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CHAPTER 19 Safe for Democracy: The United States
and World War I, 1916–1920
This chapter concentrates on the history of America during World War I. It opens with a definition of Woodrow
Wilson’s concept of a moral foreign policy through what he called liberal internationalism. Promising to bring the
Progressive agenda to the world, Wilson fell short, and the war forced Americans to debate the true extent of liberty
once again. Quickly looking at the foreign policies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, the chapter
embarks on the road toward war. Wilson initially took the stance of neutrality, but when he was pushed into war, his
Fourteen Points outlined for the world his vision that this war should make the world safe for democracy. At home,
the war was sold to the American public via the Committee on Public Information. Progressives used the war to
expand their agenda, culminating in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. However, freedom of speech was
not a cause taken up by Progressives. The war also forced Americans to define who was an American. Race had
earned a legitimate place in science through eugenics, which fueled the anti-immigrant sentiment of the era. Anti-
German hysteria ran particularly high during the war, and German-Americans were forced to prove their loyalty.
Blacks, too, were asked to work in defense industries and serve in the army, only to face continued discrimination
and violence. Asking Wilson to make America safe for democracy, W. E. B. Du Bois emerged as a new leader of
the black community. Seen as an alternative to Du Bois, Marcus Garvey launched a separatist movement. The
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: American Liberal Internationalism
A. This vision, articulated by President Woodrow Wilson, rested on the conviction that economic and political
progress went hand in hand, both domestically and internationally.
II. An Era of Intervention
A. “I Took the Canal Zone”
1. Roosevelt was more active in international diplomacy than most of his predecessors.
2. Roosevelt pursued a policy of intervention in Central America.
a. Panama
B. The Roosevelt Corollary
2. Taft emphasized economic investment and loans from American banks, rather than direct military
intervention.
a. Dollar Diplomacy
C. Moral Imperialism
1. Wilson repudiated Dollar Diplomacy and promised a new foreign policy that would respect Latin
America’s independence.
3. Wilson’s moral imperialism produced more military interventions in Latin America than any president
before or since.
D. Wilson and Mexico
1. The Mexican Revolution began in 1911.
3. Mexican factions fought among themselves.
a. Pancho Villa
III. America and the Great War
A. Neutrality and Preparedness
1. War broke out in Europe in 1914.
2. The war dealt a severe blow to the optimism and self-confidence of Western civilization.
5. By the end of 1915, Wilson embarked on a policy of preparedness.
B. The Road to War
3. The Zimmermann Telegram was intercepted in 1917.
4. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) highlights Wilson’s “War Message to Congress”
(1917).
C. The Fourteen Points
2. Wilson issued the Fourteen Points in January 1918.
a. They established the agenda for the peace conference that followed the war.
3. When American troops finally arrived in Europe, they turned the tide of battle.
IV. The War at Home
A. The Progressives’ War
1. Some Progressives viewed the war as an opportunity to disseminate Progressive values around the
globe.
B. The Wartime State
1. The war created a national state with unprecedented powers and a sharply increased presence in
Americans’ everyday lives.
C. The Propaganda War
1. The Wilson administration decided that patriotism was too important to leave to the private sector.
D. “The Great Cause of Freedom”
1. The CPI couched its appeal in the Progressive language of social cooperation and expanded democracy.
2. Freedom took on new significance.
E. The Coming of Women’s Suffrage
1. America’s entry into the war threatened to tear the suffrage movement apart.
a. Jeannette Rankin opposed war.
a. Nineteenth Amendment
F. Prohibition
1. Numerous impulses flowed into the renewed campaign to ban intoxicating liquor.
2. Like the suffrage movement, prohibitionists came to see national legislation as their best strategy.
G. Liberty in Wartime
1. Randolph Bourne predicted that the war would empower not reformers, but the “least democratic forces
in American life.”
H. The Espionage and Sedition Acts
1. The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited not only spying and interfering with the draft but also “false
statements” that might impede military success.
jury before his sentencing under the Espionage Act (1918).
b. Debs ran for president in 1920while still in prison.
I. Coercive Patriotism
1. Attitudes toward the American flag became a test of patriotism.
V. Who Is an American?
A. The “Race Problem”
1. The race problem had become a subject of major public concern.
B. The “Science” of Eugenics
1. The emergence of eugenics, which studied the alleged mental characteristics of different groups of
people, gave an air of scientific expertise to anti-immigrant sentiment.
2. Eugenics held that because many social problems were caused by defective genes, they could be
eliminated by controlling reproduction.
B. Americanization and Pluralism
1. Americanization meant the creation of a more homogenous national culture.
2. A minority of Progressives questioned Americanization and insisted on respect for immigrant
subcultures.
a. Jane Addams’s Hull House
b. Who Is an American? (Primary Source document feature) focuses on Randolph Bourne’s rejection of
forced Americanization in an article, “Trans-National America,” in The Atlantic (1916).
C. The Anti-German Crusade
1. German-Americans bore the brunt of forced Americanization.
2. The use of German and expressions of German culture became targets of pro-war organizations.
D. Toward Immigration Restriction
1. The war strengthened the conviction that certain kinds of undesirable persons ought to be excluded
2. In 1917, Congress required that immigrants be literate in English or another language.
E. Groups Apart: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian-Americans
1. The war led to further growth of the Southwest’s Mexican population.
3. Even more restrictive were policies toward Asian-Americans.
a. Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907
F. The Color Line
1. The freedoms of the Progressive era did not apply to blacks.
G. Roosevelt, Wilson, and Race
1. Although Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House, he still felt
blacks were “wholly unfit for the suffrage.”
2. Wilson’s administration imposed racial segregation in federal departments in Washington, D.C.
a. The Birth of a Nation
H. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Revival of Black Protest
1. Du Bois tried to reconcile the contradiction between what he called “American freedom for whites and the
continuing subjection of Negroes.”
a. The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
i. The Declaration of Principles
3. Du Bois was a cofounder of the NAACP.
a. Bailey v. Alabama
I. Closing Ranks
1. Most black leaders saw American participation in the war as an opportunity to make real the promise of
freedom.
2. During World War I, closing ranks did not bring significant gains.
J. The Great Migration and the “Promised Land”
1. The war opened thousands of industrial jobs to black laborers for the first time, inspiring a large-scale
2. Many motives sustained the Great Migration.
K. Racial Violence, North and South
1. Dozens of blacks were killed during a 1917 riot in East St. Louis, Illinois.
2. Violence was not confined to the North.
L. The Rise of Garveyism
1. Marcus Garvey launched a separatist movement.
a. Freedom for Garveyites meant national self-determination.
VI. 1919
A. A Worldwide Upsurge
1. There was a worldwide revolutionary upsurge in 1919.
B. Upheaval in America
3. The strike wave began in January 1919 in Seattle.
C. The Great Steel Strike
1. The wartime rhetoric of economic democracy and freedom helped to inspire the era’s greatest labor
2. Steel magnates launched a concerted counterattack.
a. Associated the strikers with the IWW
D. The Red Scare
1. This was a short-lived but intense period of political intolerance inspired by the postwar strike wave and
the social tensions and fears generated by the Russian Revolution.
a. J. Edgar Hoover
3. Secretary of Labor Louis Post began releasing imprisoned immigrants and the Red Scare collapsed.
E. Wilson at Versailles
1. The Versailles Treaty did accomplish some of Wilson’s goals.
2. The Versailles Treaty was a harsh document that all but guaranteed future conflict in Europe.
F. The Wilsonian Moment
1. Wilson’s idea that government must rest on the consent of the governed and his belief in “equality of
nations” reverberated across the globe, especially among oppressed minorities and colonial peoples
seeking independence.
G. The Seeds of Wars to Come
2. A new anti-Western, anticolonial nationalism emerged in non-European nations.
3. German resentment over the terms of the peace treaty helped to fuel the rise of Adolf Hitler.
H. The Treaty Debate
1. Wilson viewed the new League of Nations as the war’s finest legacy.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• Explain liberal moral imperialism.
• How were immigrants treated during World War I? Why was there so much anti-German sentiment?
