U.S. History / Unit 6: The Progressive Era and World War I
6.6 The Home Front and the War's Aftermath
Notes
- The Selective Service Act (1917) drafted millions of men. The American Expeditionary Force under General John J. Pershing helped stop Germany's final offensives.
- The government sold Liberty Bonds and used propaganda through the Committee on Public Information.
- Women took factory jobs. The Great Migration: hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners moved to Northern cities for war jobs and to escape Jim Crow.
- The Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918) punished criticism of the war. In ***Schenck v. United States* (1919) the Court upheld limits on speech that posed a "clear and present danger."**
- The armistice took effect on November 11, 1918.
- Wilson's Fourteen Points called for self-determination, free seas and a League of Nations.
- The Treaty of Versailles (1919) punished Germany. The Senate rejected the treaty, partly over fears the League would pull the U.S. into future wars; the U.S. never joined the League.
- The Red Scare (1919 to 1920): fear of communism led to the Palmer Raids and arrests of suspected radicals.
Practice
In Schenck v. United States (1919), the Supreme Court ruled that:
Schenck had urged men to resist the draft during wartime.
Why did the U.S. Senate reject the Treaty of Versailles?
Senators like Henry Cabot Lodge objected to Article X, which pledged members to defend one another.
A Black family leaves Mississippi in 1917 for a factory job in Chicago. They are part of:
Wartime jobs in the North and escape from Jim Crow drew Black Southerners to Northern cities.
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