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INTRODUCTION

The Tumultuous Teens

As the United States entered the second decade of the twentieth century, Americans found themselves in the midst of sweeping economic, political, and cultural changes. The United States began the 1910s as the richest nation in the world, and by the end of the decade it had emerged from World War I with an economic output greater than that of all Europe combined. The United States had also become the most important voice for democratic ideals, but Americans drew back from the responsibility of making those ideals a worldwide reality. A decade that began full of what Herbert Croly called "the promise of American life" ended with a year of labor unrest, race riots, and hysteria over the threat of radicalism. In a decade of causes and crusades—for woman suffrage, Prohibition, the rights of workers—Americans tested the pronouncement of one of the decade's brightest young minds, Walter Lippmann, who wrote in 1914 that earlier generations "inherited a conservatism and overthrew it; we inherit freedom, and have to use it." Freedom took many forms in the 1910s, some having little if anything to do with politics: from a looser code of behavior among the young, to an emerging ethic of leisure and consumption among the middle class, to the exhilaration of travel in the increasingly popular automobile. But freedom brought with it uncertainty, restlessness, and conflict, as Americans in peace and war grappled with who they were and what they were becoming.

The High Tide of Progressivism

The surge of political and social movements that began in the 1890s—to advocate reform of government at every level, to push for stronger regulation of big business and public ownership of utilities, to establish settlement houses, trade-union leagues, and child-welfare organizations—crested in the 1910s. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive Republican who remained the most compelling political figure in the country, made clear the power of progressive ideals in a speech he delivered at Osawatomie, Kansas, on 31 August 1910. There he put conservatives in his own party and nationwide on notice that the rugged individualism of the past "must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it." After failing to wrest the Republican presidential nomination from incumbent William Howard Taft in 1912, Roosevelt embarked on a third-party challenge as the nominee of the Progressive (or "Bull Moose") Party. The presidential race that year featured Taft, Roosevelt's handpicked successor, who had prosecuted the trusts even more vigorously than his predecessor; Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who had established a progressive record as governor of New Jersey; Roosevelt, whose "New Nationalism" platform promised a graduated income tax, workers' compensation for industrial injuries, and other progressive measures; and Eugene V. Debs, the candidate of the Socialist Party, who won 6 percent of the popular vote. Between them Wilson, Roosevelt, and Debs won more than 70 percent of the popular vote, giving Wilson a clear mandate to chart a course of reform. During his first term in office—supported by progressives in both the Democratic and Republican parties—Wilson established one of the most impressive legislative records of any American president, passing measures to establish the Federal Reserve System, regulate trusts, provide credit to farmers, curb child labor, and enact a graduated income tax. During the 1910s four amendments to the Constitution were adopted, each reflecting the often conflicting principles of the progressive movement: direct election of senators, the federal income tax, woman suffrage, and Prohibition. In total the reforms of the 1910s established the basic framework for the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s.

Growth and Prosperity

Fueled by the growth of new industries, the application new technologies, and a profitable agricultural sector, the American economy expanded rapidly in the 1910s, spreading its benefits to a new middle class of professionals and managers. The most striking example of the astounding productivity of American manufacturing was the automobile industry, which rode a huge wave of consumer demand for its product and implemented innovative production techniques to dominate of the world market in the 1910s. Led by Ford Motor Company, which adopted the moving assembly line to produce its Model T beginning in 1913, American automobile makers were producing more than two million cars a year by 1920, putting what had once been a luxury for the wealthy few within reach of millions of American consumers. In automobile, electrical, chemical, and other industries, the adoption of scientific management and new manufacturing techniques increased productivity and boosted the profits of stockholders. By the end of the decade the growing popularity of "personnel management" was pointing the way toward the welfare capitalism of the 1920s, in which a mix of profit-sharing plans, grievance procedures, company unions, and company-sponsored social activities were used to blunt worker unhappiness and foster loyalty to employers. During the war years, business leaders and government regulators created new arrangements that assured generous profits for business in exchange for cooperation in the expansion of federal involvement in economic planning. Despite industrial growth, however, poverty remained widespread in the rural South, in urban immigrant communities, and among African Americans. For the majority of workers, economic security was a still distant dream, and persistent inflation during the decade eroded their hard-won gains.

An Artistic Awakening

With an expanding economy creating new opportunities for education and leisure among middle-class Americans, a generation of artists and writers emerged in the 1910s, intent on reinventing a national culture. As an editorial in the first issue of The Seven Arts magazine declared in November 1916, "It is our faith and the faith of many that we are living in a renascent period, a time which means for America the coming of that national self-consciousness which is the beginning of greatness." Indeed, the 1910s were a decade of awakening in American painting, photography, poetry, drama, fiction, and dance. Inspired by the Armory Show, an exhibition of avant-garde European painters and sculptors in New York City in 1913, young American artists launched their own modernist experiments in form and subject in a burst of creativity not seen since the days of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville in the mid nineteenth century. Unleashing themselves from stale traditions and slavish devotion to Old World models that had dominated American taste in the Gilded Age, the young American rebels of the 1910s embraced the cacophony of modern urban life, even as they critiqued the dehumanization of work in the modern factory. Born in the 1880s and 1890s, the new American writers were children of the Industrial Revolution, but they were profoundly skeptical of the premise that the path to happiness lay in thrift, industry, and piety. Instead they drifted to bohemian enclaves in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, seeking like-minded souls who shared a dis-taste for the confinements of middle America and rejected the Victorian pieties of their parents. Often they coupled radical politics with radical artistic experiments and through magazines such as The Masses and The New Republic articulated a vision of America remade in their own image.

