BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Library of Congress -- Exhibit: Echoes of the Great War

DC -- Library of Congress -- Exhibit: Echoes of the Great War:

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Description of Pictures: Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I
April 4, 2017–January 2019
Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I examines the upheaval of world war as Americans confronted it— both at home and abroad. The exhibition considers the debates and struggles that surrounded U.S. engagement; explores U.S. military and home front mobilization and the immensity of industrialized warfare; and touches on the war’s effects, as an international peace settlement was negotiated, national borders were redrawn, and soldiers returned to reintegrate into American society.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. LOCEC1_170404_008.JPG: Echoes of the Great War American Experiences of World War I In 1914, Europe maintained a precarious balance. Nationalism, political rivalries, and imperial ambitions strained the system of military alliances that had long provided stability but also divided Europe into two competing, armed camps. When Serbian nationalists, angered over Austro-Hungarian rule, assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on June 28, 1914, a crisis ensued. By the end of October 1914, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire united as the Central Powers against France, Great Britain, and Russia as the Allies. Each country believed war could further its national interests, but each also saw itself as fighting a "defensive" war for national survival. The Great War, as the 1914–1918 conflict came to be known, became truly a world war as it drew in Japan, British colonies in the Pacific, and European colonial holdings throughout Africa, Asia, and North America. Meanwhile, wary of embroiling itself in the conflict, the United States initially remained neutral and pursued the profits of international trade while protecting its interests at home and in the Pacific. World War I raged around the globe for almost three years before the United States officially entered the fight on April 6, 1917. Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I examines the upheaval of world war as Americans confronted it -- both at home and abroad.The exhibition considers the debates and struggles that surrounded U.S. engagement; explores U.S. military and home front mobilization and the immensity of industrialized warfare; and touches on the war's effects, as an international peace settlement was negotiated, national borders were redrawn, and soldiers returned to reintegrate into American society.
2. LOCEC1_170404_017.JPG: Arguing Over War
3. LOCEC1_170404_020.JPG: Arguing Over Here
4. LOCEC1_170404_027.JPG: Arguing Over War Americans were deeply divided over how to respond to the Great War and expressed a diverse range of views on the conflict. President Woodrow Wilson declared U.S. neutrality on August 4, 1914, and many Americans saw little reason to entangle themselves in what they viewed as European quarreling and intrigue. As the war persisted and the destruction spread, many Americans could not ignore the crisis. President Wilson and other leading Americans, like industrialist Henry Ford, attempted to facilitate negotiations for peace to end the conflict in Europe. Americans organized and provided humanitarian aid to war victims, particularly the monumental relief operation led by Herbert Hoover to feed German-occupied Belgium. But other forces drew the United States toward war. Cultural ties to Britain tended to outweigh those that German Americans and other European ethnic groups had to their ancestral homelands. Although the United States did profit financially from the war as a neutral nation, Great Britain's naval domination of the seas and blockade of Germany and the other Central Powers meant that Americans primarily traded with the Allies during the war. Germany attempted to counter this imbalance with the widespread use of submarines, the first time these weapons had been extensively deployed in war. German submarines sank merchant ships engaged in what Americans viewed as peaceful trade and killed American passengers on British ocean liners, most notably the Lusitania. As the war raged on in Europe, to many, including eventually President Wilson, the conflict became a matter of principles: whether to uphold the freedom of the seas, to make the world safe for democracy in the face of autocracy, or to establish a new world order ensuring permanent peace and governed by rational law. The United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.
5. LOCEC1_170404_033.JPG: Sinking of the Lusitania On May 7, 1915, a German submarine sank the Cunard Company ocean liner Lusitania. Early news reports did not describe the full extent of the disaster. The Boston American headlined "Report All Saved," but cautioned "the loss of life might have been very heavy." And it was: the ship sank in 18 minutes and at least 1,191 passengers and crew died, including approximately 128 Americans. The sinking received massive coverage in America as an attack on innocent civilians, leading to a surge in pro-British and anti-German sentiment.
6. LOCEC1_170404_039.JPG: The Invasion of Belgium American cartoonist William Allen Rogers contrasts American and German behavior in Belgium, a neutral country invaded in August 1914 by the German army. In this image, a German soldier guards the almost entirely occupied country, where reports of brutal German behavior belie German claims to be a model of a civilized nation. Meanwhile, Uncle Sam, representing the "plain," and thus by German standards less cultured, people of the United States, sends a constant stream of food, clothing, and other assistance into the suffering country.
7. LOCEC1_170404_045.JPG: Humanitarian Aid As long as the United States remained out of the war, humanitarian assistance offered an alternative response to the international crisis. Neutral Belgium invaded and occupied by Germany and other war-ravaged countries faced food shortages and the threat of starvation. At the urging of the U.S. embassy in London, Herbert Hoover -- then a forty-year-old mining engineer and wealthy business leader -- organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB). Designed to feed all of Belgium, it was the largest humanitarian relief operation to date. Relief efforts later expanded to occupied northern France, and by 1918 the CRB had delivered three million tons of food, largely averting starvation in the occupied territories. Americans also undertook much smaller voluntary relief efforts for suffering peoples within the Central Powers' territories including Germany, Austria, Hungary, Armenia, and Syria.
8. LOCEC1_170404_053.JPG: Commission for Relief in Belgium The plight of Belgium attracted worldwide sympathy. Successful businessman and future U.S. president Herbert Hoover undertook leadership of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which sought to feed and clothe the Belgians and avert starvation. This letter summarizes the results of that relief effort through the middle of 1915, which included the collection of 71 million francs worth of food. This page from a trade publication for American wheat manufacturers shows bags of flour at a distribution depot in Brussels. The Commission shipped close to 700 million bags of wheat to towns across Belgium. By mid-1915 the Commission was also assisting the people of German-occupied northern France.
9. LOCEC1_170404_066.JPG: Giving Thanks In an expression of gratitude for U.S. humanitarian aid, thousands of Belgian schoolchildren and many of their teachers wrote letters of thanks to President Wilson and the American people. Ten-year-old Fritz van der Mensbrugghe lived in the city of Ghent with his parents, eighty-year-old grandmother, and ten brothers and sisters. In neatly written English, the boy's letter expressed his family's appreciation for "the generous American people, who take care of us." He observed that "the war will perhaps ruin us but thanks to the providing America we will not starve." In 1919 Belgian schools sent photographs to students in United States to thank them for their support during the war. These young girls from Seraing, just outside of Liege, had probably lived under Germany occupation most of their lives since the city was taken in the first weeks of the war.
10. LOCEC1_170404_074.JPG: Allegiance to the Homeland Artist Winold Reiss, who emigrated from Germany in 1913, created this poster to promote a twelve-day charity event in New York City's Madison Square Garden for the benefit of the widows and orphans of the Central Powers. The bazaar opened on March 11, 1916, and featured booths representing German wartime and peacetime industries including a popular showcase for Zeppelin technology. One of the bazaar's organizers told the New York Times: "I think that there is no one in this country who can accuse us of disloyalty if we feel sympathy first for the country of our birth, so long as the United States is not directly involved." With three days to run, it was reported that the organizers had raised $500,000 and expected proceeds to exceed $750,000.
11. LOCEC1_170404_078.JPG: For or Against War With the world around them at war, Americans' debate over the conflict often centered on the issue of military preparedness and the wisdom of making loans and selling arms overseas. Many feared that a large army would threaten American democracy and that an expanded arsenal would menace other countries. This fear of militarism also reinforced antagonism toward Germany, a well-armed and authoritarian monarchy. Preparedness advocates, however, believed that defending the country's security and borders outweighed other considerations, especially as the revolution in Mexico made the United States seem unready to defend itself. Some war opponents believed the greed of munitions makers, bankers, and others who stood to profit from war might draw Americans into an expanded conflict. Peace activists, pacifists, and others dreaded the inevitable loss of lives and drain on the economy that going to war would bring.
12. LOCEC1_170404_080.JPG: A Case for War Reverend Mercer Johnston was the rector of Trinity Church in Newark, New Jersey. In this letter to his father, he expressed his strong opposition to Germany's role in the war and the desire to do what he could to "hasten Germany's day of judgment." Johnston wrote, "I could no more remain neutral towards the program that the Kaiser and his war party have put forth than I could remain neutral towards the program of His Satanic Majesty." Acknowledging that Johnston's sermons in favor of the Allies upset some of his German American parishioners and colleagues, the letter describes the divided sympathies among America's 100 million diverse people toward the warring nations.
13. LOCEC1_170404_088.JPG: Advocating for Peace The Women's Peace Party, organized in January 1915 and led by Jane Addams, was one of the most prominent organizations opposing American military intervention and the preparedness movement. In this 1915 letter to President Wilson, the party leaders argued that preparations against threats from Europe, through the buildup of the U.S. military, would only lead to arms races that would cause more problems than they solved. "These preparations," they wrote, "would create rivalry, suspicion and taxation in every country." They believed that, instead, President Wilson should concentrate his efforts on the opportunity for the "establishment of permanent peace" that "this world crisis offers."
14. LOCEC1_170404_097.JPG: Profiting from the War Minnesotan Frank Naughton presents two arguments revealing American interests in seeing the European war continue in his three-panel editorial cartoon, which he drew for the Duluth News Tribune weeks after the war's start. Duluth, where immigrants made up more than a quarter of the population, was one of the largest shipping ports in the United States and stood to profit from wartime production. Naughton ridicules the butcher's customer who is celebrating economic opportunities that the war presents until the customer realizes the butcher is gouging him. Food prices increased significantly and the nation's businesses profited mightily during World War I.
15. LOCEC1_170404_100.JPG: The Dangers of Preparedness This meeting notice, published by the Anti-War League of the District of Columbia, illustrates one group's opposition to the preparedness movement. The flyer argued that building up the armed forces -- what American groups like the Navy League were calling "preparedness" -- caused the war in Europe. The D.C. Anti-War League also feared that a large military and a society regimented by its preparations for war would bring a militarized culture to the United States, which would threaten American values.
16. LOCEC1_170404_107.JPG: Available Forces Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Clifford Berryman was a Washington, D.C., fixture. He spent more than five decades at the Washington Star, and his work was widely distributed across the United States. Well aware of the comparatively tiny size of the U.S. Army (fewer than 130,000 officers and men when the major belligerents had forces numbering in the millions), Berryman opted to represent American military strength, or lack of it, with two small dogs, "Navy" and "Army," out for a walk with Uncle Sam, the quintessential symbol of the United States.
17. LOCEC1_170404_116.JPG: Fearing an Autocratic Peace Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin was a maverick Republican who opposed the war even as Republican leaders like Theodore Roosevelt were calling for a strengthening of the armed forces and a vigorous defense of American rights and values. La Follette was concerned that the war would not be fought to further democratic ideals. In these notes for a speech before Congress opposing a Declaration of War, the senator wrote, "We may declare it is a war for democracy, but if the allies should insist on a partition of the smaller nations or taking over of peoples, we will be a party to the autocratic peace." Transcript Point IIIb. We are entering into the compact without any knowledge of the extent to which we are committing ourselves to the foreign policies. We may declare it is a war for democracy but if the allies should on partition of smaller nations . . . we will be party to the autocratic peace.
18. LOCEC1_170404_118.JPG: To Slay the Serpent Editorial cartoonist William Allen Rogers became a well-regarded contributor to the New York Herald during World War I. On the eve of the United States joining the war effort, Rogers chose Minerva, the goddess of both war and knowledge, to slay the serpent crushing Europe, which bears the head of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Pro-war, Rogers tacked "US" on to Minerva's shield, three months before the United States formally entered the war.
19. LOCEC1_170404_127.JPG: A Meeting to Discuss War President Wilson and his cabinet met on March 20, 1917, to discuss the question of declaring war. Secretary of State Robert Lansing urged war, but he did not believe the United States should go to war solely because German submarines had sunk U.S. ships and killed Americans. In his account of the cabinet meeting discussion, Lansing related how he tried to convince the president of the duty "to suppress an autocratic government like the German because of its atrocious character and because it was a menace to the national safety of this country and of all other countries with liberal systems of government."
20. LOCEC1_170404_130.JPG: The Zimmermann Telegram In January 1917, the British intercepted a coded telegram from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann to Germany's ambassador to Mexico that offered to assist Mexico in reconquering U.S. territory in exchange for joining the Central Powers against the Allies should the United States declare war. In early March, U.S. papers published the contents of the telegram, and on March 5, 1917, the text was entered in the Congressional Record. Playing on fears of what would happen if Americans did not unite behind the war effort, cartoonist Clifford Berryman drew a hand in a gauntlet (decorated with the imperial German eagle) carving up a map of the southwestern United States. Transcript On the 1st of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this, it is our intention to endeavor to keep neutral the United States of America. If this attempt is not successful, we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give general financial support, and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. The details are left to you for settlement.
21. LOCEC1_170404_137.JPG: On the 1st of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this, it is our intention to endeavor to keep neutral the United States of America. If this attempt is not successful, we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give general financial support, and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. The details are left to you for settlement.
22. LOCEC1_170404_153.JPG: Clifford Berryman. Hand carving up a map of the Southwestern United States, 1917.
23. LOCEC1_170404_161.JPG: Wilson Before Congress On April 2, 1917, President Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. He condemned German submarine attacks on U.S. and other neutral shipping. He also argued that autocratic governments, such as the German regime, with their habitual intrigue, unrestrained by the will of their people, were a threat to free and self-governing nations. The president asserted, "The world must be made safe for democracy." Transcript The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We see no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.
24. LOCEC1_170404_167.JPG: United States Enters the War Readers of the Atlanta Journal could not miss the momentous news of April 6, 1917, when the United States formally declared war on Germany. The coverage expresses the predominantly pro-war sentiment of the American press at the time, yet favorably features Republican Jeannette Rankin -- the first woman elected to the House of Representatives, who served three years before women nationwide gained the right to vote. Representative Rankin opposed U.S. entry into the war: "I want to stand by my country, but I can't vote for war." Even though the article's headline focuses on "Lady of Montana, in Tears," its conclusion asserts: "Thunderous, hysterical applause from pacifist and pro-war sides of the house alike greeted this frank admission -- woman's first official voice in the house."
25. LOCEC2_170404_001.JPG: Over Here
26. LOCEC2_170404_006.JPG: Over Here Never before had the United States mobilized for war on such a scale. Government agencies sought to shape public opinion; private industry geared up war production; home front volunteerism surged to unprecedented heights; bond drives raised funds to finance the war; and labor unions and workers organized to increase national output. For the first time in its history, the nation's military would be derived largely from conscripts rather than volunteers. General John J. Pershing crafted the largest army in U.S. history from a force that in 1915 was a fraction of the size of the armies contesting in Europe. Newly inducted soldiers found themselves training for war in military camps throughout the United States. Women dedicated themselves to the war effort by laboring in war industries, organizing food conservation, and growing crops. Civil liberties contracted as the Espionage and Sedition Acts limited free speech and made dissent a risky proposition. German Americans found their loyalties questioned and were subject to occasional violence. U.S. mobilization revealed contradictions within the American democratic experiment. Conscription heightened questions regarding the rights and obligations of citizenship. For women, immigrants, and African Americans the war simultaneously provided an opportunity to demand expanded rights previously denied and demonstrated the limits of such efforts. Women's contributions to the war effort bolstered their long-standing claims for equal voting rights. Immigrants and African Americans hoped that military service would lead to greater inclusion into civic life in the United States. African Americans endured a rigidly segregated military, and experienced discrimination and racial violence as many moved into northern cities to take advantage of wartime employment opportunities.
27. LOCEC2_170404_011.JPG: Americanization Day Though nativists may have abhorred the increasing ethnic diversity in the United States, others saw the opportunity to steep newcomers in American traditions. With four million Americans of Irish descent, hundreds of thousands of Jewish Americans with strong ties to Eastern Europe, and ten million citizens hailing from nations aligned with the Central Powers, organizations like the New York National Americanization Day Committee hoped to use patriotic holidays such as the Fourth of July as a means to unify the country's diverse populations.
28. LOCEC2_170404_015.JPG: "Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" Already a well-known songwriter when the war began, Irving Berlin, himself an immigrant whose family came from Siberia, was drafted into the U.S. Army in early 1918 and was assigned to Camp Upton, located in Yaphank, Long Island, New York. There Berlin wrote a Ziegfeld-style revue featuring a cast of soldiers called Yip, Yip, Yaphank, which helped raise money to construct a camp community center. "Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," one of the show's hit tunes, expressed Berlin's distress over early morning reveille.
29. LOCEC2_170404_020.JPG: Camp Upton Construction began on Camp Upton in summer 1917, but the first draftees arrived at the uncompleted camp in early September. These multi-ethnic conscripts from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut came from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. A recruit in this photo carries a sign: "From New Rochelle, '45 minutes from Broadway, 'bound for Yaphank. Ready to do our bit." By some estimates more than thirty different languages and dialects were spoken in this one camp. Over the course of the war close to 40,000 men would train at Camp Upton before deploying overseas.
30. LOCEC2_170404_024.JPG: Americanization Dating back to the late eighteenth century, native-born Americans worried about assimilating immigrants; the nation's entrance into the war heightened this already palpable concern. In 1917, one out of every three U.S. citizens was either a first- or second-generation American. Nearly one fifth of the army had been born abroad. Despite scant evidence of disloyalty, U.S. political and military leaders wondered if citizens could balance allegiances between their nation of ancestry and their new home. "Americanization," the name given to the process of imbuing in immigrants an American identity, took numerous forms. Roughly speaking, however, Americans divided into two camps regarding Americanization. One side demanded what many called "100% Americanism" or the complete abandonment of Old World languages, traditions, and loyalties. In contrast, progressive reformers, and eventually military leaders, encouraged the adoption of American values while still respecting Old World traditions and culture. Some communities found 100% Americanization far more oppressive. German Americans lived under increased government and public surveillance, and were sometimes subject to vilification and violence.
31. LOCEC2_170404_028.JPG: How the War Came The United States government undertook a comprehensive propaganda campaign under the auspices of the Committee for Public Information (CPI) headed by George Creel. The agency shaped public opinion on the war effort through an unprecedented multimedia campaign that lasted throughout U.S. involvement in the war. These pamphlets illustrate the efforts of the CPI to reach diverse communities within the United States by publishing their message in German, Spanish, and English. With this approach, they sought to forge a unified, government-sponsored view of why Americans were fighting in distant lands. More than 6,250,000 copies of How War Came to America were in circulation, and it proved to be one of CPI's most popular publications.
32. LOCEC2_170404_040.JPG: Enthusiastic Americanism About 500,000 of the AEF's enlisted soldiers were recent immigrants from 46 different nations; 100,000 did not speak English. Beyond basic concerns regarding literacy and language, officials remained wary of their political loyalties. Americanization courses sought to imbue troops with a sense of nationalism or as Captain Flemming noted in this communication with the White House, "enthusiastic militant Americanism." Though the army initially embraced a "100% Americanism," the military eventually adopted an approach that allowed for the retention of cultural traditions.
33. LOCEC2_170404_045.JPG: Path to Citizenship This 1917 poster urged immigrants to seek information about learning English and becoming U.S. citizens. The poster's text repeats in English, German, Hungarian, Czech, Hebrew, and Italian: "If the war has affected your living or working conditions, if you want to learn the American language and become a citizen, if you wish employment, advice, or information, without charge, apply."
34. LOCEC2_170404_049.JPG: Drafting an Army The Selective Service Act of 1917 gave the government the power to conscript a national army. Raising an army largely through conscription represented a dramatic new obligation for citizens. Ever mindful of the tension between federal powers and states' rights, the draft occurred nationally, but draft boards at the local level conducted the actual selections. They appealed to local populations by including regional languages such as this example from the Territory of Hawaii issued in Hawaiian, Portuguese, and Chinese (on view). By comparison with the Civil War, in which eight percent of Union soldiers were conscripts, draftees made up seventy-two percent of the United States Army in World War I.
35. LOCEC2_170404_054.JPG: Richard Bliss Leith Richard Leith was an American physician attached to the British Expeditionary Force in World War I. His selective service questionnaire illustrates the complex system of deferments and exemptions that local draft boards used to determine whether military-age males were eligible for conscription. Claiming no grounds for avoiding the draft, Leith arrived in France in October 1917, well ahead of most American combat forces. He would remain in Europe for the duration of the war and for several months beyond the November 1918 Armistice, treating refugees and victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic.
36. LOCEC2_170404_059.JPG: First Philippine Division The Library of Congress houses in its collections a large number of company rosters, many illustrated with photographs. This roster shows members of the 9th Regiment, who were Filipino, including the officers. At the time, the Philippines were governed by the United States as part of an American empire in the Pacific. The regiment was part of a 15,000-man division, which was still in training at the time of the 1918 Armistice. The roster was intended as a souvenir for unit members and includes every member's name as well as character sketches of the unit's officers.
37. LOCEC2_170404_067.JPG: Conscientious Objectors Of the twenty-four million men who registered for the draft more than 64,000 claimed Conscientious Objector (CO) status; 56,830 of these claims were validated by local draft boards, and roughly 20,800 of those men were called up for military service. Either through coercion or persuasion, approximately 80 percent of the 20,800 eventually went to war. Most of the remaining 20 percent served in noncombat roles, and a devoted 1,500 would refuse any sort of service all together. Four hundred and fifty individuals were court-martialed and sent to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Pictured in Russian-born Maurice Becker's drawing is conscientious objector W. Oral James speaking on behalf of striking prisoners at Fort Leavenworth to Commandant Colonel Sedgwick Rice. Rice brought the strikers' requests to the War Department in early 1919.
38. LOCEC2_170404_075.JPG: Controlling the Message Whether censoring the mail, organizing communication networks through government control of the telegraph, or advising President Wilson on postwar policies, Postmaster General Albert Burleson played a central role in the Wilson administration and in mobilizing war support on the home front. This letter from Burleson to Wilson's private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, demonstrates the extent to which Wilson and his advisers believed the war to be an opportunity to reconstruct America domestically to better benefit average Americans while also reshaping international relations into a durable peace.
39. LOCEC2_170404_078.JPG: Answer Songs "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier," published in January 1915, a few months after war broke out in Europe became a rallying cry for the nation's pacifists. Reflecting the official U.S. policy of neutrality, the song was one of the most popular of the era. Two years later, after America entered the war, "answer" songs, such as "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Slacker," "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Coward," and "Don't Marry a Slacker, Girls" offered a decidedly pro-war sentiment. The Library of Congress holds more than 14,000 pieces of sheet music relating to World War I.
40. LOCEC2_170404_085.JPG: State by State Service The diagram in the U.S. House of Representatives report lists the number of soldiers, not including officers, who served from each state and territory during World War I. According to the report: "The bars are proportionate in length to the total number of men furnished whether by volunteering in the Regular Army, coming in through the National Guard, or being inducted through the draft." By war's end, the report states that the total number of soldiers serving in the armed forces was 4.8 million, 4 million of whom were in the United States Army.
41. LOCEC2_170404_091.JPG: I Want You Originally published as the cover for the July 6, 1916, issue of Leslie's Weekly with the title "What Are You Doing for Preparedness?" this portrait of "Uncle Sam" went on to become -- according to its creator, James Montgomery Flagg -- "the most famous poster in the world." More than four million copies were printed between 1917 and 1918, as the United States entered World War I and began sending troops and materiel into war zones.
42. LOCEC2_170404_095.JPG: Ships Launched The Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC) was established under congressional mandate by the United States Shipping Board ten days after the U.S. declared war on Germany. Its purpose was to acquire, maintain, and operate the merchant ships needed to transport American troops and their supplies to France. In 1917, the United States was acutely short of ships, shipyard workers, and yards in which to build them. This poster, showing a line of ships cresting a wave, celebrates the "tidal wave" of shipping launched over the course of the previous fourteen months. Despite these efforts, British ships carried the bulk of U.S. troops and supplies to Europe throughout the war.
43. LOCEC2_170404_102.JPG: Come on Boys! This enlistment poster picturing a soldier on horseback rallying potential recruits is one of many striking posters designed by Czech artist Vojtěch Preissig during World War I. Issued by the Czechoslovak Recruiting Office in New York City, the image also appeared on postcards and intended to prompt immigrants to join the military. Born in Bohemia, Preissig returned to his native land in the 1930s, after living in New York and Boston for twenty years. During World War II, he joined the resistance during Nazi occupation. Preissig was executed at the Dachau concentration camp in 1944.
44. LOCEC2_170404_106.JPG: Funding the War Not wanting to disrupt the economic advances the nation had enjoyed under neutrality, Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo and the government as a whole heavily promoted the sale of war bonds called Liberty Loans. Mounting four Liberty Loans drives and one Victory Loan drive, the U.S. government raised $20 billion with nearly one third coming from people making less than $2,000 annually. Celebrities exhorted citizens to buy bonds. Artists produced posters that were powerful tools in each of the separate bond drives. The three posters shown here are "car cards," so called because of their placement on buses, trams, and subway cars to attract the attention of riders.
45. LOCEC2_170404_111.JPG: World War I Gardeners During World War I, Maginel Wright Enright was asked to design a series of posters for the United States School Garden Army, part of the National War Garden Commission. This nationwide campaign was launched in 1917 to increase the food supply and to stimulate interest in creating war gardens among the country's school children. Praising Enright's design, Secretary of the Interior Frederick Lane wrote, "I think it is a beautiful piece of work . . . I am sure a great many children will find their hearts stirred by the picture, and no older person can look at it without a thrill of loyalty and desire to do his part."
46. LOCEC2_170404_116.JPG: Mad Brute In this 1918 propaganda poster artist Harry R. Hopps depicts Germany as an enraged gorilla stepping foot on an American shore as Europe lays in ruin in the distance. This enlistment poster issued by the San Francisco Army Recruiting District was intended to rouse its audience to join the cause against the "German militarism" threatening American liberty. In this powerful image, liberty takes the form of woman whom the brute clutches in his one arm, while his other carries a bloody club marked "Kultur."
47. LOCEC2_170404_124.JPG: Get Behind the Girl He Left Behind Him / Join the Land Army. New York: The American Lithographic Company, ca. 1918.
48. LOCEC2_170404_127.JPG: Woman's Land Army Unlike many organizations contributing to the war effort, the Woman's Land Army (WLA) of America consisted of female leadership and female staff. Inspired by the women's land army of Britain, the WLA sought to use women's labor to address the threat of food shortages resulting from the war. The director of the Committee on Public Information, George Creel, recognized the symbolic power of the WLA and eventually embraced the effort. Initially, the WLA received no federal funding or even state support. However, the New Jersey WLA proved particularly adept at fundraising, often depending on its established network of women's associations and local businesses. The organization also utilized various events including bake sales, concerts, and movie nights to raise money. New Jersey WLA chairperson Anne MacIlvaine's appeal for government support would be realized when the Department of Labor absorbed the organization in the fall of 1918, which ironically led to the WLA's demise the following September.
49. LOCEC2_170404_138.JPG: Farmerettes Known as "farmerettes," WLA workers were on the job in thirty-three states by summer 1918. Success varied from state to state. WLA units in Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Illinois were among the most productive. In California, WLA leaders secured labor contracts guaranteeing wages, hours, and working conditions that agricultural workers would rarely have again. Between its establishment in late 1917 and its demise in 1919, WLA employed roughly 15,000 to 20,000 women.
50. LOCEC2_170404_143.JPG: Daylight Saving Time Following many of the other belligerent countries, the United States adopted daylight saving time on March 31, 1918, as a means to conserve electricity during wartime, not, as commonly believed, to allow farmers to work longer in the fields. In fact, the agriculture industry fervently opposed the measure because farming schedules are based on sunrise and sunset not the clock. The measure was far more popular in urban areas, where wartime gardeners cultivated a host of available spaces, and with retailers, including the United Cigar Store Company, which published the poster above. The agriculture industry lobbied for the repeal of daylight saving time that Congress passed over President Wilson's veto in 1919.
51. LOCEC2_170404_150.JPG: Loan Drives and Taxation Despite the success of the Liberty Loan program, as war expenditures rapidly increased and debt ballooned, government officials realized borrowing alone could not fully fund the war -- taxation too must play a role. The War Revenue Act of 1918 forever changed American taxation. Before the First World War, three fourths of federal revenues were derived from custom and excise taxes; after the war, this would be flipped, so that the same percentage would now come from income, profit, and estate taxes. Still, bond drives remained crucially important. Bond subscribers were given a button with every purchase, and, according the poster to the left of the case, were expected to wear it as a sign of patriotism.
52. LOCEC2_170404_159.JPG: Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense Though she would later express bitterness over the lack of influence women had over policies during the war, chairman of the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense Anna Howard Shaw embraced the food conservation program of the U.S. Food Administration, headed by Herbert Hoover. The Woman's Committee connected with state and municipal women's groups whose members believed that women served a unique role in food conservation. Through three separate drives in the summers of 1917 and 1918, nearly 500,000 clubwomen issued Hoover Pledge Cards promising to conserve food and secured approximately fourteen million householders' signatures on those cards. The comical song "Over Here," sung to the famous tune of "Over There," extols the virtues of meatless and wheatless days in the name of patriotic food conservation.
53. LOCEC2_170404_167.JPG: Waste No Food The U.S. Food Administration distributed, through its various state organizations, this broadside and others like it to stem the waste of food. Volunteers, most often clubwomen, posted the broadsides "in every place where numbers of people will see them," including schools, libraries, groceries, and public transit. The 1917 Official U.S. Bulletin reported, "Waste in any individual household may seem insignificant, but if only a single ounce of edible food, on the average, is allowed to spoil or be thrown away in each of our 20,000,000 homes, over 1,300,000 pounds of material would be wasted each day. The housewife must learn to plan economical and properly balanced meals, which, while nourishing each member of the family, do not encourage overeating."
54. LOCEC2_170404_172.JPG: Ben Black. "Over Here." San Francisco: Daniels & Wilson, Inc., 1918.
55. LOCEC2_170404_182.JPG: Home Front Contributions The need for labor, food conservation, and a variety of volunteer efforts only increased with America's deepening involvement in the war. Women played a critical role on the home front whether working in factories, growing and harvesting crops in Victory gardens, or organizing knitting circles to provide socks for troops. The federal government harnessed state and municipal activism through women's organizations including the General Federation of Women's Clubs and the National Association of Colored Women. In many organizations, like the Red Cross and Committee on National Defense, a glass ceiling prevented women from holding the most influential positions. While a handful of states gave women the franchise, most did not. Despite these barriers and disappointments, women viewed the war as a chance to expand upon their rights thereby serving as the fulcrum upon which volunteerism functioned.
56. LOCEC2_170404_189.JPG: Lest Liberty Perish As head of the U.S. Government Division of Pictorial Publicity during World War I, renowned illustrator Charles Dana Gibson recruited fellow artists to contribute their work in support of the war and appointed Joseph Pennell as an associate. Prominent in Pennell's body of wartime prints and drawings is his startling poster design for the Fourth Liberty Loan drive of 1918. Pennell stressed the potentially dire consequences of inaction: "New York City bombed, shot down, burning, blown up by an enemy. A fleet of aeroplanes fly over Lower Manhattan, flames and smoke envelop the burning skyscrapers, in the foreground Liberty, from a pile of ruins, rises headless on her pedestal, her torch shattered." His proposed title, "Buy Liberty Bonds or You Will See This," was ultimately softened to a more poetic alternative.
57. LOCEC2_170404_192.JPG: A Changing America With the rise of industry in the nineteenth century, U.S. cities grew with every passing decade. The war helped to fuel what we today refer to as the Great Migration, a decades-long process that ultimately reshaped American culture, society, and politics. Beginning in the 1910s, African Americans migrated from southern farms and small towns into northern cities. Many hoped to escape Jim Crow, the South's system of legalized segregation and disenfranchisement, while simultaneously exploiting employment opportunities created by the war. Adjusting to their new urban circumstances, migrants endured segregation, discrimination, and sometimes physical violence. At the same time, women worked to expand the right to vote nationally. The suffrage movement predated the war by decades, but World War I proved a pivotal moment. Radical suffragists picketed the White House, while more moderate groups touted their contributions to the war. As a result, Woodrow Wilson became the first president to advocate a constitutional amendment. In 1919, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote, which was ratified in 1920.
