War and the American State, 1914–1920

1. War and the American State, 1914–1920

2. The Great War, 1914–1918 • War in Europe • The Perils of Neutrality • “Over There”

3. How and why did World War I began? • Evaluate and discuss President Wilson’s decision • to enter the war in 1917. • Why World War I was considered a “total war”. • How he war affected economic affairs and social • relationships in America? • How and why President Wilson attempted to • shape the Treaty of Versailles? • The failures of the Settlement of • 1919–1920 to achieve a lasting peace in America • and in Europe.

4. In February 1915, Germany announced that it intended to sink on sight enemy ships en route to the British Isles. On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the British passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 passengers, 128 of them U.S. citizens. American newspapers featured drawings of drowning women and children, and some editorials demanded war. Propaganda posters like this one were used to encourage military enlistment once the United States entered World War I in 1917.

5. Even as posters encouraged women to participate in war activities by buying Liberty Bonds, supporting the Red Cross, knitting socks for soldiers, or conserving food, the images rarely challenged traditional ideas of women's proper place. This is a recruitment poster for the Land Army, a voluntary organization formed to mobilize women as temporary farmworkers. Notice how it links labor on the home front to the war.

6. Images of women have been used to represent the United States since the nation was founded. Posters used female representations to give a feminine face to war aims. A beautiful woman flanked by the United States flag or dressed in "the stars and stripes" represented the patriotism of a nation at war. This poster depicts a beseeching woman wearing a cap that clearly echoes the American flag. In the backdrop is a European city with its church towers in flames, a potent reminder to Americans safe at home of the devastating war across the Atlantic.

7. Women's efforts were central to the nation's call for patriotism. In the midst of the final stages of their drive for citizenship, many women saw themselves, if not quite as regular soldiers, as members of a volunteer army that blanketed the nation in support of various wartime mobilization drives. These activities required exceptional administrative skills, and for some leisure-class women, this became full-time work. Given the eagerness with which women rushed into the public sphere to support the war, it is ironic that the majority of these images depicted traditional notions of womanhood. This poster features a female form to indicate that America's honor needed fighting men to protect it.

8. War posters traded on images of female sexuality. The saucy young woman dressed in a military uniform in this an image created by well-known artist Howard Chandler Christy, provocatively exclaims, "I Wish I Were a Man." What does this image suggest about modern notions of female sexuality emerging in the prewar years? Consider how the cross-dressed figure communicates the proper roles of men and women in wartime.

9. On occasion, war posters acknowledged women who crossed conventional gender barriers when they took jobs in war work. These images were usually issued by the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), which produced its own posters. During the war, the YWCA continued its prewar activism on behalf of young working women and distributed the poster depicted here as part of its fund-raising campaign. In keeping with YWCA literature that praised women factory workers' vital contribution to defense, this image emphasizes female strength and solidarity. Note too the graphic style of this image.

10. Women took on new jobs during the war, working as mail carriers, polic officers, drill-press operators, and farm laborers attached to the Women's Land Army. These women are riveters at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington. Black women in particular, who customarily were limited to employment as domestic servants or agricultural laborers, found that the war opened up new opportunities and better wages in industry. When the war ended, black and white women alike usually lost jobs deemed to be men's work

11. Before the war ended, some 25,000 American women made it to France, all as volunteers. Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed war the "Great Adventure,” and some women were eager to share in it. About half became nurses, where as one said, they dealt with "a sea of stretchers, a human carpet.” Women also drove ambulances, acted as social workers, and ran canteens for the Red Cross and the YMCA. One YMCA worker, Mary Baldwin, hoped that a few hours in her canteen would "make life, and even death, easier ‘out there.'” A handful of female physicians worked as contract surgeons for the U.S. army. Dr. Loy McAfee wore this uniform in France.

12. Hollywood joined in the government's efforts to work up war rage against the "brutal Huns,” as Germans were often called. In a film made for the British and French governments by America's leading filmmaker, D. W. Griffith, a hulking German is about to whip a defenseless farm woman (Lillian Gish, one of the nation's favorite stars) innocently carrying potatoes from a field. When the film premiered in Washington, D.C., in 1918, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson wrote Griffith pleading with him to cut or soften the violent whipping scene. Her plea was one of the few acts coming from the nation's capital that sought to moderate the hate campaign.

13. Nothing could make living in the trenches anything better than miserable, but a decent shave with a Gillette safety razor could offer temporary relief.