America and the World

Since its founding as a nation, the United States has been ambivalent about its role on the world stage. Some Americans believed that it was the nation's destiny and responsibility to serve as a beacon of freedom and democracy; others argued that American policy should consist of little more than heeding George Washington's admonition to avoid "entangling alliances." By 1910 the interest of American manufacturers in competing for markets and raw materials around the globe had involved the country inevitably in affairs beyond its borders, and despite the preference of most Americans to remain neutral, those international economic ties, as well as pro-British sentiment, eventually drew the United States into World War I. In Latin America and the Caribbean presidents Taft and Wilson followed long-established precedents of intervening to assert American influence and protect U.S. economic interests. In 1914 Theodore Roosevelt's dream of an American-controlled passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific was realized when the fifty-mile-long, $352-million Panama Canal was completed. By 1912 one half of all American foreign investments were in Latin America. To Roosevelt's "Big Stick" and Taft's "Dollar Diplomacy" Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, added the conviction that the United States was chosen, as he said in 1910, "to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty." Yet Wilson's moral diplomacy was tempered by his recognition of hard realities: American industries "will burst their jackets," he warned in 1912, "if they cannot find free outlets in the markets of the world." In 1911, when the Mexican Revolution began to create turmoil south of the border, Wilson's moralism did not prevent him from resorting to armed intervention and an attempt to impose American ideals through force. When World War I began in the summer of 1914, Wilson hoped to use moral suasion to bring about a just peace; but when that policy failed, the United States combined force of arms with the principles laid down in Wilson's Fourteen Points in an attempt to create a new world out of the old.

World War I

Compared with the losses of lives and resources endured by the European nations over more than five years of war, American sacrifices in the conflict were slight. But the war nonetheless had a profound impact on American life and American politics from the moment it began. For those bred to believe, as many were, that Europe was the pinnacle of civilization—with its ancient cathedrals and its great literary and artistic traditions—the carnage of war came as a tremendous shock. Though Wilson called on his fellow Americans to remain "neutral in fact as well as in name, impartial in thought as well as action," it was difficult if not impossible for a nation of immigrants to avoid choosing sides in the conflict. As the war continued, ethnic tensions and questions about the loyalty of recent immigrants intensified. At the same time, American bankers and businessmen leaped at the opportunities created by the war. Trade with the Allies increased from $300 million to $3 billion during the first two years of the war, and loans to the Allies from American banks totaled better than $2 billion by the end of the war. As the novelist John Dos Passos remarked in his novel 1919 (1932), war provided "good growing weather for the House of Morgan."

The War at Home

Once the United States entered the war in April 1917, these effects intensified and multiplied. Three million American men were drafted, and another two million volunteered. Of these five million troops some two million served overseas between 1917 and the armistice in November 1918. More than one hundred thousand Americans lost their lives in the conflict, slightly more than half to diseases that modern medicine had not yet conquered. With millions called into service, the depletion of the labor force created new opportunities for women and African Americans, who had long been relegated to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. More than four hundred thousand southern blacks heeded the call of the Chicago Defender (the leading African American newspaper of the era), which pleaded in an editorial: "I beg you, my brother, to leave the benighted land.…Get out of the South." Thus began the "Great Migration" of blacks from the rural South to northern cities, a migration that reshaped not only African American communities and family life but profoundly affected American culture as a whole. Similarly, close to a million women entered the labor force for the first time during the war years, working in hospitals, schools, and factories, and creating the economic basis for the emergence of the independent young "flapper" once the war had ended. In many new ways the war made government a recognizable daily presence in the lives of Americans. Through hundreds of executive agencies and war boards the federal government extended its reach into economic policy, production decisions, labor disputes, and other sectors once considered securely in the private realm. Government propaganda—orchestrated by the Committee on Public Information—encouraged Americans to despise the "Hun," support the troops, buy war bonds, and embrace "100 percent Americanism." In a nation that prided itself on toleration and individualism, conformity with official opinion and popular sentiment was enforced through the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 and occasionally by vigilante justice. German Americans found themselves the objects of suspicion and abuse at the hands of local patriots. Radicals of every stripe—anarchists, communists, and socialists—faced similar treatment, particularly in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in November 1917. As historian Barry Karl has written about the war years, "the enemy at home became the most visible enemy to attack."

Nineteen Nineteen

The last year of the 1910s was one of the most tempestuous in American history. In Washington the battle over the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations raged through most of the year and contributed to President Wilson's collapse from a stroke in October. For American workers the battle was not over grand plans for peace but over the size of their paychecks. Throughout the decade labor unions had battled employers for improved wages and working conditions, hoping to share the fruits of economic growth. In 1917 there had been more than four thousand strikes, but most workers had put their demands on hold for the duration of the war. Severe wartime inflation, rapid demobilization, and a postwar recession rekindled the fires of discontent. In 1919 hundreds of thousands of workers walked off their jobs in steel, coal mining, and other industries. Boston police went on strike as well, and there was a general strike in Seattle. Though most of the strikes were defeated, they ignited fears of a radical uprising, and by summer 1919 the nation was in the grip of the Red Scare. Alien radicals were deported by the hundreds, radical labor organizers were lynched, and duly elected Socialists were expelled from the New York State legislature. Though the worst of the hysteria was over by summer 1920, the Red Scare helped to dampen the reform energies of progressives who had seen government as a force for good. Their optimistic spirit was further dampened in the bloody summer of 1919 by race riots in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, and other cities, as returning black soldiers and workers who had moved north in search of opportunity met resistance and resentment from their white counterparts. When Americans voted for a new president in 1920, they chose Republican Warren G. Harding, who promised "not heroism but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration, not agitation but adjustment, not surgery but serenity, not the dramatic but the dispassionate, not experiment but equipoise, not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality."