WWI (1 gen 1914 anni – 1 gen 1918 anni)

Descrizione:

While the United States staked claims around the globe, a war of unprecedented scale was brewing in Europe. The military buildup of Germany, a rising power, terrified its neighbors. At the same time, further east, the disintegrating Ottoman Empire was losing its grip on the Balkans. Out of these conflicts, two rival power blocs emerged: the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) and Triple Entente (Britain, France, and Russia). Within each alliance, national governments pursued their own interests but were bound to one another by public and secret treaties.

Americans had no obvious stake in these developments and in fact had a record of serving as a neutral mediator of European disputes. In 1905, when Germany suddenly challenged French control of Morocco, Theodore Roosevelt arranged an international conference to defuse the crisis. Germany got a few concessions, but France — with British backing — retained Morocco. Accomplished in the same year that Roosevelt brokered peace between Russia and Japan, the conference seemed another diplomatic triumph. One U.S. official boasted that America had kept peace by “the power of our detachment.” It was not to last.

The spark that ignited World War I came in the Balkans, where Austria-Hungary and Russia competed for control. Austria’s 1908 seizure of Ottoman provinces, including Bosnia, angered the nearby Slavic nation of Serbia and its ally Russia. Serbian revolutionaries recruited Bosnian Slavs to resist Austrian rule. In June 1914, in the city of Sarajevo, university student Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

Like dominos falling, the system of European alliances pushed all the powers into war. Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the assassination and declared war on July 28. Russia, tied by secret treaty to Serbia, mobilized against Austria-Hungary. This prompted Germany to declare war on Russia and its ally France. As a preparation for attacking France, Germany launched a brutal invasion of the neutral country of Belgium, which caused Great Britain to declare war on Germany. Within a week, most of Europe was at war, with the major Allies — Great Britain, France, and Russia — confronting the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Two military zones emerged. On the Western Front, Germany battled the British and French; on the Eastern Front, Germany and Austria-Hungary fought Russia. Because most of the warring nations held colonial empires, the conflict soon spread to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

The so-called Great War wreaked terrible devastation. New technology, some of it devised in the United States, made warfare deadlier than ever before. Every soldier carried a long-range, high-velocity rifle that could hit a target at 1,000 yards — a vast technical advancement over the 300-yard range of rifles used in the U.S. Civil War. The machine gun was even more lethal. Its American-born inventor, Hiram Maxim, had moved to Britain in the 1880s to follow a friend’s advice: “If you want to make your fortune, invent something which will allow those fool Europeans to kill each other more quickly.” Elaborate trenches, familiar from the Civil War era, were now enhanced with barbed wire to protect soldiers in defensive positions. Once advancing Germans ran into French fortifications, they stalled. Across a swath of Belgium and northeastern France, millions of soldiers on both sides hunkered down in fortified trenches. During 1916, repeatedly trying to break through French lines at Verdun, Germans suffered 450,000 casualties. The French fared even worse, with 550,000 dead or wounded. It was all to no avail. From 1914 to 1918, the Western Front barely moved.

At the war’s outbreak, President Wilson called on Americans to be “neutral in fact as well as in name.” If the United States remained out of the conflict, Wilson reasoned, he could influence the postwar settlement. Even if Wilson had wished to, it would have been nearly impossible in 1914 to unite Americans behind the Allies. Many Irish immigrants viewed Britain as an enemy — based on its continued occupation of Ireland — while millions of German Americans maintained ties to their homeland. Progressive-minded Republicans, such as Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, vehemently opposed taking sides in a European fight, as did socialists, who condemned the war as a conflict among greedy capitalist empires. Two giants of American industry, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, opposed the war. In December 1915, Ford sent a hundred men and women to Europe on a “peace ship” to urge an end to the conflict. “It would be folly,” declared the New York Sun, “for the country to sacrifice itself to … the clash of ancient hatreds which is urging the Old World to destruction.”



World War I created tremendous economic opportunities at home. Relatively well-paid work in war industries drew thousands of people to the cities. With so many men in uniform, jobs in heavy industry opened for the first time to African Americans, accelerating the pace of black migration from South to North. During World War I, more than 400,000 African Americans moved to such cities as St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Detroit, in what became known as the Great Migration. The rewards were great, and taking war jobs could be a source of patriotic pride. “If it hadn’t been for the negro,” a Carnegie Steel manager later recalled, “we could hardly have carried on our operations.”

Blacks in the North encountered discrimination in jobs, housing, and education. But in the first flush of opportunity, most celebrated their escape from the repressive racism and poverty of the South. “It is a matter of a dollar with me and I feel that God made the path and I am walking therein,” one woman reported to her sister back home. “Tell your husband work is plentiful here.” “I just begin to feel like a man,” wrote another migrant to a friend in Mississippi. “My children are going to the same school with the whites…. Will vote the next election and there isn’t any ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ — it’s all yes and no and Sam and Bill.”

Wartime labor shortages prompted Mexican Americans in the Southwest to leave farmwork for urban industrial jobs. Continued political instability in Mexico, combined with increased demand for farmworkers in the United States, also encouraged more Mexicans to move across the border. Between 1917 and 1920, at least 100,000 Mexicans entered the United States; despite discrimination, large numbers stayed. If asked why, many might have echoed the words of an African American man who left New Orleans for Chicago: they were going “north for a better chance.” The same was true for Puerto Ricans such as Jésus Colón, who also confronted racism. “I came to New York to poor pay, long hours, terrible working conditions, discrimination even in the slums and in the poor paying factories,” Colón recalled, “where the bosses very dexterously pitted Italians against Puerto Ricans and Puerto Ricans against American Negroes and Jews.”

Women were the largest group to take advantage of wartime job opportunities. About 1 million women joined the paid labor force for the first time, while another 8 million gave up low-wage service jobs for higher-paying industrial work. Americans soon got used to the sight of female streetcar conductors, train engineers, and defense workers. Though most people expected these jobs to return to men in peacetime, the war created a new comfort level with women’s employment outside the home — and with women’s suffrage.

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