13.1 America Becomes a World Power and the World War I Era

13.1 The United States in the World War I Era

When World War I erupted in Europe in August 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that the United States must remain "neutral in fact as well as in name, impartial in thought as well as in action." Rooted in George Washington's Farewell Address and the Monroe Doctrine, American isolationism reflected a deep-seated reluctance to become entangled in European dynastic rivalries. However, over the course of thirty-two months, economic interconnections, strategic realities, and escalating maritime warfare systematically dismantled American neutrality, drawing the United States into its first global military conflict.

Prelude: The United States Becomes a World Power (1890s–1917)

America entered World War I as a country that had already acquired an overseas empire. Understanding this expansion explains the Roosevelt Corollary, the Panama Canal, and why Latin American and Asian policy looked so different from Wilson's neutral stance in Europe.

Motives for Expansion

• Sea Power: Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) argued that great nations needed a strong navy, coaling stations, and colonies.
• Markets and the Closed Frontier: Business leaders sought foreign markets for industrial surpluses, and some writers linked the 1890 "closing" of the frontier to a need for new outlets.
• Ideology: Social Darwinism, Anglo-Saxon racial theories, and missionary zeal (Josiah Strong's Our Country, 1885) framed expansion as destiny.

Hawaii

American sugar planters, backed by U.S. Marines from a visiting warship, overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in January 1893. President Cleveland opposed annexation, but Congress annexed Hawaii by joint resolution in July 1898 during the war with Spain. Hawaii became a territory in 1900 and the 50th state in 1959; in 1993 Congress formally apologized for the overthrow.

The Spanish-American War (April–August 1898)

• Causes: Cuba's independence war against Spain (from 1895), sensational "yellow journalism" by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the insulting de Lôme letter, and the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor (February 15, 1898). The Teller Amendment pledged that the United States would not annex Cuba.
• Campaigns: Commodore George Dewey destroyed Spain's Pacific fleet at Manila Bay (May 1, 1898); Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders and Black "Buffalo Soldiers" fought at San Juan and Kettle Hills in Cuba (July 1, 1898). John Hay, then ambassador to Britain and soon Secretary of State, called it "a splendid little war."
• Treaty of Paris (December 1898): Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines (for $20 million) and gave up Cuba.
• Aftermath: The Platt Amendment (1901) let the United States intervene in Cuba and lease Guantánamo Bay. Filipino nationalists under Emilio Aguinaldo fought the Philippine–American War (1899–1902, with resistance continuing afterward), which cost thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Filipino lives. The Anti-Imperialist League (Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Jane Addams) argued that ruling colonies without consent betrayed the Declaration of Independence. In the Insular Cases (1901), the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not fully apply in "unincorporated" territories; the Jones Act of 1917 made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens.

Asia and Latin America

• Open Door Notes (1899–1900): Hay asked the powers to respect equal trading rights and China's territorial integrity.
• Panama Canal: When Colombia rejected a canal treaty, Roosevelt backed Panama's 1903 revolt, signed the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, and the canal opened on August 15, 1914.
• Roosevelt Corollary (1904): Claimed a U.S. "international police power" in the Western Hemisphere to prevent European intervention, leading to customs control in the Dominican Republic.
• Dollar Diplomacy and Moral Diplomacy: Taft encouraged investment backed by the government; Wilson promised a moral foreign policy yet sent troops to Veracruz, Mexico (1914), occupied Haiti (1915–1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), and ordered General John J. Pershing's Punitive Expedition into Mexico (1916–1917) after Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico.

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The Breakdown of Neutrality and the Road to Intervention (1914–1917)

Maintaining genuine neutrality proved impossible given Britain's command of the Atlantic and American economic interests:

• The British Naval Blockade: Great Britain declared the entire North Sea a military zone, mined international shipping channels, intercepted neutral vessels, and expanded the definition of contraband to include foodstuffs and raw materials bound for Germany. While the Wilson administration filed formal diplomatic protests, American exporters complied with British restrictions to avoid vessel confiscations.
• Economic Ties to the Allies: American neutrality was heavily tilted toward the Allied powers (Great Britain, France, and Russia) from the outset. Between 1914 and 1916, American trade with the Allies jumped fourfold from $825 million to $3.2 billion, while trade with Germany plummeted from $170 million to barely $1 million due to the British blockade. Furthermore, Wall Street investment banking houses, led by J.P. Morgan and Company, extended over $2.3 billion in commercial credit and war loans to Allied governments, compared to only $27 million to the Central Powers. A German victory would have threatened the solvency of the American financial system.
• German Unrestricted Submarine Warfare: Lacking surface naval parity, Germany deployed the Unterseeboot (U-boat) to interdict Allied shipping. Unlike conventional cruisers that adhered to international maritime prize law—stopping merchant ships, searching for contraband, and ensuring the safety of crews and passengers before scuttling—submarines relied on stealth and struck without warning.
  • The Sinking of the Lusitania (May 7, 1915): A German submarine torpedoed the British Cunard passenger liner RMS Lusitania off the Irish coast. The vessel sank in eighteen minutes, killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. Although the ship's cargo included about 4,200 cases of rifle cartridges, American public opinion was deeply inflamed. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, committed to strict pacifist neutrality, resigned when Wilson dispatched sharp diplomatic ultimatums rather than barring American citizens from traveling on belligerent vessels.
  • The Sussex Pledge (May 1916): After a German U-boat torpedoed the unarmed French passenger ferry Sussex, injuring several Americans, Wilson threatened to sever diplomatic relations. Germany relented by issuing the Sussex Pledge, promising that submarines would not sink passenger or merchant ships without warning and providing for the safety of passengers, conditioned on the United States compelling Britain to respect maritime law.
• Wilson's Reelection and the "Peace Without Victory" Ideal (1916–1917): Wilson won reelection in November 1916 running under the popular slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War." In January 1917, Wilson addressed the Senate, calling for a negotiated "peace without victory" grounded in democratic self-determination, freedom of the seas, and collective security.
• The German Gamble and Resumption of Submarine Warfare: Desperate to break the British blockade and starve Britain into submission before American industrial power could mobilize, the German High Command announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against all merchant shipping in European waters beginning February 1, 1917. Wilson immediately severed diplomatic ties.
• The Zimmermann Telegram (March 1917): British naval intelligence intercepted and decrypted a coded telegram sent by German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German minister in Mexico. The message proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico if the United States entered the war; in exchange, Germany promised financial aid and pledged to assist Mexico in reconquering its "lost territory" in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Published in the American press on March 1, 1917, the dispatch generated overwhelming national outrage.
• Declaration of War (April 1917): Following the sinking of five unarmed American merchant ships by German U-boats and the Russian Revolution in March (which toppled Czar Nicholas II, briefly enabling Wilson to claim the Allies were fighting for pure democracy), Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917. Wilson framed American intervention in progressive, moralistic terms, declaring: "The world must be made safe for democracy." Congress declared war on April 6, 1917, with six senators and fifty representatives voting in opposition.

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Home Front Mobilization and the Total War Economy

World War I required an unprecedented expansion of federal administrative authority over economic, social, and cultural life:

Industrial and Agricultural Bureaucracies

• Selective Service Act (May 1917): Unlike the Civil War draft, which permitted wealthy men to hire substitutes, the 1917 statute required all men between ages 21 and 30 (later expanded to 18–45) to register. Run by local civilian draft boards, the lottery system registered 24 million men and inducted 2.8 million into the armed services without major domestic violence.
• War Industries Board (WIB): Reorganized in March 1918 under Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the WIB exercised sweeping control over manufacturing. It allocated scarce raw materials, standardized product specifications (such as eliminating steel from women's corsets to build destroyers), established production priorities, and fixed prices on industrial goods.
• Food Administration: Directed by Herbert Hoover, who had achieved international fame organizing Belgian relief, the agency relied on voluntary compliance and patriotic propaganda rather than mandatory rationing. Hoover popularized "Hooverizing" through "Wheatless Wednesdays," "Meatless Mondays," and "Porkless Saturdays," encouraging the planting of "Victory Gardens." By setting guaranteed high floor prices for wheat and hogs, agricultural output surged, allowing the U.S. to feed Allied civilian populations and armies.
• National War Labor Board (NWLB): Co-chaired by former President William Howard Taft and labor attorney Frank P. Walsh, the NWLB mediated industrial disputes to prevent strikes that could cripple wartime production. In exchange for a no-strike pledge, the board pressured employers to grant the eight-hour workday, equal pay for women doing equal work, and the right to collective bargaining. Consequently, membership in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), led by Samuel Gompers, grew from 2 million to over 3.2 million.

Demographic and Social Transformations

• The Great Migration: The wartime economic boom coincided with an acute industrial labor shortage caused by European immigration drying up and millions of young men entering uniform. Northern factory recruiters traveled south, sparking the first major wave of the Great Migration (1916–1930). Over 500,000 African Americans fled the rural Jim Crow South for industrial centers such as Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and New York. While escaping sharecropping, disenfranchisement, and racial terror, Black migrants encountered de facto housing segregation, employment discrimination, and virulent racial friction, culminating in violent urban race riots, including the East St. Louis Riot (1917) and the nationwide bloodshed of the Red Summer of 1919.
• Women in the War Effort: Over one million women entered the paid labor force for the first time, taking industrial jobs in munitions factories, rail yards, and steel mills. Tens of thousands served overseas as nurses, ambulance drivers, and telephone operators with the military. This visible economic contribution provided decisive political momentum for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (ratified in 1920), which Wilson publicly endorsed as a "vital war measure."

