War and Revolution: America Reengages the World 1914-1920
The
delayed decision of the United States to enter the First World War is a turning
point in American History. It also
followed a period of direct intervention in challenging or holding in check the
Mexican Revolution by the Wilson administration. In this period we find a series of domestic
labor strikes and aggressive crackdowns by armed militias occurred at Ludlow Massacre
in Colorado and at Bisbee, New Mexico. The victorious war effort in Europe was
particularly bloody and resulted in heavy losses for those American troops who
were sent to the front in 1918. While
the selections in this reader do not include documents on this phase, we shall
use Alan Dawley’s Changing the
World: American Progressives in War and
Revolution (2003) as a synthesis of the complex array of issues that were
manifested in Wilson’s New Freedom initiatives, and his League of Nations
proposals following the war. While
Wilson’s proposal for joining the League of Nations was rejected by an
organized conservative countermovement at home, Wilson’s decision to occupy
Haiti in 1915 also caused embarrassment for him at the Paris Peace Conference
in 1919. Students interested in the
League of Nations will profit from studying documents that have become
available from the League of Nations archives now stored at the United Nations
in Geneva, or at http://www.indiana.edu/~league/sites_documents.htm; or
http://www.unog.ch/library/archives/faq.htm.
In the aftermath of the withdrawal of US troops from Europe, Wilson
engaged in an aggressive anti-communist tactics that included the landing of
marines at Vladisvostock in Russia to support a counter-revolution against the
Bolsheviks. This period also witnessed
the suppression of radical labor movements in 1919 in Seattle, Everett and in
Centralia. This was a harbinger of a
trend to suppress and protect against the Red Scare, that saw the arrest, trial
and execution of the anarchist bombers Sacco and Vanzetti, and the imprisonment
of the Socialist Presidential candidate Eugene Debs.
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