Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

by Alan Axelrod

  Over the Top

  Between June 6 and July 1, 1918, the “Yanks” recaptured for the Allies Vaux, Bouresches, and—after a particularly bitter battle-Belleau Wood. The Americans also managed to hold the critically important Allied position at Cantigny against a great German offensive during June 9-15. If ever the cliche about a “baptism by fire” was appropriate, it was now. American troops quickly came to know what the soldiers of Europe had experienced for the past four years: the results of humanity gone mad.

  Marne

  Between July 18 and August 6, 85,000 American troops broke the seemingly endless stalemate of the long war by decisively defeating the German’s last major offensive at the Second Battle of the Marne. Here, at last, was a battle that could be deemed a genuine turning point. The victory was followed by Allied offensives-at the Somme, Oise-Aisne, and Ypres-Lys during August.

  St. Mihiel

  Although Americans fought in each of the major August offensives, they acted independently—and brilliantly—against the St. Mihiel salient during September 12-16. This battle initiated a campaign involving a massive number of U.S. troops-some 1.2 million of them—who pounded then cut German supply lines between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest. The campaign, which continued until the very day of armistice, November 11, 1918, was highly successful, but terribly costly. American units suffered, on average, a casualty rate of 10 percent.

  Armistice

  It became apparent to Germany that American soldiers were not only willing and able to fight (a matter of doubt among optimistic German strategists the year before), but that their numbers were inexhaustible, as was the American capacity for military-industrial production. The German government agreed to an armistice—a cessation of hostilitiesto be concluded at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

  The Least You Need to Know

  The end of the 19th century saw the end of America’s long tradition of isolation from world affairs.

  The United States emerged from World War 1, the most terrible war the world had seen up to that time, as the champion of world democracy; although some politicians held out for a return to the nation’s old isolationist ways, turning back was not possible.

  Word for the Day

  Americans who, in characteristically loud tones, voiced support for a warlike, imperialist foreign policy were called jingoes. The word jingo apparently came from “by jingo,” an expression in the refrain of a bellicose 19th-century English music-hall song. “By jingo” also entered into American popular speech as a socially acceptable alternative expletive to “by Jesus. “

  Word for the Day

  Yellow journalism–sensational, usually nonobjective, even distorted or outright untrue journalistic practices aimed directly at readers’ emotions and meant to boost newspaper circulation.

  Main Event

  The 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the required two-thirds of the states in February 1913, and the federal government was henceforth authorized to collect income taxes. Initially, rates were set at 1 percent of taxable income above $3,000 for individuals and $4,000 for married couples. The highest rate was 7 percent, imposed on those with incomes in excess of $500,000. The century’s two world wars would temporarily send income tax rates sky high-as high as 77 percent during World War I and 91 percent during World War II. In the middle of the second war, in 1943, Congress enacted an automatic payroll withholding system, thereby greatly increasing taxpayer “compliance” (as the IRS politely terms it) and doubling tax revenues by 1944.

  Word for the Day

  American David Bushnell (ca. 1742-1824) invented a submarine that was used during the Revolution in 1776. Then in 1864, the Confederate navy operated the submarine Hunley with disastrous results—for the crew of the Hunley. By the early 20th century, all the major European powers built submarines. By far the best were the German vessels, which were called Unterseebooten, or U-booten for short: U-boats.

  Voice from the Past

  From Woodrow Wilson’s war message to Congress, April 2, 1917:

  “…The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters. in the same way. There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of poise and a temperateness of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation.

  “… We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those tights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of the nations can make them….”

  Word for the Day

  In a military context, a salient is a line of battle, especially a concentrated area of defense.

  Stats

  A total of 65 million men and women served in the armies and navies of combatant nations during World War 1. Of this number, at least 10 million were killed and 20 million wounded. Of the 2,000,000 U.S. troops who fought, 112,432 died, and 230,074 were wounded. The monetary cost the war to the United States was the equivalent of $32,700,000,000 in dollars.

  As deadly as bullets, shells, and poison gas were, an influenza epidemic produced by the filthy living conditions of the war proved even more terrible. About half the number of American troop deaths were caused by “flu.” The epidemic would grow to pandemic proportions after the war, killing some 21.64 million people world percent of the world’s population. In the United States, 25 percent of the ill, and 500,000 died.