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Civil Liberties, Propaganda, and the Suppression of Dissent

To manufacture national unity, the federal government waged an aggressive campaign against anti-war dissent and cultural pluralism:

• Committee on Public Information (CPI): Directed by progressive journalist George Creel, the CPI deployed four-minute men (75,000 volunteers who gave brief patriotic speeches in movie theaters and churches), millions of pamphlets, and vivid recruitment posters (such as James Montgomery Flagg's "I Want You for U.S. Army"). The agency fostered hyper-patriotism that rapidly degenerated into virulent anti-German hysteria: German-language books were burned, German instruction was banned in public schools, German-sounding street names were altered, and German foods were renamed (sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage"; dachshunds became "liberty pups").
• The Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918: The Espionage Act imposed fines up to $10,000 and prison terms up to twenty years for aiding the enemy, obstructing military recruitment, or causing insubordination in the armed forces, while empowering the Postmaster General to ban "subversive" publications from the mail. The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to utter, print, or publish any "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the U.S. government, Constitution, flag, or military uniform. Federal authorities prosecuted over 2,000 individuals, targeting radical labor unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Socialist Party. Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for delivering an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio.
• Schenck v. United States (1919): Charles Schenck, General Secretary of the Socialist Party of America, printed and mailed 15,000 pamphlets to draftees arguing that conscription was unconstitutional under the Thirteenth Amendment and urging peaceful resistance. Convicted under the Espionage Act, Schenck appealed, asserting his First Amendment free speech rights. In a unanimous ruling, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. affirmed the conviction, establishing the landmark "clear and present danger" doctrine:

  "The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured..." Holmes introduced the enduring legal analogy that the First Amendment does not protect a person who falsely shouts "fire!" in a crowded theater, causing a panic.

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The American Expeditionary Forces and the Defeat of Germany

• General John J. Pershing and the AEF: When the United States declared war, its standing army ranked seventeenth in the world. General John J. Pershing, appointed commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), firmly resisted British and French demands to integrate American soldiers as piecemeal replacements into existing European units, insisting on an independent American fighting force operating along its own designated sector of the front.
• African American Soldiers: Approximately 370,000 African Americans served in the military, stationed in strictly segregated units commanded almost exclusively by white officers, with the vast majority relegated to non-combat labor and stevedore battalions. However, the 369th Infantry Regiment (the "Harlem Hellfighters") was assigned directly to the French Army. Spending 191 days continuously in the frontline trenches—longer than any other American unit—the regiment never yielded a foot of ground, and the French government awarded the regiment the Croix de Guerre, with 171 of its members also receiving individual decorations.
• The Turning Tide on the Western Front (1918): Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), taking Russia out of the war and allowing Germany to transfer dozens of divisions to the Western Front for a massive Spring Offensive. Fresh American troops arrived just in time to plug gaps, blunting the German advance at the Battles of Cantigny, Château-Thierry, and Belleau Wood.
• The Meuse-Argonne Offensive (September–November 1918): The largest and deadliest operation in U.S. military history up to that point, the Meuse-Argonne campaign involved 1.2 million American soldiers driving through rugged terrain to sever the primary German rail network at Sedan. Suffering over 26,000 deaths and 95,000 wounded, the relentless American pressure broke German defensive lines. Facing impending military collapse, domestic revolution, and starvation, Germany signed an Armistice on November 11, 1918 (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).

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The Versailles Peace Conference and the League of Nations Battle

• Wilson's Fourteen Points (January 1918): Wilson's blueprint for a just and lasting peace rested on progressive idealism: open diplomacy ("open covenants openly arrived at"), freedom of the seas, free trade, international disarmament, democratic adjustment of colonial claims, national self-determination for ethnic groups in Central and Eastern Europe, and his crowning Fourteenth Point: a general association of nations (the League of Nations) to guarantee political independence and territorial integrity through collective security.
• The Paris Peace Conference (1919): The conference was dominated by the "Big Four": Wilson (United States), David Lloyd George (Great Britain), Georges Clemenceau (France), and Vittorio Orlando (Italy). Clemenceau and Lloyd George, having lost millions of citizens and bankrupting their treasuries, sought retribution and security rather than idealistic reconciliation. Wilson was forced to compromise on self-determination and disarmament in order to preserve the Covenant of the League of Nations as the centerpiece of the Treaty of Versailles. The final treaty imposed crippling economic reparations ($33 billion) on Germany, demilitarized the Rhineland, stripped Germany of all colonies, and forced Germany to accept sole moral responsibility under Article 231 (the "War Guilt Clause").

The Senate Battle and Rejection of the Treaty

Under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Senate must ratify treaties by a two-thirds majority. Wilson alienated congressional Republicans by failing to include a single Republican senator or prominent party leader in his peace delegation. In the Senate, three distinct factions emerged:

Senate Factions on the Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations

• The Impasse and Wilson's Collapse: Senator Lodge deliberately stalled the treaty in committee, reading all 264 pages aloud and holding extensive public hearings. In September 1919, an exhausted Wilson bypassed the Senate, embarking on a grueling 8,000-mile nationwide whistle-stop train tour to rally public opinion. After delivering a passionate address in Pueblo, Colorado, Wilson collapsed from physical exhaustion. Days later in Washington, he suffered a catastrophic stroke that left him partially paralyzed and isolated in the White House. Managed by his wife Edith Wilson, the president adamantly refused to accept Lodge's reservations. In November 1919 and March 1920, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles. The United States never joined the League of Nations, concluded a separate peace with Germany in 1921, and retreated into interwar diplomatic isolationism.