58. LOCEC2_170404_193.JPG: The Great Migration Even before the outbreak of World War I, African Americans had begun to migrate from rural areas to urban centers. The war accelerated this process. Many took advantage of train lines running north to escape the segregation of the Jim Crow South and to find new opportunities in bustling cities like Chicago. However, new forms of discrimination and segregation greeted them upon arrival. Known as the "Great Migration," this exodus continued through the following decades, helping to spawn industrial growth and cultural movements in the 1920s such as the Harlem Renaissance, while also reshaping urban politics in northern cities.
59. LOCEC2_170404_198.JPG: Silent Protest Whites reacted with discrimination and sometimes violence to the increasing numbers of African Americans in northern cities. On July 9, 1917, one of the most violent riots of the twentieth century exploded in East St. Louis, Illinois, resulting in the destruction of hundreds of black homes and businesses and the deaths of at least thirty-nine African Americans. The NAACP organized a "Silent Protest Parade" in New York City to denounce the riot and to appeal for equal rights. This memorandum distributed to participants highlights black contributions to American history and notes that, although African Americans had "fought for the liberty of white Americans in six wars; our reward is East St. Louis."
60. LOCEC2_170404_209.JPG: National Woman's Party Some suffrage organizations tempered their demand for the vote in hopes that support for the war effort would further their cause. The National Woman's Party (NWP), however, kept securing for women the right to vote at the top of its agenda throughout the war. Enduring insults, physical violence, and legal prosecution for their efforts, NWP members first picketed the White House in January 1917. In the fall, dozens of members were arrested and imprisoned. Drawing attention to the cause, suffragists such as Virginia Arnold (pictured here) turned Woodrow Wilson's outspoken sympathy for self-government into a critique of the president and his opposition to a constitutional amendment for women's suffrage. Initially Wilson had said that women's voting rights should be left to the states to decide.
61. LOCEC2_170404_219.JPG: A Position Changed Carrie Chapman Catt and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) that she led worked during the war to gain President Wilson's support for a constitutional amendment securing voting rights for all American women. She wrote to Wilson: "Our Country is asking its women to give their all, and upon their voluntary and free offering may depend the outcome of the war. If the Amendment fails, it will take the heart out of thousands of women." By the fall of 1918, Wilson had been persuaded. On September 30, Wilson spoke to the Senate, which was preparing to vote on the suffrage amendment. In the speech displayed above, the president argued that the extension of women's suffrage was "vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity."
62. LOCEC2_170404_227.JPG: Wartime Work Joseph Pennell's wartime drawings and prints continued his lifelong fascination with industrial subjects -- a theme he called the "Wonder of Work." Pennell's work for the federal Committee on Public Information's Division of Pictorial Publicity accorded him special access to such sensitive sites as shipyards and munitions factories, and the backs of his drawings often bear censor clearance stamps. Pennell observed: "But just as the greatest human energy has been given to war work, given to make things to explode, to kill, to destroy; so the greatest machines have been turned to do this work with the greatest skill and accuracy and the greatest speed...it is the working of the great machinery in the great mills which I find so inspiring -- so impressive -- for the mills are shrines of war."
63. LOCEC2_170404_234.JPG: Arming the Military During World War I, as men left for military duty, millions of women contributed to the war effort, not only through volunteer service but by entering the labor force as nurses, agricultural laborers, and office and factory workers. Women were critical to maintaining production in the nation's ordnance plants. In this photograph a woman is seated at a cartridge venting machine at the U.S. Cartridge Co. plant in Lowell, Massachusetts, as her right arm is resting on a tray of empty shell casings.
64. LOCEC2_170404_238.JPG: "Working Women of America" Though the Council of National Defense was formed in 1916, not until April 1917 did Wilson add a Woman's Committee to the board, headed by suffragist Dr. Anna Howard Shaw. Due to government ambivalence and union hostility, women's efforts would be temporary and somewhat limited in scope; but their contributions would be significant. Many women who found work in wartime industries had been in the labor force prior to the war but often in domestic service positions. The unprecedented wartime labor opportunities for women evaporated soon after the fighting stopped.
65. LOCEC2_170404_242.JPG: War Industry The challenge of global war required the cooperation of organized labor, industry, and a broader public on an unprecedented level. Hoping to avoid accusations of government coercion,the Wilson administration encouraged voluntary collaboration between government and business. The coordinating agency Congress established, the War Industries Board, could only keep business aligned with national interests through cajolery, growing profit margins, and the threat of negative publicity that would label uncooperative businesses as unpatriotic. Large unions including the American Federation of Labor saw the war as an opportunity to secure better wages and working conditions. Labor conflicts still arose. In 1917, more than 4,000 strikes caused work stoppages, many of which occurred in the mines, shipyards, and forests of the western United States where smaller but more militant unions exerted greater influence. More than one million women found skilled temporary employment in factories and offices as they left domestic service and non-factory textile labor.
66. LOCEC2_170404_245.JPG: Great Guns! This wartime New York Tribune rotogravure features a spread on the manufacture of artillery at Bethlehem Steel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. From April 1917 to the end of the war, Bethlehem produced more than sixty-five percent of the total number of finished artillery pieces manufactured by all of the allied nations. In order to meet the demand, Bethlehem Steel invested more than $1 million to expand their plant. During the war, leading newspapers took advantage of rotogravure printing, which produced richly detailed, high quality illustrations -- even on inexpensive newsprint paper -- to create vivid new pictorial sections for their readers.
67. LOCEC2_170404_250.JPG: Calling Business to the Cause Lax antitrust enforcement and the blurring of the line between public and private spheres distinguished the wartime collaboration between business and government. Entities like the War Industries Board and the War Shipping Committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce, led by captains of industry, sought maximum output, even if that meant a rise in costs. The government exhorted, cajoled, and threatened industry with bad publicity in order to meet federal production goals. Both during the period of neutrality, when U.S. companies filled hosts of war orders, and during the period of U.S. belligerence, industry benefitted from this fevered war production. Between 1914 and 1918, for example, Du Pont Company stock dividends multiplied sixfold, and the Savage Arms Company recorded profits of sixty percent in 1917.
68. LOCEC2_170404_255.JPG: Hyphenated Americans In 1917 one in every three Americans had either been born abroad or had at least one foreign-born parent, a phenomenon captured in the term "hyphenated Americans." The hyphen could be characterized as a bridge between two cultures or a measure of divided loyalties. This poster issued by the National Industrial Conservation Movement, asks "Which Bridge Do You Want? American Labor can either build a bridge of ships to help Pershing's army or it can permit enemy agitators to stretch the hyphen of disloyalty as a bridge to aid our enemies."
69. LOCEC2_170404_268.JPG: "We Pledge . . . Our Undivided Support" At a contentious 1915 American Federation of Labor (AFL) trade union convention, labor leader Samuel Gompers proclaimed to a fractious audience, "I am a pacifist . . . and I had hoped that we would get away from the war idea." Yet from 1915 forward, the AFL's labor policies hewed closely to those of the Wilson administration's foreign policy. Gompers aligned the AFL with Wilson, promoted preparedness, and was appointed to the pre-war Council of National Defense. The AFL's support for the war led to enormous growth in membership and political influence but also sparked equally vociferous dissent within the larger labor movement.
70. LOCEC2_170404_274.JPG: Four Minute Men In order to convince the public of the war's importance, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) engaged patriotic local residents around the nation to urge Americans in movie houses (where it took four minutes to change reels) and, later, many other venues to support war measures, including the Liberty Loan drives. More than 75,000 citizens -- men, women, and children -- took part in the Four Minute program, and it is estimated that up to 400 million listeners at movie houses, union halls, churches, parks, and other public forums heard their short, carefully vetted speeches. With a blank space for messaging, Four Minute posters served as another important tool in this propaganda campaign.
71. LOCEC2_170404_279.JPG: George Creel's statement "To the Four Minute Men," published November 1917.
72. LOCEC2_170404_282.JPG: Delivering the Government's Message With commercial radio still several years away, the ability of public speakers to inform and persuade audiences carried great importance. Prior to U.S. entry, Carrie Chapman Catt had opposed the war but afterwards, like many other suffragists, she embraced the war effort and served as chairman of the Educational Propaganda Department. This arm of the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense sought to train female speakers to disseminate the government's message to the people, particularly the foreign born, a group that continued to draw attention from the government: "The messages must be taken to the less educated and more apathetic portions of the population and much of it must done among persons of foreign birth."
73. LOCEC2_170404_291.JPG: Surveillance and Censorship Fighting a war in Europe required a clear message and a cooperative public. The federal government established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which deployed propaganda to convince Americans of World War I's legitimacy and the importance of civic contributions. Congress also passed the Espionage (1917) and Sedition (1918) Acts to enforce loyalty and silence dissent. Postmaster General Albert Burleson used the Espionage Act to ban from the mail those magazines and newspapers he perceived as promoting discord against the government and undermining national unity. Government policies and wartime nationalism encouraged citizens to police one another's loyalty and patriotism. As a result, political dissidents, ethnic minorities, and militant labor organizations and their leaders were subject to increased scrutiny and, on occasion, violence. Ultimately, challenges by citizens to limits on free speech would help create a modern conception of citizenship based on individual rights and civil liberties.
74. LOCEC2_170404_294.JPG: Sedition Law Passes After the Sedition Act, passed on May 16, 1918, augmented the already stringent Espionage Act of 1917, the New York Herald ran this cartoon by William Allen Rogers touting Uncle Sam's expanded authority to "round up" those that would oppose the government. Rogers identifies the undesirables as spies, Irish separatists, and radical anti-war International Workers of the World, commonly known as the "Wobblies." The law now made it illegal time of war to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government . . . the Constitution . . . the military or naval forces . . . the flag . . . or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States."
75. LOCEC2_170404_296.JPG: Suppression of The Masses Editor of the socialist journal The Masses Max Eastman openly opposed the U.S. entrance into World War I. During one anti-war speech in Fargo, North Dakota, Eastman narrowly escaped a lynching for expressing his views. Relating his experiences, Eastman wrote to President Wilson: "Is there not grave danger to our civil liberties in these hundreds of thousands of armed men, if in the name of patriotism they are allowed with impunity to degenerate into gangs of marauders?" Under the provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917, Postmaster General Albert Burleson declared the August 1917 issue of The Masses could not be mailed, effectively cutting off the magazine's distribution.