  Jazzed, Boozed, and Busted Flat

  (1918-1929)

  In This Chapter

  Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”

  Rejection of the League of Nations

  The “Lost Generation” and the “Roaring Twenties”

  Women’s right to vote and advancement of African-Americans

  Prohibition and the birth of organized crime

  Crash of the stock market

  The United States had entered World War I late, but in time for the American Expeditionary Force to suffer a ghastly 10 percent casualty rate—even higher if deaths from the influenza epidemic are included. President Wilson was determined that these deaths in a “foreign war” would not be in vain. He had told the American people that the “Great War” was a “war to end all war,” and he meant it. On January 8, 1918, almost a year before the war ended, Wilson announced to Congress “Fourteen Points,” which he called “the only possible program” for peace. After a complex of treaty obligations had escalated an obscure Balkan conflict into a worldwide conflagration, Wilson’s dream was that his Fourteen Points would create a single international alliance, making armed conflict among nations impossible. The alliance would be called the League of Nations.

  A League of Nations

  As vigorously as Wilson had worked to mobilize his nation for war, he now struggled to bring about a peace meant to spell the end of war. Wilson personally headed the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, which was charged with creating a final treaty. Driven by his intense and intensely idealistic vision of a world league and a world of perpetual peace, Wilson did not deign to develop strong bipartisan support for his peace plans. Fearing Republican isolationists would be hostile to the League of Nations, he chose not to appoint a prominent Republican to the delegation. Worse, Wilson made peace a political issue by appealing to voters to reelect a Democratic Congress in 1918. In fact, the 1918 contest went to the Republicans, who won majorities in both houses. To many, this election seemed a no-confidence vote against Wilson and his crusade for world peace.

  In Europe, Wilson was a
t first greeted with nothing but confidence in his leadership. However, it soon became apparent that the other major Allied leaders—Georges Clemenceau of France, David Lloyd George of Great Britain, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy—wanted to conclude a settlement that simply and severely penalized Germany. Wilson nevertheless hammered away at his Fourteen Points, ultimately seeing them embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, which, however, also imposed crippling terms on Germany. Gratified that he had won inclusion of the League of Nations as part of the treaty, Wilson presented the Versailles document to his fellow Americans as the best obtainable compromise, He felt that the League of Nations itself would eventually rectify some of the injustices presently imposed upon Germany.

  Red Scare

  While Wilson was trying to engineer world harmony, popular American sentiment was already retreating toward isolationism. The Russian Revolution of 1917, which toppled the long regime of the czars, was not greeted by most Americans as a victory over autocracy, but was regarded with terror as an assault on established order. A “Red Scare” swept western Europe and the United States.

  At the beginning of 1919, U.S. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer ordered a series of raids on the headquarters of radical organizations in a dozen cities, indiscriminately rounding up 6,000 U.S. citizens believed to be “sympathetic to Communism.” Palmer and others lumped Communist, radicals, and “free thinkers” together with out-and-out anarchists, who, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, were committing acts of terrorism. Anarchists mailed bombs to Palmer, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and more than 30 other wealthy, prominent conservatives. Ironically, many of the bombs failed to reach their destinations—due to insufficient postage!

  In a climate of intense fear, outrage, and confusion, Palmer created the General Intelligence Division, headed by an eager young Justice Department investigator named J. Edgar Hoover. With meticulous zeal, Hoover (in those precomputer days) created by hand a massive card index of 150,000 radical leaders, organizations, and publications. As all too often happened in American history, beginning with the Alien and Sedition Acts passed at the end of the 18th century, legislators and administrators did not hesitate to take totalitarian measures to defend American liberty.

  End of the Dream

  Fear of Communism was not the only thing that chipped away at Wilson’s dream. Although the president tried to convince the American people—and himself—that the Treaty of Versailles was the best compromise possible, it was actually one of the most tragic documents in history. Although Wilson succeeded in persuading France to concede its key demand—that the left bank of the Rhine be severed from Germany and put under French military control—the treaty dictated humiliating, economically devastating terms. Germany was forced to accept full guilt for the war, to cede huge sections of territory, and to disarm almost completely.

  The Allies hoped that, by weakening Germany, the nation could never again threaten Europe’s peace. However, the punitive terms of Versailles so destabilized Germany that the nation became ripe for the dark promises of Adolf Hitler, who came into prominence during the 1920s and 1930s. Instead of preventing another war, the Treaty of Versailles guaranteed one—a war that would prove even more devastating that the 1914—18 conflict.