14. While trenches could be dry, rains brought mud so deep that wounded men drowned in it. By the time American doughboys arrived in Europe, troops had faced one another for more than three years, burrowed into a double line of trenches, protected by barbed wire, machine gun nests, and mortars, backed by heavy artillery. A pair of dry boots was perhaps one of the greatest comforts a soldier could experience in the trench.

15. Herbert Hoover headed the Food Administration during World War I. Sober and tireless, he led remarkably successful "Hooverizing” campaigns for "meatless” Mondays and "wheatless” Wednesdays and other means of conserving resources. Guaranteed high prices, the American heartland not only supplied the needs of U.S. citizens and armed forces but also became the breadbasket of America's allies.

16. About 16,000 Native Americans served in the U.S. armed forces during World War I. This magazine cover, entitled "The Warrior's Return" offers a romanticized reconstruction of one homecoming. The young soldier, still in uniform and presumably fresh from France, rides his painted pony to the tepee of his parents, where they proudly welcome the brave warrior. Their tepee even has a star, a national symbol that families with sons in the military displayed on their homes. The painting sought to demonstrate that all Americans, even those on the margins of national life, were sufficiently assimilated and loyal to join the national sacrifice to defeat the enemy.

17. After the triumphal parades ended, attention turned to the question of what the heroes would do at home. The Department of Labor poster tries to convey a strong image of purposefulness and prosperity by portraying a soldier in front of a booming industrial landscape. The U.S. Employment Service had little to offer veterans beyond posters, however, and unions were unprepared to cope with the massive numbers of former soldiers who needed retraining. As workplace conditions deteriorated, the largest number of strikes in the nation's history broke out in 1919.

18. American officials were adamant that all sectors of the population be reached by the propaganda campaigns that urged Americans to buybonds, conserve food, enlist, and support the war effor in countless other ways. They targeted immigrants with posters such as this one for Liberty Bonds in the hopes no only that the foreign-born would buy bonds, but in doing so they would become more Americanized and more deeply committed to their adopted home.

19. American officials were adamant that all sectors of the population be reached by the propaganda campaigns that urged Americans to buybonds, conserve food, enlist, and support the war effor in countless other ways. They targeted immigrants with posters such as this one for Liberty Bonds in the hopes no only that the foreign-born would buy bonds, but in doing so they would become more Americanized and more deeply committed to their adopted home.

20. World War I could be considered the first "modern" war. Aside from the debut of the machine gun (seen here), it also marked the advent of air forces, submarines, tanks, and chemical warfare. Casualties skyrocketed accordingly, due mostly to the new, ruthlessly efficient weaponry, but also because armies continued to use 19th century tactics like trench warfare.

21. War on the Home Front • Mobilizing Industry and the Economy • Mobilizing American Workers • Wartime Reform: Woman Suffrage and Prohibition • Promoting National Unity

22. An Unsettled Peace, 1919–1920 • The Treaty of Versailles • Racial Strife, Labor Unrest, and the Red Scare

23. War on the Home Front • Wartime Reform: Woman Suffrage and Prohibition • Promoting National Unity

25. This image shows the suffrage militants of the National Woman's Party picketing the White House during World War I. College graduates, they identified themselves by their alma maters. Though criticized by more moderate suffragists, these radical suffragists sought to embarrass President Wilson by graphically pointing out the hypocrisy of a war fought for democracy while women at home were not enfranchised.

26. Prohibition Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure or even diminish it. MARK TWAIN

27. The Anti-Saloon League of America saw conquering the alcohol problem as more than an American crusade. In 1916 at the convention of the ASL in Indianapolis Ernest Cherrington presented an address to the convention titled "The World Movement Toward Prohibition of the Liquor Traffic."

28. No beer, no vodka, no rum, no fun. Prohibition in the 1920’s was nation wide when the 18th Amendment went into affect. On January 16, 1920 the United States officially had a ban on the sale, consumption, and creation of all alcoholic beverages.

30. Promoting National Unity • Committee on Public Information headed by George Creel

31. An Unsettled Peace 1919-1920 • Treaty of Versailles • Racial Strife

32. Treaty of Versailles • 14 Points • Georges Clemenceau stated Moses only had to have 10 Commandments – Wilson has to have 14

33. Racial Strife, Labor Unrest, and the Red Scare • .

34. Mitchell Palmer