76. LOCEC2_170404_303.JPG: People of New Hampshire . . . Promptness in Recognizing and Reporting Suspicious or Disloyal Actions to your Local Authority. Concord, New Hampshire: Committee of 100 on Public Safety. Broadside, ca. 1917.
77. LOCEC2_170404_313.JPG: Questions of Loyalty Born in New York City in 1882, Hermann Hagedorn was the son of German emigrés and had himself trained at the University of Berlin. During the war, Hagedorn vociferously expressed American nationalism, promoting war preparedness and, along with other writers and artists, formed the pro-war Vigilantes group. Hagedorn also tried to bolster the image of German Americans by forming the League of Loyal Americans of German Origin. In this questionnaire Hagedorn is soliciting information from publishers and civic leaders across the nation information about German Americans in their communities.
78. LOCEC2_170404_319.JPG: Report Suspicion or Disloyalty During World War I, no centralized intelligence infrastructure existed. To augment its efforts, the state depended on the vigilance, and in some cases vigilantism, of citizens. Broadsides like this one issued by the Committee of 100 on Public Safety in New Hampshire imbued Americans with a sense of responsibility for safeguarding their communities against potential German spies and dissidents posing a threat to U.S. security. Vigilance sometimes slipped into coercion and suppression amidst the pressures of war. Ashes left from a 1918 bonfire fueled by German textbooks in Baraboo, Wisconsin, are visible in this photograph. The Baraboo fire may have been as much a protest over the difficulty of local German language courses as an expression of anti-German sentiment prevalent across the nation at that time.
79. LOCEC2_170404_322.JPG: Back cover of The Masses, August 1917. Vol. 9, no. 10 (issue no. 74).
80. LOCEC2_170404_326.JPG: Raising an Army In previous conflicts, the United States had utilized conscription, but World War I marked the first time the nation's military raised its army primarily through a draft. In order to balance federal power with state autonomy, local civilian draft boards administered the selective service system. Posters, printed materials, films, and music all helped the government to conduct a national campaign that conveyed the legal requirement for men to register with the selective service or to enlist. Officials struggled to forge a unified fighting force from a segregated military consisting mostly of native-born whites, American Indians, and African Americans, along with large numbers of immigrants. The draft also raised questions about the obligations of citizenship, especially the duty to serve. Though the policy developed and changed over the course of the war, the U.S. War Department created the status of "conscientious objector" for Americans who viewed military service as a violation of their religious, ethical, or political beliefs.
81. LOCEC2_170404_330.JPG: A Father's Farewell William L. Houston experienced success as a prominent black lawyer in the nation's capital. Soon after the war began, his son Charles enlisted, and he shortly became one of the men accepted for officer training in June 1917. The following year William Houston wrote: "No son has ever left home whose parents had greater pride in him than we have in you." After serving overseas, Charles Hamilton Houston became dean of Howard Law School, dismantling racist legislation through advocacy at the Supreme Court, and mentoring a cadre of civil rights lawyers including Thurgood Marshall.
82. LOCEC2_170404_336.JPG: African American Officers' Training Camp Camp Fort Des Moines, Iowa, welcomed its first black recruits for training in May 1917. Trainee Charles Hamilton Houston, who graduated as a 1st lieutenant and was the youngest officer in the camp, is pictured in the second row, fifth from the right. His dog tags, coat buttons, and a bullet represent his first months of military service. Of the 1,250 men who entered Camp Fort Des Moines, forty percent were college graduates. Despite their enthusiasm and dedication, training was limited to the infantry and neglected specialized areas such as artillery or engineering. After four months, the camp graduated 204 2nd lieutenants, 329 1st lieutenants, and 106 captains. They were assigned to the 92nd Division, where they faced fierce racial prejudice from many of their white superior officers and white enlisted men.
83. LOCEC2_170404_349.JPG: Enlistment America's entrance into the war sparked debate within the African American community regarding enlistment and segregation. While some believed opposing military service could be a means to protest the nation's racial policies, others believed supporting the war effort by enlisting offered an imperfect opportunity to advance civil rights. Black college students at Amherst College, Howard University, and the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, among other schools, demanded that officers' training be offered to qualified African American soldiers. Washington, D.C., minister and civic leader Reverend J. Milton Waldron and the Committee of One Hundred, consisting of black leaders from across the nation, repeatedly lobbied Secretary of War Newton Baker and President Woodrow Wilson to establish officer's training for qualified African American soldiers.
84. LOCEC2_170404_354.JPG: William Augustus Pollard. Enlistment Application for African American Officer's Camp to J. E. Spingarn, April 25, 1917.
85. LOCEC2_170404_357.JPG: Training Across the Nation Training camps sprang up all across the nation to prepare the nation's rapidly expanding armed forces to fight. This map issued by Union Pacific Railroad in 1917 locates "Post and Stations of the Army, National Guard Camps, Aero Training Stations, Marine Barracks and Naval Training Stations." At this time there was no separate Air Force. There were eventually thirty-two training cantonments, or temporary military installations, spread across the nation.
86. LOCEC2_170404_363.JPG: Lincoln urged the building of the Union Pacific -- even when the country's resources were strained by war -- because he realized the commercial, military, NATIONAL necessity for this railroad, strategically placed for greatest service, east to west and west to east.
87. LOCEC2_170404_367.JPG: Augustus Bennett Warfield A veteran of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, Major Augustus Bennett Warfield commanded the 332nd Field Artillery Regiment as they trained for overseas service. World War I was fought largely with artillery, and Warfield's meticulous notes of his instruction of his artillerymen and accompanying photographs document the regiment's preparations at Camp Sherman, Ohio. Warfield went on to serve in France and Germany and was wounded in October 1918.
88. LOCEC2_170404_371.JPG: Richard Thomas Crump Very little is known about Richard Crump's life, aside from the meticulous scrapbook he assembled documenting his World War I service as an ambulance driver. The album begins with his days in training at the University of Virginia, including the page shown here with its photographs of an orderly drill in pleasant surroundings. The later photos in the album, which show the ravaged French countryside in San Sulpice and Wailley, damaged ambulances, and buildings reduced to rubble by German shelling, are in stark contrast to these earlier images.
89. LOCEC2_170404_380.JPG: Training for Trench Warfare By 1917, the Western Front, where the vast majority of Americans troops would serve, had long been the scene of military stalemate, with two intricate webs of fortified trench lines facing one another. Americans were well aware of the bitter losses each side sustained as they struggled through storms of heavy artillery, aerial bombing, and machine-gun fire in largely unsuccessful attempts to break through opposing lines. Yet, the name of this manual notwithstanding, for many months the U.S. Army continued training new soldiers for a war of movement and only gradually and incompletely incorporated new methods for fighting a war stalemated in the trenches.
90. LOCEC2_170404_385.JPG: Over Here
91. LOCEC3_170404_001.JPG: Over There
92. LOCEC3_170404_006.JPG: Over There George M. Cohan's popular song "Over There" accompanied Americans overseas as they joined the bloody battle that had stalemated in Western Europe for almost three years. Moving such a large army, eventually totaling two million soldiers, across an ocean was a feat not seen before, and its accomplishment emphasized that industrialized countries had the capacity to fight massive wars across the globe. In comparison to nations engaged in three years of grueling warfare, the United States faced combat mostly during the war's last six months. However, Americans encountered unprecedented challenges fighting as part of a coalition in a new kind of war. The Great War was the world's first large-scale military struggle fought among highly industrialized countries. The mass production capabilities of the belligerents, their networks of railroads, and new rapid-firing weapons contributed to the deadlock on the European front lines. Both sides dug into miles and miles of trenches from which neither could dislodge the other. Other new technologies such as airplanes, tanks, and poison gas were widely used in an attempt to end the standoff, but no miracle weapon could break the stalemate and end the war. Although the struggle in the trenches was brief for Americans, it was intense. After an introduction to battle at places such as Belleau Wood and St. Mihiel in France, the United States fought the deadliest battle in its history -- a seven-week offensive along the Meuse River and into the Argonne Forest on the war's Western Front. Medical advances and care for the wounded provided by organizations like the Red Cross kept many alive who might have died in earlier wars. Americans made important contributions to the Allied victory but at considerable cost.
93. LOCEC3_170404_009.JPG: America's "First Shot" in the War This map purports to illustrate America's first artillery salvo of the war, fired on October 23, 1917, by guns in the American 1st Division. Sergeant Alexander Arch barked the order "fire" to the crew manning the 75mm field gun. The rapid-firing artillery piece was provided by the French to American troops, who lacked a sufficient supply of weapons and ordnance. Artillery was the most devastating weapon of the land war, responsible for inflicting some 60 percent of all causalities. Detailed maps and wired communications lines were among the innovations that made World War I artillery fire more accurate and deadly than in earlier conflicts. Therefore, trenches, so strongly associated with the war, were essential to protect troops from barrages that could turn fields into virtual wastelands.
94. LOCEC3_170404_015.JPG: Saving Lives For World War I, Americans mobilized a medical and public health effort unprecedented in its scale and scope. With only a small medical corps in the standing armed forces, the American Red Cross played a critical role in providing medical care to wounded and sick service members. Thousands of Americans, women and men, volunteered for the Red Cross, many of them staffing dozens of hospitals in Europe. In addition to treating those wounded by war, the medical services struggled to fight the worldwide influenza epidemic that broke out in 1918. The flu killed more than 30 million people around the world, including 675,000 Americans, more than were killed in the fighting of the Great War.
95. LOCEC3_170404_021.JPG: Influenza Pandemic Photographer Lewis Hine joined the American Red Cross in 1918 and then did freelance photography for the organization through the 1930s. By the time this photograph was taken in July of 1918, nearly 24,000 American Red Cross nurses were enrolled for military service. A devastating challenge emerged the same year in the form of an influenza pandemic that would eventually claim an estimated 20 to 50 million lives, more than were killed by enemy weapons . The Red Cross continued working with the U.S. Public Health Service to provide nurses and motor corps workers until the pandemic receded in 1919.
96. LOCEC3_170404_025.JPG: "I was down for a week" The Great War did not cause the epidemic of influenza that swept the world in 1918 and killed more than 30 million people. However the war likely helped to spread the disease, an especially deadly strain of flu, with its crowding of troops in training camps and trenches and the flow of people across oceans and borders. In this letter home, American Red Cross volunteer Dorothy Kitchen O'Neill describes how she and forty other women came down with influenza on the voyage to Europe; four of those women died. Dorothy wrote to her family on October 10, 1918: "I was down for a week and have only been up for two days so feel shaky."
