2 1093 Prohibition Arrives

The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in January nineteen nineteen, took effect a year later, and the Volstead Act gave it the force of law, closing saloons across the country in nineteen twenty. Unit six taught the temperance campaign. The anchor says enforcement failed, a story unit nine takes up.

The last day of the suffrage fight.

USH2 1094 Tennessee's Vote

By August nineteen twenty thirty-five states had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, one short of the thirty-six required, and Tennessee voted next, where twenty-four-year-old Harry T. Burn changed his vote after reading a note from his mother. Seventy-two years after Seneca Falls, the amendment was ratified in time for that year's presidential election.

Two entries on the first American offensives in France, and the bloodiest of them.

The first American offensive.

USH2 1095 Cantigny

On May twenty-eighth, nineteen eighteen, American troops at Cantigny launched the first American offensive of the war, followed by battles from May to August at Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood and the Second Marne that repelled a German offensive. The anchor says American forces fought alongside the British and French in these battles.

The bloodiest of them.

USH2 1096 Belleau Wood

At Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood American troops fought what the anchor calls the bloodiest battles of the war for American forces, with ten thousand American casualties at Belleau Wood, one thousand eighty-seven killed in a single day. These losses came within weeks, after years of European losses on the same front.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe the wartime government's two methods, command and persuasion: the railroads taken over, food saved by appeal, and opinion shaped by Creel's committee. You can explain how the war tested civil liberties. Opposition became a crime, the Court upheld it in Schenck, and Debs went to prison. Ask what the danger was, and who decided. You can describe women's war: a million new workers, farmerettes, the Hello Girls and Red Cross nurses, the first women marines, and the Nineteenth Amendment ratified in Tennessee. You can hold both accounts of Black service, labour battalions and the Harlem Hellfighters, and describe the backlash: riots in twenty-five cities and lynchings of returning veterans. And you can explain labour's bargain: more union members, poorer real wages, and anger held back only until peace.