Chapter 22 World War I

MAP 22.1 The United States in the Caribbean, 1865–1933 An overview of U.S. economic and military involvement in the Caribbean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Victory in the Spanish-American War, the Panama Canal project, and rapid economic investment in Mexico and Cuba all contributed to a permanent and growing U.S. military presence in the region.

MAP 22.2 The Western Front, 1918 American units saw their first substantial action in late May, helping to stop the German offensive at the Battle of Cantigny. By September, more than 1 million American troops were fighting in a counteroffensive campaign at St. Mihiel, the largest single American engagement of the war.

MAP 22.3 Woman Suffrage by State, 1869–1919 Dates for the enactment of woman suffrage in the individual states. Years before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, a number of Western states had legislated full or partial voting rights for women. In 1917, Montana suffragist Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress. SOURCE:Barbara G.Shortridge,Atlas of American Women (New York:Macmillan,1987).

This 1905 cartoon portraying President Theodore Roosevelt, “The World’s Constable,” appeared in Judge magazine. In depicting the president as a strong but benevolent policeman bringing order in a contentious world, the artist Louis Dalrymple drew on familiar imagery from Roosevelt’s earlier days as a New York City police commissioner. SOURCE:The Granger Collection (4E218.07).

This 1914 political cartoon comments approvingly on the interventionist role adopted by the United States in Latin American countries. By depicting President Woodrow Wilson as school teacher giving lessons to children, the image captures the paternalistic views that American policy makers held toward nations like Mexico, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. SOURCE:The Granger Collection,New York.

The New York Times printed a special Extra edition announcing that a German submarine had torpedoed the British passenger liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915, off the Irish coast. The ship’s manifest later revealed that the Lusitania carried a shipment of arms along with its passengers. The 1,198 lives lost included 128 Americans and the incident helped push the United States toward “preparedness” for war. SOURCE:© Bettmann//CORBIS (PG3064A).

Halt the Hun. This 1918 Liberty Loan poster used anti-German sentiment to encourage the purchase of war bonds. Its depiction of an American soldier as the protector of an innocent mother and child implied that the Germans were guilty of unspeakable war crimes. SOURCE:Howard Chandler Christy,Halt the Hun!Fight or Buy Bonds, poster,1917.Museum of the City of New York,gift of John Campbell. The Granger Collection (4E695.09).

Founded by Clara Barton after the Civil War, the American Red Cross grew in both size and importance during World War I. Female volunteers, responding to humanitarian and patriotic appeals combined in posters like this one, provided most of the health and sanitary services to military and civilian casualties of the war. SOURCE:Library of Congress.

Troops of the American Expeditionary Force in Southampton, England, embarking for the front in France, 1917. By November 1918, when the Great War ended, more than 2 million American soldiers were in Europe. SOURCE:Snark/Art Resource,New York.

African American soldiers of the 369th Infantry Regiment fighting in the trenches on the Western front, 1918. Nearly 400,000 black man served in World War I, but due to the racist beliefs held by most military and political leaders, only 42,000 went into combat. “Many of the white field officers,” wrote black Lieutenant Howard H. Long, “seemed far more concerned with reminding their Negro subordinates that they were Negroes than they were in having an effective unit that would perform well in combat.” SOURCE:The Granger Collection,New York.

Women workers at the Midvale Steel and Ordinance Company in Pennsylvania, 1918. Wartime labor shortages created new opportunities for over one million women to take high-wage manufacturing jobs like these. The opening proved temporary, however, and with the war’s end, nearly all of these women lost their jobs. By 1920, the number of women employed in manufacturing was lower than it had been in 1910. SOURCE:National Archives and Records Administration (1-SC-31731).

Members of the National Woman’s Party picketed President Wilson at the White House in 1917. Their militant action in the midst of the war crisis aroused both anger and sympathy. The NWP campaign helped push the president and the Congress to accept woman suffrage as a “war measure.” SOURCE:Library of Congress.

Seattle policemen wearing protective gauze face masks during the influenza epidemic of 1918. The pandemic killed over half a million Americans and some twenty million people worldwide. SOURCE:Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

This Southern African American family is shown arriving in Chicago around 1910. Black migrants to Northern cities often faced overcrowding, inferior housing, and a high death rate from disease. But the chance to earn daily wages of $6 to $8 (the equivalent of a week’s wages in much of the South), as well as the desire to escape persistent racial violence, kept the migrants coming. SOURCE:Stock Montage,Inc./Historical Pictures Collection.

Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George are among the central figures depicted in John Christen Johansen’s Signing of the Treaty of Versailles. But all the gathered statesmen appear dwarfed by their surroundings. SOURCE:John Christen Johansen, Signing of the Treaty of Versailles, 1919. National Portrait Gallery,Smithsonian Institution,Washington,DC/Art Resource,New York (S0022-240).