97. LOCEC3_170404_030.JPG: Tending to the Wounded Thousands of American women served in Europe during the war. Many who worked as nurses for the Army were recruited by the Red Cross, which also mobilized women to serve in other ways. American Red Cross volunteer Dorothy Kitchen O'Neill worked as a recreation hut worker and was responsible for maintaining the morale of wounded soldiers recovering at the military hospital in Savenay, France. As the director of entertainment, she ran a theater that was popular with the troops. But she could not escape the ravages of war. Of one hospital patient, Kitchen O'Neill writes in her diary: "I couldn't help but see that right in his throat was a hole through which were several flat rubber tubes, and that every time he swallowed it must have been indescribable."
98. LOCEC3_170404_037.JPG: orothy Kitchen O'Neill's photo album, open to diary pages, 1918
99. LOCEC3_170404_048.JPG: Meuse-Argonne Offensive At dawn on September 26, 1918, General Pershing's troops launched an attack along the Meuse River and into northern France's rugged Argonne Forest that would prove to be the deadliest battle in American history. While British forces attacked the German lines to the far north in Belgium, more than 600,000 American and French troops supported by almost 5,000 artillery pieces, 500 tanks, and 500 airplanes slowly forced their way through strong German defenses. During the nearly seven weeks of combat, the Allied forces made significant advances against the exhausted Germans, breaking the stalemate in the trenches and nearly pushing the Germans out of France. The battle lasted until the end of the war, and 26,277 Americans died in this final fight, the highest American death toll for any single battle in U.S. history, not surpassed even by the fierce battles of the Civil War or World War II.
100. LOCEC3_170404_053.JPG: Eve of the Offensive During the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton had one of his earliest opportunities to command tanks in battle. Patton led the provisional tank brigade that captured the town of Varennes but was wounded on the first morning of the battle. In his diary, Patton recorded inspections of his tanks the day before the battle and noted the coming fight. He jotted a terse note: "Will start soon."
101. LOCEC3_170404_056.JPG: General Pershing's Diary General John J. Pershing's diary describes the first day of the largest and deadliest battle that the United States fought in the Great War. Not all went as planned. Pershing wrote that the failings of green troops and new staff officers who did not yet work well together hindered progress. Emphasizing the importance of transportation and logistics, he judged that the most serious problem of the day was mending the roads across No Man's Land, which had been obliterated by years of fighting.
102. LOCEC3_170404_064.JPG: Breaking the Hindenberg Line In the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, U.S. forces sought to break through the Hindenberg Line, what one American general called "the most comprehensive system of leisurely prepared field defense known to history." This letter from Major General W. G. Haan described the condition of his 32nd Division, originally National Guardsmen from Michigan and Wisconsin, after three days of brutal combat to seize a vital segment of the Hindenberg Line from the Germans. The intensity of the fighting was reflected in the statistics he related. The full strength of a battalion was 1024 and a company was 256.
103. LOCEC3_170404_071.JPG: The Air War at the Meuse Argonne At Meuse-Argonne, Colonel William Mitchell, the AEF's chief aviation officer, led a force of 842 airplanes in bombing raids against German concentrations behind the frontlines, strafing runs against machine gun nests, and aerial reconnaissance missions to observe enemy movements. In this letter to his mother two weeks into the battle, he praised the performance of the air service and noted, "Our ground troops also do well, but are pretty new." This map depicts the entire Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The engagement lasted from September 26, 1918, until the Armistice on November 11, 1918. During these forty-seven days, more than 1.2 million American soldiers went into action.
104. LOCEC3_170404_084.JPG: Hillie John Franz Hillie Franz, a young Texan of German descent, found a nearly unused German ledger book while serving in France. In spite of his lack of formal education and challenges with spelling words, often done phonetically, his account captures the chaos of the infantryman's life in wartime. During the campaign, he describes the downing of an airplane in battle: it "was hit in a weak spot and the gass [sic] caught fire and hell was up and it got to turning over and over and was coming down."
105. LOCEC3_170404_090.JPG: Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Map Showing Daily Position of Front Line, May 24, 1919.
106. LOCEC3_170404_124.JPG: Irving Greenwald Drafted into the Army in December 1917, Private First Class Irving Greenwald chronicled his experiences in training camp and then overseas in France in his small pocket diary. In handwriting that became increasingly tiny as the diary progressed, he recorded everything from what he ate for breakfast and supper each day, to descriptions of combat and gas attacks, to his longing for his wife and infant daughter. Greenwald's entries continued until October 1918, when his battalion was involved in brutal combat in the Argonne Forest, during which they spent nearly a week in siege-like conditions, trapped in a ravine and surrounded by the enemy. Upon their rescue, the unit was immediately dubbed the "Lost Battalion." Greenwald survived, though he was wounded in the fighting.
107. LOCEC3_170404_129.JPG: Books for Soldiers Troubled by low literacy rates, U.S. military officials sought to promote reading and writing. Sharing the concern for literacy and for maintaining the moral fiber of the armed forces led the American Library Association (ALA) to establish its Library War Service, which was directed by Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam. Artist Charles Buckles Falls and others created a series of posters to encourage Americans to donate books and to prompt soldiers to use camp libraries. From 1917 to 1920, the ALA and its affiliates distributed between seven and ten million books and magazines and established roughly thirty-six libraries at camps across the United States and in Europe. Soldiers, including Gustave Sanow, submitted requests for reading materials in numerous ways, including the postcard displayed here.
108. LOCEC3_170404_142.JPG: "Xmas Gifts for Men Over There and Those Who Are Going" [Franklin Simon & Co. advertisement], New York Tribune, November 4, 1917. Serial and Government Publications Division, Library of Congress (129.00.00) Enlarge Previous 8 of 9 Next All Objects Gifts for Servicemen As the first Christmas after U.S. entry into the war approached, the Franklin Simon store on New York's Fifth Avenue advertised gifts to send the troops. The ad featured radium dial wrist watches, a tempting gift for servicemen, who could then read their glowing watch dials in the dark. The manufacture of these watches posed considerable health risks for young female workers at the United States Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company factories, who painted the tiny numbers on the dials. Dubbed "Radium Girls," the women were encouraged to lick their paintbrushes to keep the tips pointed, thereby ingesting fatal radiation doses. Radium paint was also used on the gauges of military instruments during the war.
109. LOCEC3_170404_146.JPG: News of the Offensive Rotogravure coverage of the action at St. Mihiel, the first major offensive organized and led by the recently formed U.S. First Army led by General John J. Pershing, focuses on victorious American and French forces. The images of smiling American soldiers and Allied tanks, along with separate newspaper reports of lower than expected Allied casualties and high German prisoner counts, served to bolster support for the war. Pictured here is American opera singer Cobina Johnson (later Cobina Wright), celebrated for entertaining the troops, even under fire.
110. LOCEC3_170404_151.JPG: American Red Cross Almost one-third of the U.S. population contributed to the Red Cross as volunteers or donors, with a staggering $400 million in funds and material raised in support of its programs at home and abroad. This monumental poster titled "The Greatest Mother in the World," makes a clear visual connection to Christian imagery in which the Virgin Mary cradles the figure of Christ in her lap. According to the Committee on Public Information, the image "appeared in newspapers, magazines, and posters with greater repetition and force than any other advertisement for any phase of Government endeavor since the war began."
111. LOCEC3_170404_160.JPG: The Naval War at Sea This post-war, commercially produced map summarizes the story of the complex war at sea and was created to celebrate the Allied victory. Both the Allies and the Central Powers recognized the crucial importance of controlling the seas -- principal routes for securing food, medicine, and military supplies. As soon as it entered the war in 1914, Great Britain deployed its powerful surface fleet and used sea mines to blockade the Central Powers, with help from France and, later, the United States. Effectively bottled up in its home waters for most of the war, the German surface fleet could do little to break the Allies' increasingly strong stranglehold. After February 1915, the Germans relied, ever more heavily, on U-boats (submarines) to prevent supplies from reaching the Allies.
112. LOCEC3_170404_179.JPG: Certificate of Service Though the American World War I soldier pictured here is unidentified, his uniform indicates that he served with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Their three-towered castle appears on his collar insignia and is echoed in artist Dan Smith's commemorative certificate design that also features symbols for Infantry, Cavalry, Field Artillery, Coast Artillery, Signal Corps, the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, and the Medical Corps. Flanked below them are allied country flags while Columbia, representing the United States, presides above, gazing toward a battle scene. More than one million African Americans responded to the draft with more than 350,000 serving in segregated military units.
113. LOCEC3_170404_187.JPG: Reminders of War The medal, dog tags, and French bank note for fifty centimes displayed in this case belonged to Arthur C. Chandler, a soldier and cook from Oklahoma. Chandler served during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the last and longest American-led, Western-Front campaign of the war. The medal with the distinctive double rainbow ribbon was known as a World War I Victory Medal and was given to everyone who served in the U.S. armed forces during the Great War.
114. LOCEC3_170404_195.JPG: Tanks When tanks were first introduced, it was hoped they could help break the stalemate by plowing through the enemy lines. The earliest tanks were large, slow, prone to breakdowns, and often got stuck in craters. In 1917, French automaker Renault introduced the FT, a lighter, quicker tank with a rotating turret that was equipped with either a cannon or a machine gun. It proved to be more effective in battle.
115. LOCEC3_170404_200.JPG: Rex Bixby Rex Bixby spent two years in the Army National Guard before he enlisted in the regular army in 1917. He was sent to Texas to train as a pilot at the School of Military Aeronautics. Though he did not serve overseas, the early days of aviation were fraught with danger. According to the newspaper accounts pasted into a scrapbook he kept, Bixby was injured in a crash and one of his fellow pilots was killed during a training mission. Like all soldiers, Bixby's personal identity tags or "dog tags" ensured that he could be identified and loved ones notified in the event he was wounded or died in service.
116. LOCEC3_170404_207.JPG: Official War Pictures This compendium of U.S. Signal Corps photographs was selected from the official files of the U.S. War department, in the words of Secretary of War Newton Baker "to illustrate the magnitude and effectiveness of the American military effort." In the image on the left-hand page, members of the 132nd Infantry Regiment, 33rd Division take advantage of camouflage left by German troops during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The caption reads: "From Sept. 27 to Oct. 4 this division held the west bank, patrolling and reconnoitering in anticipation of the attack on Oct. 8, which involved crossing the river." The Meuse River is pictured in the aerial shot to the right.
117. LOCEC3_170404_219.JPG: Industrialized Warfare World War I was unlike any that had preceded it. At the war's outbreak, Europeans had expected the conflict to be short. However, combat soon bogged down into a stalemate. On the western front, both sides dug complex trench networks that stretched for hundreds of miles across Belgian Flanders and northern France. Industry mass-produced artillery, machine guns, and ammunition at extraordinary rates while railroads carried a continuous flow of munitions and soldiers to the front. At the same time, the combatants pursued technological means to break the stalemate. The results -- tanks, poison gas, and the military use of airplanes -- were too new to have dramatic effects on the outcome of the Great War, but they would transform future warfare.