• Why did the eugenics movement arise and how did it influence American domestic and foreign policy?
• Compare the Alien and Sedition Acts issued during the Quasi War with France with the Sedition Act issued by
Wilson during World War I. Be sure to use the Voices of Freedom selections. Comment on the Supreme Court’s
ruling of “a clear and present danger” criterion.
• Discuss the limits of Wilson’s extension of democracy. Who was excluded?
• Describe the war experience for African-Americans. How did they expect America to change for them after the
war?
• Discuss the debates surrounding the Treaty of Versailles. Why did the U.S. Senate ultimately reject the treaty?
• Did World War I make the world safe for democracy? Assess the ways in which the war both enhanced and
undermined democracy in the United States.
• Discuss Wilson’s political ideology. What did he believe? To what extent did he put his beliefs into practice?
How did oppressed minorities and colonial peoples view Wilson’s political ideology?
• What were the most important themes and events that emerged in postwar American life in 1919?
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition
http://dl.lib.brown.edu/temperance/
This Brown University site includes broadsides, sheet music, pamphlets, and government publications that pertain to
temperance and Prohibition.
Red Scare
https://cnu.libguides.com/1920s/redscare
This site from Christopher Newport University provides links to a wealth of primary and secondary sources on the Red Scare.
World War I
The Price of Freedom: Americans at War
http://americanhistory.si.edu/militaryhistory/exhibition/flash.html
From the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, select a war (e.g., World War I) and enter an
exhibit that includes a movie, learning resources, statistics, a printable exhibition, maps, and time lines.
World War I Apocalypse (Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle, 5 episodes, 4 hrs., 20 mins., 2014)
www.nationalgeographic.com.au/tv/apocalypse-world-war-i/#about
This multipart documentary series provides searing color images of the war. The website by National Geographic includes the
episodes.
They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson, Warner Brothers, documentary, 1 hr., 39 mins., 2018)
Providing never-before-seen archival imagery to commemorate the anniversary of the end of the war, this documentary has
had a limited release but can be purchased for school use.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Baer, Hans. The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001.
Cooper, John Milton, Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983.
Coppozola, Christopher. Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010.
Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
McKillen, Elizabeth. “Ethnicity, Class, and Wilsonian Internationalism Reconsidered.” Diplomatic History 25, no. 4 (2001):
553–588.
Rolinson, Mary. Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920–1927. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Rosenberg, Emily. Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Smith, Norma. Jeannette Rankin: America’s Conscience. Helena: Montana Historical Society, 2002.
Sullivan, Patricia. Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: New Press, 2009.
Traxel, David. Crusader Nation: The United States in Peace and the Great War: 1898–1920. New York: Random House, 2007.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. The Class as Supreme Court: the Eugene Debs Trial
2. Research and Group Activity: The Tulsa, Oklahoma, Race Riot, 1921
This entry in the online Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture tells the story of the riot:
www.okhistory.org/publications/.
A. Discussion: Ask the students the following questions after they become familiar with the riot details:
1. Why would a harmless incident like the encounter between Rowland and Page cause such outrage? How might issues
of sex and gender help us understand the racial anxieties that transpired here?
2. The neighborhood flattened by the riots was the prosperous black business district of Greenwood. Why did Tulsa
whites target this area?
3. A number of African-American men who went to the Tulsa courthouse to protect Rowland from being lynched were
veterans of World War I. How might this experience have changed the attitude and outlook of the black community in
Tulsa, and how might this have changed the reaction of black Tulsans to white violence?
B. Research Activities:
1. Ask students to find additional resources on the Tulsa riot online and on YouTube to explore the history of the black
community in Tulsa before the riots. Ask them to assess the history of white vigilante mobs in Oklahoma in general and
Tulsa in particular. What history of black prosperity existed in this town?
2. Ask students to research the aftermath of the Tulsa riots. How did the town handle the violence? How did the federal
government respond? How did the black community recover?
3. Have students study Oklahomans’ 1996 and 2001 efforts to come to terms with the riots. Invite a discussion on whether
Oklahoma’s 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act of 2001 shows a lack of change or the progress the nation has
