The Great War and After, 1914–1919

This is Unit Eight, part three, on the end of the war, the failed peace, and the upheavals of nineteen nineteen. Part two closed at Belleau Wood, the bloodiest battles of the war for American forces, and pointed to the largest American offensive. Carry one measure through this part: judge the peace by its own stated terms. Wilson promised self-determination and a League to keep the peace. Watch what the treaty did with the first, and what the Senate did with the second. Then ask whose failure the League's defeat was, and the course answers with both halves. By the end you will be able to describe the end of the fighting and its human cost. To measure the treaty against the Fourteen Points. To explain whether the League's defeat was Wilson's failure. To compare the war's toll with the pandemic's. And to describe the upheavals of nineteen nineteen.

Three entries on the end of the fighting: the largest American offensive, the armistice, and the cost.

The largest American offensive.

USH2 1097 The Meuse-Argonne

The Meuse-Argonne offensive of September to November nineteen eighteen sent more than one million American troops into nearly forty days of battle. The Yawp notes that influenza struck hardest during the offensive, weakening both the American and German armies at the height of the fighting.

The end of the fighting.

USH2 1098 The Armistice

The fighting ended with the armistice of November eleventh, nineteen eighteen, less than two years after the United States entered the war. American troops had fought in strength for only months. Their arrival, the anchor says, helped turn back the German offensive of nineteen eighteen.

What the war cost in lives.

USH2 1099 The Human Cost

More than one hundred fifteen thousand American soldiers died in the war, the Yawp says, and the anchor counts two hundred six thousand wounded. The Yawp states that influenza killed more soldiers than battle did. Deaths and battle deaths are different counts, and this course keeps them apart.

Four entries on the peace: Wilson's plan, the conference, the treaty's terms, and how the treaty measured against the plan.

Wilson's plan for the peace.

USH2 1100 The Fourteen Points

On January eighth, nineteen eighteen, Wilson set out fourteen points as a blueprint for peace, the National Archives records: self-determination and a League of Nations, beside open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, free trade and no more secret treaties. The points were a programme drafted before victory, and the peace conference would test them against the victors' demands.

The conference that made the peace.

USH2 1101 The Big Four

At the Paris peace conference Wilson negotiated with David Lloyd George of Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France and Vittorio Orlando of Italy, four leaders redrawing the map of Europe and the Middle East. Wilson's allies wanted security and compensation more than his principles. The treaty shows which prevailed.

The treaty's terms.

USH2 1102 The Treaty's Terms

The Treaty of Versailles required Germany to pay reparations of more than thirty-three billion dollars and to accept a war guilt clause, gave France disputed border lands, and redistributed Germany's colonies. Former Ottoman lands, such as Iraq and Palestine, became new states under French and British rule, which the anchor calls quasi-colonial.

How the treaty measured against Wilson's promise.

USH2 1103 Self-Determination and Mandates

The Fourteen Points promised self-determination, the right of peoples to choose their own governments. The treaty that ended the war placed former Ottoman lands such as Iraq and Palestine under the quasi-colonial rule of France and Britain, and redistributed Germany's colonies among the victors. The principle and the settlement came from the same peace process, a year apart, and Wilson sat at the table that drew the new borders. The confusion to avoid is taking the Fourteen Points as a description of the peace. They were Wilson's programme; the treaty was a negotiation among victors who wanted security and compensation. Hold both, and the peace becomes legible as a failure measured by its own stated terms.

Five entries on the League: its central promise, the senator who opposed it, Wilson's collapse, the Senate's votes, and whose failure the defeat was.

The League and its central promise.

USH2 1104 Article X

The treaty created a League of Nations, and its Article X bound every member to defend all other members against military threats, small nations protected by the combined power of the large. The anchor says this article would prove the undoing of Wilson's dream, because critics feared it would drag the United States into other nations' wars.

The senator who led the opposition.

USH2 1105 Lodge's Reservations

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, issued fourteen reservations to the treaty, most of them concerning the League, fearing that Article X would commit American troops to others' conflicts. The anchor calls Lodge an isolationist; the Yawp says he was never one, and wanted the country free to handle its problems its own way.

Wilson's appeal to the public.

USH2 1106 Wilson's Tour and Stroke

Wilson took his case for the League to the people in a cross-country speaking tour, but collapsed after an event on September twenty-fifth, nineteen nineteen. A debilitating stroke left Edith Wilson acting, in the anchor's words, as de facto president for about six months. The treaty's chief advocate could no longer lead the fight for it.

The Senate's votes.

USH2 1107 The Senate Rejects the Treaty

The Senate rejected the treaty in November nineteen nineteen, and a second vote with reservations in March nineteen twenty fell short of the two-thirds required. The United States never ratified Versailles and never joined the League. The Yawp says the country had joined Europe in war but abandoned it in peace.

Whether the defeat was Wilson's failure.