118. LOCEC3_170404_222.JPG: U-boat Attacks These German maps highlight the widespread and numerous attacks launched by Germany's U-boats throughout the war. By November 1918, Germany had sunk more than 5,000 merchant ships and more than 100 warships; tens of thousands of lives were lost. This was achieved at a high cost to the German navy, as 217 of its 351 submarines were sunk with a loss of more than 5,000 sailors. The German effort, nonetheless, could not overcome Allied sea power and their industrial capacity to replace lost ships and supplies. The map depicts areas where Germany threatened to sink both Allied and neutral merchant ships and shows cross-sections and detailed plans of a German U-boat.
119. LOCEC3_170404_246.JPG: "Toxic Smoke" Trained as an engineer, Captain Earle Covington Smith requested a commission in the Ordnance Officers Reserve Corps. After a stint as a proof officer, during which he tested various brands of ammunition, he was transferred to France, where he eventually became a gas officer. In his diary, Smith noted the chemical makeup of particular toxic gases, the construction of hand grenades, and how to remove mustard gas from the skin. Serving as an "official nose," Smith worked to ensure that soldiers were properly equipped with functional gas masks, trained to recognize different gases, and able to identify the start of an attack. This Bavarian spiked helmet likely was brought back to the United States as a war souvenir. The motto on the helmet "In treue fest" translates as "steadfast in loyalty."
120. LOCEC3_170404_247.JPG: Albert John Carpenter Albert Carpenter enlisted in the 36th Division of the 142nd Infantry as a nineteen-year-old student. Carpenter served in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in France during the final days of the war. As a soldier in the trenches along the Hindenberg Line, he experienced the gassings, mud, and bloodshed for which the war is infamous. In a series of short but vivid entries, his diary chronicles a single month, October 1918, which he calls "the most eventful month of [my] life." On this page of his diary, Carpenter describes enduring a gas attack: "My lungs very soar [sic] and throughing [sic] up blood."
121. LOCEC3_170404_254.JPG: German helmet, probably acquired by soldier Walker Harrison Jordon, ca. 1918.
122. LOCEC3_170404_262.JPG: Albert John Carpenter Albert Carpenter enlisted in the 36th Division of the 142nd Infantry as a nineteen-year-old student. Carpenter served in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in France during the final days of the war. As a soldier in the trenches along the Hindenberg Line, he experienced the gassings, mud, and bloodshed for which the war is infamous. In a series of short but vivid entries, his diary chronicles a single month, October 1918, which he calls "the most eventful month of [my] life." On this page of his diary, Carpenter describes enduring a gas attack: "My lungs very soar [sic] and throughing [sic] up blood."
123. LOCEC3_170404_274.JPG: A Howitzer The war brought with it an increase in artillery and experimentation in artillery tactics. Cannons like this French Schneider 155mm howitzer were used by the U.S. Army to attack the German lines. A trained crew could fire three 100-pound shells per minute a distance of approximately 12,500 yards. The photograph shows a soldier standing in front of the cannon holding a tool in the barrel, assisting the 29th Infantry Division in France.
124. LOCEC3_170404_285.JPG: The Loss of a Son July 1918 was a rending time for the family of Theodore Roosevelt. On July 14, Theodore Roosevelt's youngest son, Quentin, an AEF pilot, was shot down and killed. All four of Roosevelt's sons served in World War One, but only Quentin was killed in action. In this letter, noted author Rudyard Kipling, whose own son had perished in the war, attempts to console Theodore Roosevelt. The Roosevelts chose not to bring Quentin home for burial, his gravesite pictured here is in France. Writing to General Peyton March, Roosevelt noted: "We have always believed, that ‘where the tree falls, there let it lie.'" Although many American families brought their fallen sons home, numerous others, like the Roosevelts, chose to have them buried where they died.
125. LOCEC3_170404_286.JPG: Rudyard Kipling to Theodore Roosevelt, July 18, 1918
126. LOCEC3_170404_295.JPG: Armistice On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, an armistice negotiated between Germany and the Allies ended the major fighting of World War I. The Meuse-Argonne offensive had given the Allies an important victory, but Germany itself had not been invaded and a large German army remained in the field. However, its allies Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria had already abandoned the fight; the Allied blockade increasingly threatened the food supply and economy of Germany; and the prospect of millions more American soldiers flowing across the Atlantic convinced German leaders that their situation would only worsen. Worldwide, the fighting killed about ten million soldiers and wounded approximately twenty million more. Included in these numbers were more than 100,000 dead and 200,000 wounded Americans. Millions of civilians also died directly or indirectly from the conflict, many by starvation and disease. The war had taken a catastrophic human toll.
127. LOCEC3_170404_297.JPG: No Man's Land By the end of the war many towns across Europe were destroyed and forests reduced to fallen logs and bare tree trunks. Populations were devastated: over 2,000,000 German, 1,000,000 British, 1,700,000 Russian and French soldiers each, perished. Fields were crisscrossed with trenches, pockmarked with craters, and littered with debris. Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern section of Belgium, was the scene of heavy fighting throughout most of the war. This elegiac photograph taken by Ohioan William Lester King, working for the Military Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army, captures that bleak devastation.
128. LOCEC3_170404_305.JPG: Lester Westcott Lester B. Westcott served with the 51st Pioneer Infantry in France and Germany, erecting barbed wire entanglements, building a stockade, and pulling guard duty. He could not share many details in his letters, but Westcott regularly assured his mother that he was healthy and would be home soon. Three days after the armistice that ended the fighting, he was able to write to his mother: "Well I suppose you are very much relieved now that I have scared the Kaiser out of Germany and I have come out of the mill without a scratch and have every reason to believe I will return O.K."
129. LOCEC3_170404_309.JPG: Lester B. Westcott, Company C, 51st Pioneer Infantry, to his mother, November 14, 1918, and Westcott in uniform.
130. LOCEC3_170404_312.JPG: "Peace" Not everyone was pleased that peace had finally returned to Western Europe. The day the armistice commenced, George Patton penned a poem encapsulating his feelings. The poem described Patton's "dismay" at the popular excitement that greeted the peace, which he characterized as the "cruel glee of the weak." Patton's poem mourned the loss during peacetime of the virtues that he believed war inspired, such as sacrifice and purpose. In this draft an editor, possibly Patton's wife Beatrice, has crossed out those lines that express especially strong sentiments like comparing peaceful life to "a festering sewer." In contrast to Patton's view of war, the stereograph of a dead U.S. soldier in a bomb crater takes its title from Robert Burns Wilson's poem "Such is the Death the Soldier Dies."
131. LOCEC3_170404_320.JPG: "All their weary marches done, all their battles fought and won." American dead in the Meuse-Argonne
132. LOCEC3_170404_325.JPG: Ground Gained by the Americans The markings on this map, included in a summary report to the U.S. House of Representatives, indicate the sectors held and the ground gained by American divisions in 1918. The map excludes U.S. advances made during the offensives at Meuse-Argonne, St. Mihiel, and Chateau-Thierry because of the complexity of unit movements during those large battles.
133. LOCEC3_170404_333.JPG: Ground Gained by the Americans The markings on this map, included in a summary report to the U.S. House of Representatives, indicate the sectors held and the ground gained by American divisions in 1918. The map excludes U.S. advances made during the offensives at Meuse-Argonne, St. Mihiel, and Chateau-Thierry because of the complexity of unit movements during those large battles.
134. LOCEC3_170404_347.JPG: Armistice President Woodrow Wilson announced that, with the European armistice signed, "Everything for which America has fought has been accomplished." He believed that the armistice brought an important opportunity for Americans "to assist by example by sober friendly counsel and by material aid in the establishment of just democracy throughout the world." However, the armistice only ended the fighting between the Allies and Central Powers. Violent conflict continued in Eastern Europe, where a civil war in Russia had broken out, and in the Middle East, where the final borders of Turkey would be fought over for three more years.
135. LOCEC3_170404_351.JPG: War Over Seas With most of the German navy bottled up in the North Sea by the British fleet, the United States never engaged in any major naval battles with the Central Powers. However, the U.S. Navy played a vital role in the extraordinary movement of a massive army across an ocean. By the end of the war, the Allies had shipped two million American military personnel to Europe. Because of the comparatively small size of the U.S. merchant marine fleet, a majority of these Americans were transported by British ships or ships confiscated from the Central Powers. The Navy escorted these troop and supply convoys while under constant threat of German submarine attacks. This successful sealift operation allowed the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), commanded by General John J. Pershing, to become the largest U.S. force deployed overseas to that point.
136. LOCEC3_170404_353.JPG: Troopships The United States commandeered the German ocean liner SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie after relations with that country were severed in February 1917. Renamed the USS Mount Vernon, she served as an American troop transport ship. This photograph was taken just after the ship's return to Boston, where it was to receive repairs for damage due to a torpedo strike the previous month. The ever-present threat of submarine attack, the crowded conditions, and boredom made the lengthy Atlantic crossing a challenge shared by all Americans who served in Europe. This YMCA pamphlet attempted to make the trip easier for soldiers by providing detailed information about the voyage and conditions on the troopships.
137. LOCEC3_170404_355.JPG: George M. Cohan. "Over There." New York: Leo. Feist, Inc., 1917. Original musical sketch by Cohan.
138. LOCEC3_170404_364.JPG: "The Yanks Are Coming!" Approximately 35,000 patriotic songs, military marches, love ballads, and protest songs were copyrighted during World War I. More than half were written by women, who usually collaborated as lyricist with a male composer. Lyrics ranged from rallying cries and odes to bravery to pleas for pacifism and celebrations of peace. George M. Cohan, considered the father of American musical comedy, became the first entertainer to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, which he received in 1940 particularly for his 1917 patriotic standards "A Grand Old Flag" and "Over There" -- the latter song most closely identified with the American experience of the war. On view is one of the many sheet music versions of the song and Cohan's own manuscript, which he signed. Due in part to the absence of radio, World War I was the last American war in which singing was a widespread and popular pastime among the troops. Whether filling the time on the tedious passage across the Atlantic Ocean or helping to boost morale on the battlefield, song could be heard nearly everywhere among the American Expeditionary Forces as this "songster" pamphlet published by the YMCA helps to illustrate.
139. LOCEC3_170404_367.JPG: "I'll Be Ready Very Soon" General John J. Pershing led the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) that would join the fight in Europe. Pershing was well known as the general with the most recent experience of leading U.S. troops into battle, having commanded the military expedition into Mexico in 1916 to pursue Mexican guerrilla leader Pancho Villa, whose troops had attacked Columbus, New Mexico. In this hand-drawn cartoon by a Pershing admirer, the general is depicted as Uncle Sam's axe against German autocracy. Secretary of War Newton Baker sent an accompanying note to Pershing: "I have no doubt that you will use the axe [labeled "Pershing"] in accordance with what is evidently the artist's intention."