  At home, Wilson’s lapse of political savvy was taking its toll as Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) led Senate Republican opposition to the U.S. commitment to the League of Nations. Believing the League to be above politics, Wilson accepted little compromise and decided to bring popular pressure on the Senate by taking his case directly to the people. He embarked on a rigorous 9,500-mile transcontinental whistle-stop speaking tour. On September 25, 1919, exhausted by war, by the heartbreaking labors of making peace, and by his battle on behalf of the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson collapsed following a speech in Pueblo, Colorado. He was rushed back to Washington, but his condition deteriorated and, a week later, he suffered a devastating stroke that left him partially paralyzed. 111, desperate, frustrated, and embittered, Wilson instructed his followers to accept absolutely no compromise on the League.

  American politics has always thrived on compromise; and now, without it, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. Woodrow Wilson, his health continuing to decline, could only watch as the “war to end all war” came to look more and more like just another war fought in vain. Warren G. Harding (1865-1923), the Republican who succeeded Wilson in the White House, ran on a pledge of a “return to normalcy.” Harding told Congress that “we seek no part in directing the destinies of the world … [the League] is not for us.”

  A Generation Lost and Found

  Woodrow Wilson was not the only embittered individual in postwar America. Four years of European carnage had shown the worst of which humanity was capable. The war broke the spirit of some people; in others, it created a combination of restlessness, desperation, boredom, and thrill-seeking that earned the decade its nickname: the Roaring Twenties. Some Americans, mostly young intellectuals, found that after the war, they could not settle back into life at home. A colony of expatriate artists and writers gathered in Paris. Many of these individuals congregated in the apartment of a remarkable medical school dropout named Gertrude Stein—writer, art collector, and cultivator of creative talent. One day, she remarked to one of these young people, Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” That phrase stuck as a description of those individuals cast adrift after the war, their former ideals shattered. by battle, yet unable to find new values to replace the old.

  Stein, Fitzgerald, Hemingway & Co.

  The United States, land of liberty and opportunity, had much to be proud of. The nation touted its superiority to Europe, whose masses often suffered under conditions of political enslavement and spiritual and physical want. Yet, in matters of art and culture, America never quite outgrew its “colonial” status. True, the United States did produce a number of remarkable world-class writers during the 19th century—including Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and others. And America had some extraordinary visual artists—such as the unparalleled group of landscape painters dubbed the Hudson River School, who emerged under the leadership of Thomas Cole and Frederick Edwin Church. Despite this prominent talent, the United States entered the 20th century still bowing to the aesthetic culture of Europe, as if Americans could never quite measure up.

  During the 1920s, however, a group of American writers made an unmistakable impact on the cultural life of the world. Two of the most important, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961.) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), were frequent guests at Gertrude Stein’s salon, where they discussed how they would write “the great American novel.” Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (named for the ancestor who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”) burst onto the literary scene with This Side of Paradise, a 1920 novel that ushered in the “Jazz Age” with a vivid portrait of the youth of the Lost Generation. Two years later came The Beautiful and Damned and, in 1925, The Great Gatsby. This story of the enigmatic Jay Gatsby explored the American dream in poetic, satirical, and ultimately tragic detail. The theme was again plumbed a decade later in Tender Is the Night (1934).

  While Fitzgerald probed the American psyche by dissecting the desperate denizens of the Jazz Age, Hemingway created character after character who turned away from the roar of the Roaring Twenties to worlds of elemental dangers and basic pleasures. His stories portrayed driven efforts to recover the meaning that, through a combination of war and postwar spiritual exhaustion, had evaporated from life. The work of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, as well as the novelist Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), the poet Hart Crane (11899-1932), and the playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), at last allowed Americans to see themselves as the cultural equals of Europeans. Through the despair and desperation that lay behind the wild music and loose morality of the 1920s, American art and literature came of age.

  Women G
et the Vote

  The American woman also came of age in the 1920s, emerging from subjugation to straitlaced Victorian ideals of decorum and femininity. Women joined the work force in increasing numbers, and they became lively participants in the intellectual life of the nation. The most profound step toward the liberation of American women was the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote.

  A Renaissance in Harlem

  There was growing liberation, too, for another long-oppressed group: African-Americans. Slavery had ended with the Civil War, but blacks hardly enjoyed the same opportunities and privileges as most other Americans. In the North as well as the South, blacks were discriminated against in education, employment, housing, and in just about every other phase of life. Segregation was de facto in the North—unofficial, but nonetheless real—and de jure in the South—actually mandated by law. African-Americans had served with distinction during World War I but were put into segregated units. The French did not discriminate against blacks, and for some African-American soldiers, the overseas experience was an eye-opener. They returned to the States no longer willing to accept second-class citizenship.