US.29 Analyze the aims and negotiating roles of world leaders, including Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and the causes and effects of the United States’ rejection of the League of Nations on world politics. (H, P)
US.30 Analyze the political, economic, and social ramifications of World War I on the home front, including the role played by women and minorities, voluntary rationing, the Creel Committee, opposition by conscientious objectors, and the case of Schenck v. United States. (C, E, H, P)
Lesson 19. (US.29,30) World War I: Homefront & Aftermath
a. Women and Minorities in the War
b. Volunteer Rationing
c. The Creel Committee
d. Opposition to the War
e. Schenck v. US
f. Wilson's 14 Points & the Treaty of Versailles
g. League of Nations
During the war, large numbers of women were recruited to work jobs vacated by men who had gone to fight in the war. New jobs were also created as part of the war effort, for example in ammunition factories. Minorities, including African Americans and Hispanic Americans were also recruited to work in these factories. During this time many employers either overlooked or completely abolished their former racist hiring practices.
The Committee on Public Information (1917-1919), was an independent agency of the US government that was created to influence public opinion to support US participation in World War I.
In just over 26 months, from April 14, 1917, to June 30, 1919, it used every medium available to create enthusiasm for the war effort and to enlist public support against the foreign and perceived domestic attempts to stop America's participation in the war. It mainly used propaganda to accomplish its goals.
Pacifism is a belief that violence, even in self-defense, is unjustifiable under any conditions and that negotiation is preferable to war as a means of solving disputes. In the First World War pacifists became known as conscientious objectors.
Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), is a United States Supreme Court case concerning enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917 during World War I.
A unanimous Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed fliers to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense.
The First Amendment did not alter the well-established law in cases where the attempt was made through expressions that would be protected in other circumstances. In this opinion, Holmes said that expressions which in the circumstances were intended to result in a crime, and posed a "clear and present danger" of succeeding, could be punished.
The Court did not continue to follow this reasoning to uphold a series of convictions arising out of prosecutions during wartime, but Holmes began to dissent in the case of Abrams v. United States, insisting that the Court had departed from the standard he had crafted for them, and had begun to allow punishment for ideas. But the Court has set another line of precedents to govern cases in which the constitutionality of a statute is challenged on its face.
In 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act. It made it a crime to interfere with the induction of soldiers or to knowingly refuse the draft. Together with the Sedition Act of 1918, it became a crime to speak out, write, or engage in any activity contradictory to the government's war efforts.
Many Socialists, such as Eugene Debs, and pacifists viewed as problematic by the government, spoke out against the war and were imprisoned. Participation in the war was viewed as an act of patriotism.
Nearly a year before World War I was over, President Woodrow Wilson had already come up with a peace treaty plan called the “14 Points." The Fourteen Points was a statement of principles for peace that Wilson used during peace negotiations to end World War I. Wilson waited until the end of the war to introduce his 14 points.
The road to peace began on October 4, 1918, when the German government requested an armistice. An armistice is an end to fighting. The war ended when the armistice went into effect on November 11, 1918, at 11 AM, “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month."
President Wilson was ready to introduce his 14 Points, which included the right to self-rule, free trade, and free access to the seas by all nations. Essential to the Fourteen Points was an international peace-keeping body, an association of nations., that would be known as the League of Nations.
Wilson's 14 points were viewed by leaders of America's allies as both simplistic and overly optimistic. The French prime minister even sneered and said that... "since mankind couldn't keep God's 10 Commandments, it was unlikely to keep Wilson's 14 Points."
On June 28, 1919, European nations signed the Treaty of Versailles. The document was crafted by "the Big Four," including Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau for France, David Lloyd George for Great Britain, and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando for Italy.
Though Wilson wanted all countries to share equally in the peace, other members of the Big Four believed it only right to punish Germany. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was required to accept full blame for the war, to pay $33 billion in reparations to the Allies, and to agree to be disarmed. Much of Wilson's Fourteen Points were excluded, but the Treaty of Versailles did establish Wilson's vision for a League of Nations. Wilson lobbied tirelessly for United States ratification of the treaty, but ultimately Congress rejected it. The League of Nations Assembly first met in November 1920, but without the participation of the United States.
The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organization founded on 10 January 1920 as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. It was the first international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. Its primary goals included preventing wars through collective security and disarmament and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration.
After some notable successes and some early failures in the 1920's, the League ultimately proved incapable of preventing aggression by the Axis powers in the 1930's. The credibility of the organization was weakened by the fact that the United States never officially joined the League and the Soviet Union joined late and only briefly. Germany withdrew from the League, as did Japan, Italy, Spain and others. The fact that there was a World War 2 showed that the League had failed its primary purpose, which was to prevent any future world wars. The League lasted for 26 years; the United Nations (UN) replaced it after the end of the Second World War and inherited several agencies and organizations founded by the League.