5.1 Neutrality, Entry into World War I, and the Home Front

Why 1914–1918 is a legal-history war unit

Independent OpenExamPrep teaching treats American entry into World War I as two stacked problems, not one date. The first is diplomacy and the seas: how a president who asked Americans in August 1914 to be “impartial in thought as well as in action” ended by telling Congress, on 2 April 1917, that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” The second is the home-front state: once Congress declared war on 6 April 1917, the same administration that had preached neutrality drafted men, allocated steel, managed food, and put antiwar speech in federal court. Items on this stretch punish mix-ups among Lusitania (1915), the Sussex Pledge (1916), unrestricted submarine warfare (1917), and the Zimmermann Telegram, and they punish assigning the War Industries Board, Food Administration, or Committee on Public Information to the wrong director.

The European war opened after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (28 June 1914) and the August mobilizations. Wilson issued a neutrality proclamation on 4 August 1914. Neutrality was a legal status, not an economic fact. The British surface blockade throttled American trade with the Central Powers. Exports and private loans to Britain and France soared; the House of Morgan organized Allied purchasing. German Unterseeboote answered the blockade by treating the waters around the British Isles as a war zone. A U-boat could not, in practice, visit-and-search a fast liner the way an eighteenth-century cruiser boarded a merchantman. That technological fact is the hinge of every 1915–1917 note crisis.

Lusitania, Sussex, and the broken pledge

On 7 May 1915 a German submarine sank the British Cunard liner RMS Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland. About 1,198 people died, including 128 Americans. Germany argued that the ship carried munitions—which later evidence supported in part—and that passengers had been warned by embassy notices. Wilson still demanded that Berlin abandon surprise attacks on passenger vessels. He also said the United States was “too proud to fight,” a phrase Theodore Roosevelt mocked as weakness. A second shock, the sinking of the Arabic in August 1915, produced a German promise to spare liners. The sharper diplomatic instrument was the Sussex crisis. On 24 March 1916 a U-boat torpedoed the French Channel packet Sussex, injuring Americans. Wilson threatened to break relations. On 4 May 1916 Germany issued the Sussex Pledge: no more sinking of passenger or merchant ships without warning and without providing for the safety of people on board, provided the United States pressed Britain on the blockade.

The pledge bought Wilson a peace campaign. In 1916 he ran against Republican Charles Evans Hughes as the man who “kept us out of war,” while the Preparedness movement—National Defense Act (1916), a larger navy, Plattsburgh-style training camps—hedged the bet. Peace workers, including Jane Addams and the Woman’s Peace Party, treated any naval buildup as a slide toward the trenches. Neither camp should be collapsed into the other on a stem that asks what the 1916 slogan actually claimed.

The 1917 cascade: U-boats, Mexico, and the war message

The German high command gambled that unrestricted sinking could starve Britain before American troops arrived. Berlin announced the campaign on 31 January 1917, effective 1 February. Wilson broke diplomatic relations on 3 February. In March he armed American merchant ships after a Senate filibuster—what he called a “little group of willful men”—blocked a statutory Armed Ship Bill; he then used existing authority.

The Zimmermann Telegram turned a naval quarrel into a continental threat in the public mind. On 16 January 1917 German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann instructed the minister in Mexico City, Heinrich von Eckardt, to propose an alliance if the United States entered the war: Mexico would recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and Japan might be invited in. British Room 40 intercepted and decoded the cable. Washington received it in late February; American newspapers printed it on 1 March 1917. Zimmermann admitted the text was genuine. The note did not create the U-boat crisis, but it destroyed the claim that Germany had no designs on the Western Hemisphere.

Wilson asked Congress for war on 2 April 1917, arguing that Germany’s submarine campaign was war against mankind and that American purpose was to make the world “safe for democracy.” Congress declared war on 6 April (Senate 82–6; House 373–50). Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana voted no—the same member who would vote no again in 1941. The Selective Service Act (18 May 1917) created a draft. Roughly 2.8 million men were inducted; about 4.7 million served in the army and navy altogether. This section’s job is the decision for war and the domestic machinery; the Fourteen Points and the League fight belong in 5.2.

