World War I

To the American public of 1914, the outbreak of war in Europe came as a shock. By 1915 US industry, which had been mildly depressed, was prospering again with munitions orders from the Western Allies.

In February 1915, German military leaders announced that they would attack all merchant shipping on the waters around the British isles. President Wilson warned Germany that the United States would hold it “to a strict accountability” for “property endangered or lives lost.” The old rules of sea warfare required giving the enemy ship a chance to get its crew and passengers into lifeboats, but the German U-boats were vulnerable to small-caliber deck guns. The President, in spite of pressure from the pacifists to go easy, would continue to hold Germany responsible for loss of life and property, thus preparing the ground that should America enter the war, if would be on the Allied side.

On May 7, 1915, the great ocean-going British passenger ship Lusitania was sunk without warning, losing 1198 of its 1924 passengers. Among them were 114 Americans.

On March 24, 1916, German U-boats sank the French vessel Sussex. The ship was unarmed and 3 Americans lost their lives. President Wilson issued an ultimatum stating that unless Germany abandoned its methods of submarine warfare, the US would break off diplomatic relations. Germany agreed, and Wilson won reelection under his party’s slogan: “He kept us out of war.”

On January 31, 1917, Germany declared that it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare. Neutral ships, armed or unarmed, sailing into a German war zone, would be attacked without warning. By April 3, 1917, US vessels had been sunk and Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war. By October 1918, on the eve of Allied victory, a US army of over 1,750,000 soldiers had been deployed in France.

The US Navy helped the British break the submarine blockade and on land General John J. Pershing played an important role. In November, for example, American forces took an important part in the vast Meuse-Argonne offensive, which cracked Germany’s vaunted Hindenburg Line.

On November 11, 1918, after a month of negotiations, German government signed the armistice treaty in Compiegne. The war cost America $41,755,000,000; 130,174 deaths and 203,460 wounded.

In December 1918, Wilson sailed for Europe as head of delegation to the Peace Conference. On June 28, 1919, the Versailles Treaty was signed. Wilson’s idea of creating an association of nations – the League of Nations – approved by the Conference was rejected by his own country.

The transition from war to peace was tumultuous. A massive influenza epidemic in Europe (1917) broke out in the United States in the spring of 1918 claiming the lives of more than half-a-million Americans.

The immediate economic boom right after the war returned to normal which raised the dissatisfaction among the workers as the cost of living rose.

(Yet the greatest national concern became the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia. Americans became fearful that, just as small faction had seized power in Russia, so could a similar group take over the United States. (In August 1918, 10,000 Americans joined Japan in occupying Vladivostok on the Pacific, and some of Siberia. That would drag the Americans into the internal affairs of Russia as they sided with the White Russians in the Archangel-Murmansk campaign lasting until May 1919).

Attorney General A. Michell Palmer set up a new office of general intelligence within the Justice Department, and appointed J. Edgar Hoover as its head.

In the presidential election of 1920, women for the first time voted for a presidential candidate. (This right was given to them by the 19^th Amendment of 1919).

Government policy during the 1920s was conservative. It created the most favorable conditions for US industry; started a program of tax cuts. Private business received substantial encouragement – construction loans, profitable mail-carrying contracts and other indirect subsidies.

Unfortunately, farmers with the abrupt end of wartime demand, fell into sharp decline. The main reason for the depression in American agriculture was the loss of foreign markets.

In these years US immigration policy changed significantly. Between 1900 and 1915 more than 13 million people came to the United States. Many of them were Jewish or Catholic and it worried older Americans, predominately Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. As a result, Ku Klux Klan emerged calling for “100-percent Americanism”. It campaigned against Catholics, Jews and immigrants as well as African Americans. The Immigration Quota Law of 1924 and a 1929 act limited the annual number of immigrants to 150,000.

In 1919, the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Its intention was to eliminate the saloon and the drunkard from American society, but instead served to create thousands of illegal drinking places (“speakeasies”) and a new profitable form of criminal activity – the transportation of liquor, known as “bootlegging”. Prohibition was repealed in 1933.

The Great Depression.

In October 1929 the stock market crashed. The October 24 was labeled as “Black Thursday”. Wealthy investors such as J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller tried to prop up the market by buying, but they could not check its fall. By 1933 the value of stock on the New York Stock Exchange was less than a fifth of what it had been at its peak in 1929. Business houses closed their doors, factories shut down and banks failed. Farm income fell some 50%. By 1932 approximately one out of every four Americans was unemployed.

The core of the problem was the immense disparity between the country’s productive capacity and the ability of people to consume. Technical innovations during and after the war raised the output of industry beyond the purchasing capacity of American consumers.

Herbert Hoover who had become President eight months before the stock market crash struggled tirelessly, but ineffectively, to set the wheels of industry in motion again (a lot derivations were made: “hooverize”, “hooverblanket”, “hooverville”). Hoover relied on natural processes of recovery, while his opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, was ready to use the federal government’s authority for bold experimental remedies.

On November 8, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the election by 22,809,638 votes to Hoover’s 15,758,910 (electoral college vote: Roosevelt – 472, Hoover – 59). The United States was about to enter a new era of economic and political change.