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 The-
odore 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 ar-
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.
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.
2. When civil war broke out in Mexico, Wilson ordered American troops to land at Veracruz.
III. America and the Great War
A. Neutrality and Preparedness
2. The war dealt a severe blow to the optimism and self-confidence of Western civilization.
4. Wilson proclaimed American neutrality, but American commerce and shipping were soon swept into the conflict.
a. Lusitania
B. The Road to War
1. Wilson won reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”
3. The Zimmermann Telegram was intercepted in 1917.
C. The Fourteen Points
1. Russia pulled out of the war after the Lenin Revolution in 1917.
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
2. The Committee on Public Information (CPI) was created.
D. “The Great Cause of Freedom”
1. The CPI couched its appeal in the Progressive language of social cooperation and expanded democracy.
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.
3. The combined efforts of women during the war won them suffrage.
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
2. Eugene V. Debs was convicted in 1918 under the Espionage Act for delivering an anti–war speech.
a. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) showcases a portion of Debs’s speech to the jury before his
I. Coercive Patriotism
1. Attitudes toward the American flag became a test of patriotism.
3. The American Protective League (APL) helped the Justice Department identify radicals and critics of the war.
a. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
i. Bisbee, Arizona, copper miners
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
2. Eugenics held that because many social problems were caused by defective genes, they could be eliminated by controlling
reproduction.
4. World War I accelerated the eugenics movement.
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
C. The Anti-German Crusade
1. German-Americans bore the brunt of forced Americanization.
D. Toward Immigration Restriction
1. The war strengthened the conviction that certain kinds of undesirable persons ought to be excluded altogether.
a. IQ test introduced in 1916
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.
F. The Color Line
1. The freedoms of the Progressive era did not apply to blacks.
G. Roosevelt, Wilson, and Race
2. Wilson’s administration imposed racial segregation in federal departments in Washington, D.C.
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
2. In some ways, Du Bois was a typical Progressive who believed that investigation, exposure, and education would lead to
solutions for social problems.
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.
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 migration from
2. Many motives sustained the Great Migration.
K. Racial Violence, North and South
2. Violence was not confined to the North.
L. The Rise of Garveyism
1. Marcus Garvey launched a separatist movement.
VI. 1919
A. A Worldwide Upsurge
B. Upheaval in America
1. In the United States, 1919 also witnessed unprecedented turmoil.
3. The strike wave began in January 1919 in Seattle.
C. The Great Steel Strike
2. Steel magnates launched a concerted counterattack.
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.
2. In November 1919 and January 1920, Attorney General Palmer dispatched federal agents to raid the offices of radical and
labor organizations throughout the country.
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.
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
1. Du Bois concluded that Wilson had not meant to include black Americans or the colonial peoples of the world in his
democratic vision.
3. German resentment over the terms of the peace treaty helped to fuel the rise of Adolf Hitler.
H. The Treaty Debate
2. Opponents viewed the league as a threat designed to deprive the country of its freedom of action.
3. On its own terms, the war to make the world safe for democracy failed.
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
• 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?
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition
League of Nations
Marcus Garvey
Panama Canal
Red Scare
World War I
The Price of Freedom: Americans at War
World War I Apocalypse (Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle, 5 episodes, 4 hrs., 20 mins., 2014)
They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson, Warner Brothers, documentary, 1 hr., 39 mins., 2018)
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.
Ellis, Mark. “ ‘Closing Ranks’ and ‘Seeking Honors’: W. E. B. Du Bois in World War I.” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992): 96–124.
Greene, Julie. The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Hartfield, Claire. A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919. New York: Clarion Books, 2018.
Jensen, Kimberly. Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Keene, Jennifer. The United States and the First World War. New York: Longman, 2000.
Keith, Jeanette. Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004.
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?
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?
C. Group Activity:
Divide the class into groups and ask them to imagine they are an Oklahoma state commission assigned with the responsibility of identifying