Agencies: Baruch, Hoover, Creel

The wartime United States did not nationalize the whole economy in a socialist sense. It built coordinating boards that told private firms what to produce, what they could charge, and how to talk about the war. Learn the three names that travel together on exams.

The WIB had existed in a weaker form from July 1917; it became the “economic dictator” of textbook shorthand only after Wilson put Baruch in charge in March 1918. Hoover, already famous for Belgian relief, sold conservation as patriotism: “food will win the war.” Creel, a progressive journalist, insisted the CPI told “the facts”—while it also fed 100 percent Americanism, German-language bans in schools, sauerkraut-as-“liberty cabbage” culture war, and suspicion of hyphenated identities. The National War Labor Board (William Howard Taft and Frank P. Walsh) mediated strikes and, in exchange for a no-strike pledge, pressed firms to deal with unions. Liberty Loan drives financed the war with mass bond sales that the Four Minute Men advertised.

Home-front division of labor, 1917–1918
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Materials and prices  ->  War Industries Board (Baruch)
Calories and farms    ->  Food Administration (Hoover)
Public opinion        ->  Committee on Public Information (Creel)
Manpower              ->  Selective Service
Labor peace           ->  National War Labor Board

Espionage, Sedition, and Schenck

Legal-history items on this war sit in statute and in the Supreme Court, not only in U-boat notes. The Espionage Act (15 June 1917) made it a crime to interfere with military operations or recruitment, to cause insubordination, or to convey false reports with intent to interfere with the armed forces. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson used the law to keep socialist and antiwar papers out of the mails. The Sedition Act (16 May 1918) amended the Espionage Act and criminalized “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the form of government, the Constitution, the flag, or the military. Together they were the sharpest federal speech code since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts.

Schenck v. United States (3 March 1919) is the case to lock. Charles T. Schenck, a Socialist Party official, mailed leaflets urging men to resist the draft and invoking the Thirteenth Amendment. A unanimous Court, through Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., upheld the conviction. Holmes wrote that the First Amendment does not protect a man from “falsely shouting fire in a theatre” and that speech may be punished when it creates a “clear and present danger” of substantive evils Congress has a right to prevent. Do not confuse Schenck with later civil-liberties expansions. In Abrams v. United States (1919) Holmes and Louis Brandeis dissented and sketched a “marketplace of ideas”; the majority still affirmed convictions. Eugene V. Debs was convicted under the Espionage Act for a June 1918 Canton, Ohio, speech; he ran for president from the Atlanta penitentiary in 1920, and Warren G. Harding commuted the sentence in 1921. Industrial Workers of the World organizers and German-language editors filled other dockets. The American Protective League, a volunteer auxiliary, opened mail and reported “slackers.”

Great Migration and influenza as context

War orders plus the cutoff of European immigration created a labor vacuum in Northern packinghouses, steel mills, and railroad yards. The Great Migration—already underway—accelerated: several hundred thousand African Americans left the Jim Crow South during the war years for Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and New York. The pull was wages; the push was debt peonage, disfranchisement, and lynching. White riots answered the newcomers, notably East St. Louis (1917) and the Red Summer of 1919 (Chicago among other cities). Treat the Migration here as a wartime labor and urban fact; Harlem’s cultural flowering is Section 5.4.

The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic belongs in this section only as context. Troop trains, embarkation camps, and packed cities spread a virus that killed on the order of 675,000 people in the United States. Schools and churches closed; draft calls were disrupted. It was not an act of Congress and not a substitute for the Espionage Act on a legal-history stem. Wilson’s own illness at Paris is a footnote, not a cause of the war declaration.

Exam traps: neutrality is 1914–early 1917, not “the United States fought from August 1914.” Lusitania did not by itself produce a declaration of war. Baruch is materials, Hoover is food, Creel is propaganda—do not hand the WIB to Hoover. Schenck announces clear and present danger in a draft-leaflet case; it does not strike down the Espionage Act. The Great Migration is internal Black movement toward war jobs, not the 1924 quota law.