USH2 1108 Whether the League's Defeat Was Wilson's Failure

The sources leave this open. The case against Wilson: he took the fight to a speaking tour rather than to the Senate, and his collapse left the treaty without its champion. The case for structural opposition: Lodge chaired the committee that controlled ratification, he issued fourteen reservations centred on the League, and the Yawp says Wilson could not match Lodge's influence in the Senate. The sources disagree even about Lodge, whom the anchor calls an isolationist and the Yawp says was never one. Critics feared Article X from both directions: some that it would drag the country into war, others, the anchor says, that it would restrain American freedom of action. Two misreadings sit on either side. One blames Wilson's stubbornness alone, and forgets that Lodge's committee could block the treaty whatever Wilson did. The other blames the Senate alone, and forgets that no version of the treaty ever gathered two-thirds. The reservations are evidence for both: a price Wilson would not pay, and a barrier he could not remove. The result is agreed: the United States never joined the League it had proposed. Unit twelve returns to the idea, with the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations.

Two entries on the pandemic that killed more Americans than the war, and on keeping the two tolls together.

The pandemic.

USH2 1109 The Influenza Pandemic

The influenza pandemic of nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen made more than twenty million Americans ill and killed six hundred seventy-five thousand; the Yawp places an early outbreak at Camp Funston, Kansas, one of the army's largest training camps, in the spring of nineteen eighteen. Worldwide about five hundred million were infected and an estimated fifty million died, the anchor says.

How its toll compares with the war's.

USH2 1110 Two Death Tolls

Two figures belong in the same entry. More than one hundred fifteen thousand American soldiers died in the war. Six hundred seventy-five thousand Americans died of influenza in the same months. The Yawp adds that among soldiers more died of influenza than of combat, and that the epidemic struck hardest during the Meuse-Argonne offensive. The virus spread through fourteen of the largest training camps between March and May nineteen eighteen, and infected soldiers carried it to France on troop transports. The familiar version of nineteen eighteen is a war story. The larger killer that year was a disease, and the war helped spread it.

Five entries on nineteen nineteen: record strikes, the Red Scare that answered them, deportations, and the Red Summer.

The strikes of nineteen nineteen.

USH2 1111 The Strike Wave of 1919

In nineteen nineteen more than four million workers joined nearly three thousand strikes, both records in all of American history, as workers freed from the no-strike pledge struck for better hours and wages. The cost of living had doubled since nineteen sixteen, the anchor says, and it ties the strikes to the Red Scare that followed.

The Red Scare.

USH2 1112 The Palmer Raids

Letter bombs turned up in a New York post office in nineteen nineteen, and on June second eight bombs exploded at once, one at Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's house. From November, raids in twelve cities, organised by the young J. Edgar Hoover, arrested four thousand alleged radicals, held for weeks in overcrowded cells, the anchor says.

The ship that carried some of them away.

USH2 1113 The Soviet Ark

Almost two hundred fifty of those arrested in the raids were deported on a ship the press called the Soviet Ark; Digital History says Emma Goldman sailed with two hundred forty-six men and two other women. Deportation fell on immigrants, a target that unit nine's immigration quotas would widen.

The racial violence of the same year.

USH2 1114 The Red Summer

In the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen race riots broke out in at least twenty-five cities, including Chicago and Washington, D.C., the Yawp says, and the anchor counts more than two hundred fifty dead across the riots. The Yawp says the riots grew from wartime racial tensions in the cities the migrants had reached.

The worst of them.

USH2 1115 Chicago, 1919

In Chicago the riot began when a Black boy was stoned at a segregated beach, and violence spread across the city until twenty-three Black and fifteen White Chicagoans had been killed. Unit nine's Claude McKay wrote his poem If We Must Die in response to the Red Summer.

Two entries on how the era closed: an election promising normalcy, and a war ended by resolution.

The election that closed the era.

USH2 1116 A Return to Normalcy

In nineteen twenty the Republican Warren G. Harding won the presidency promising a return to normalcy after war, strikes and riots, winning four hundred four electoral votes to one hundred twenty-seven. The anchor calls it the largest majority any two-party contest had yet produced. Wilson, disabled, could not run.

How the war formally ended.

USH2 1117 Peace by Resolution

Because the Senate never ratified the Treaty of Versailles, the United States remained technically at war with Germany until nineteen twenty-one, when Congress quietly passed the Knox-Porter Resolution to end the war formally. The nation that proposed the League ended its war by resolution, outside the treaty.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe the end of the fighting, the Meuse-Argonne and the armistice, and its cost: more than one hundred fifteen thousand soldiers dead, with deaths and battle deaths kept apart. You can measure the treaty against the Fourteen Points: self-determination promised, and former Ottoman lands placed under quasi-colonial rule. You can explain whether the League's defeat was Wilson's failure. The reservations were a price Wilson would not pay and a barrier he could not remove. You can compare the two tolls: more than one hundred fifteen thousand soldiers, and six hundred seventy-five thousand Americans dead of influenza. And you can describe nineteen nineteen: four million on strike, the Palmer raids and the Soviet Ark, and the Red Summer.