140. LOCEC3_170404_375.JPG: Receiving the Rank of Full General In this October 1917 telegram, General Pershing thanked Newton Baker for his promotion to full general in, as the first contingents of U.S. troops were nearly ready to enter the frontline trenches. Secretary Baker had asked Congress to reestablish the rank of General, which, at that point, was higher than the top rank in the U.S. Army. Baker argued successfully that the scale of responsibility placed on Pershing as the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) deserved the higher rank. Only George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip Sheridan previously held ranks higher than Major General in the United States Army.
141. LOCEC3_170404_379.JPG: Popular Songs of the AEF. YMCA, 1918.
142. LOCEC3_170404_386.JPG: Sinking of the Tuscania German submarines were a constant threat to the troop carriers that shuttled the two million U.S. military personnel to Europe during the war. However, with the vigilant escort of the Allied navies, few troop ships were ever seriously endangered by submarines. Chief electrician Harold L. Dunne describes a very rare event, the torpedoing and sinking on February 5, 1918, of a troopship, HMT Tuscania, then packed with American troops, its passengers swimming for lifeboats, and the Kanawaha's hunt for the attacking submarine. Dunne also notes that his fellow soldiers were belting out the words from a popular tune: "Oh joy, Oh boy, where do we go from here?" Some 200 American soldiers who had been aboard Tuscania lost their lives.
143. LOCEC3_170404_394.JPG: Howard Johnson and Percy Wenrich. "Where Do We Go From Here?" New York: Leo. Feist, Inc., 1917.
144. LOCEC3_170404_398.JPG: Edward Kallstrom Originally from Iowa, Edward Kallstrom was drafted into the Army in May 1918, and arrived in Europe just as the war was ending. He was shuffled around from unit to unit, ultimately serving as a clerk in the Central Records Office Headquarters in Bourges, France. He writes to his sister on Knights of Columbus stationery after arriving in France: "The trip across the sea was a fine one, made it in short time and without dangerous incident. The sea was quite calm so that sea-sickness was not so common." Millions of American soldiers made similar journeys, and like Kallstrom, most had never been out of the country.
145. LOCEC3_170404_408.JPG: "Welcome, Brave Allies" By the spring of 1918, large numbers of U.S. soldiers were arriving in France. These reinforcements were appearing none too quickly for the French who, along with British and other Allied troops, were desperately holding off a major German offensive. In his welcome to the Americans on June 22, General Philippe Pétain, the commander of French forces, said, "Every American soldier on the soil of France represents a portion of national territory reconquered."
146. LOCEC4_170404_001.JPG: World Overturned
147. LOCEC4_170404_006.JPG: World Overturned
148. LOCEC4_170404_020.JPG: World Overturned The end of the war on November 11, 1918, brought tremendous relief around the globe but left in its wake questions about the new world the Great War had molded and about Americans' role in it. World War I was a world-changing event. During the war, four large powerful empires -- Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German -- fell apart. In Africa and Asia, the wartime contributions of colonial troops, a weakened Europe, and Wilson's promise of "self-determination" planted the seeds of decolonization. Revolution took hold in Russia under the communists and threatened the governments of Germany, Italy, and others. Facilitated by the flow of millions of people put in motion by the war, the exchange of ideas, customs, and artistic expression spread new forms of global culture, even fueling an international jazz craze. In this transformed world, Americans confronted the challenges of how to help negotiate a lasting peace, how to uphold the principles President Wilson and others claimed the country had fought for, and how to redraw the map of the world, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa -- the former imperial territories of the defeated Central Powers. At home, they considered what the role of the United States should be in this emerging international order, how to reintegrate veterans returning from the war, and how to remember the war and those who served and sacrificed. World War I had shaken the lives of Americans and shaped a modern world to which they now needed to adapt.
149. LOCEC4_170404_021.JPG: Peace and a New World Order? Even before the end of the war, Woodrow Wilson, in his "Fourteen Points" address, outlined a vision for a new peaceful postwar world order that fostered global collaboration and free trade among nations. The international conference that convened in Paris in January 1919 to negotiate a peace settlement presented the president with the opportunity to realize this vision. However, the war had transformed the world, and U.S. allies and other Americans had ideas contrary to Wilson's proposals. As the conference delegates negotiated compromises, Wilson placed his hopes in a new League of Nations, an organization where disputes between countries could be addressed. The resulting Treaty of Versailles imposed severe terms on Germany, arousing criticism within the United States, but most objections centered on the League of Nations. Ultimately, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty or join the League. The United States would play a very different role in the postwar world from the one Wilson had envisioned.
150. LOCEC4_170404_023.JPG: E. N. Clark, artist. Dead -- But the Remains Are Still with Us [Mars, the Roman god of war, lay vanquished over the earth], 1918.
151. LOCEC4_170404_031.JPG: Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" Long before the armistice, President Woodrow Wilson advocated a peace settlement in Europe based on what he viewed as sound principle and humane justice. Wilson's "Fourteen Points" address of January 8, 1918, in which he laid out a vision of a peaceful international order, was one of his most famous speeches. Wilson's vision included freedom of the seas, arms limitations, the return of territory conquered by Germany, autonomy for nationalities ruled by the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and a new association of nations to guarantee the political independence and territorial integrity of all states. Wilson drafted many of his speeches in shorthand -- displayed here with the typed reading copy.
152. LOCEC4_170404_033.JPG: Woodrow Wilson. Original typescript version of the "Fourteen Points," 1918.
153. LOCEC4_170404_047.JPG: A Seat at the Table One of the difficult questions at the Paris Peace Conference was whether and in what manner to allow Russian participation. Although Russia had been an Allied combatant for nearly three years, the second stage of the months'-long Russian Revolution took the country out of the war. Four months after the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin obtained power in November 1917 Russia made peace with Germany and forfeited a quarter of its territory. By the summer of 1918, Russia was engulfed in civil war as multiple factions sought to depose Lenin's communist government. In this letter, President Wilson expressed his skepticism that the Russian people could be adequately represented by a single faction. No Russian delegates participated in the Paris peace talks. In this image, photojournalist Helen Johns Kirkland, captured members of a committee of Allied nations intently reading documents related to the proposed treaty. Wilson is shown with head bent at the center of the right side of the table.
154. LOCEC4_170404_055.JPG: The Pan African Conference During the war, the interaction of African colonial troops and black American soldiers helped to establish a distinct strain of pan-African politics. NAACP co-founder and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois and Senegalese official Blaise Diagne organized the Pan African Conference of 1919. Held over three days in February, it brought together fifty-seven delegates from Africa, the West Indies, and the United States and helped to create a foundation for the development of black internationalism that contributed to African and Asian independence movements in the decades that followed World War I.
155. LOCEC4_170404_060.JPG: First Publication in America of the Paris Peace Treaty Recognizing the importance of the Treaty of Versailles, the New York American published the draft in full. The final document, signed on June 28, 1919, ended the state of war between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany. Some argued that the treaty was excessively harsh toward Germany and others that it was too weak to guarantee a lasting peace. Aspects of the treaty's first twenty-six articles, which established the League of Nations, concerned many U.S. senators. Wilson refused to consider any changes to the wording, and the Senate refused to ratify the treaty. The U.S. signed separate treaties with Germany, Austria, and Hungary and never joined the League of Nations, despite President Woodrow Wilson's efforts to establish and promote the League.
156. LOCEC4_170404_067.JPG: The Future of the World's Children The AEF published The Stars and Stripes newspaper from February 8, 1918, to June 13, 1919. General John J. Pershing wanted a newspaper written by American servicemen for American servicemen. The paper's mission was to strengthen troop morale and promote unity within the scattered American forces. Its circulation rose over the course of the war, from 1,000 to 526,000, using a layout typical of American newspapers of the day and a complex distribution network. This edition's prophetic front-page cartoon, in support of the League of Nations, depicts children who would be draft age by World War II.
157. LOCEC4_170404_086.JPG: The League of Nations Creation of a League of Nations was central to Wilson's strategy for achieving a peaceful postwar order. He believed that an international organization that would allow great and small countries around the world to collaborate and provide a forum for resolving interstate conflicts could prevent future international wars. Drawing on thinking current in the United States and Europe, Wilson composed this draft covenant describing how such a League of Nations should work. Such a global organization dedicated to international affairs had never existed. Active from 1920 to World War II, the League of Nations, provided a precedent for the later United Nations.
158. LOCEC4_170404_090.JPG: The Covenant of the League of Nations, in French and English in League of the Nations, Official Journal, February 1920.
159. LOCEC4_170404_093.JPG: Establishing the Boundaries of Poland Prior to World War I, Poland's territory was divided among the empires of Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. The war reignited Polish dreams of self-determination. President Wilson and his administration wanted to redraw the country's borders based on the dominant language of the people in a given area. However Great Britain feared that approach would give Poland too much of Germany's natural resources and industries in the east. Britain wanted Germany left in a position to pay restitution for the war and to avoid a communist uprising, like the one in Russia.
160. LOCEC4_170404_097.JPG: Dividing the Middle East The peace settlement in the Middle East that painfully and violently emerged from the ending of World War I carved up the former Ottoman Empire and established national borders that have, for the most part, lasted to the present day. Some of those new borders were quite literally drawn on old maps, as Allied leaders considered attempting to group peoples by their nationality and languages and to protect their own imperial and economic interests. This map from Woodrow Wilson's papers shows a proposal for a large Armenian state and Jewish homeland that was never implemented.
161. LOCEC4_170404_114.JPG: Does He Get a Job? After serving their country, returning soldiers needed to be reintegrated into the workforce. In January 1918, The U.S. Employment Service was created under the auspices of the Department of Labor. In its first year, the service referred 6 million workers for 10 million job openings. The service was still active after armistice, but its funding dwindled. In this poster, Dan Smith -- a magazine illustrator and newspaper artist-correspondent -- created a dramatic appeal to the patriotic spirit of U.S. businesses.
162. LOCEC4_170404_119.JPG: A Memorial Map More than 12,000 Native Americans served in the U.S. Army during the Great War and their casualties were high. At least five percent of Native Americans who served were killed in action, as compared to one percent of servicemen in the AEF as a whole. This memorial map, published by the Army, denotes Native American participation, graves, and military decorations awarded in France and Belgium. An inset on the map notes that this a "special sketch of noted battlefields, comprising Verdun & Meuse, Argonne & St. Mihiel operations, where the Indians occupied so many sectors and won such fine distinction."
163. LOCEC4_170404_125.JPG: Returning Home Reintegrating soldiers into American life greatly concerned government policymakers. In addition to the War Risk Insurance Act of 1917, which established disability pensions for AEF soldiers, Congress approved the Vocational Rehabilitation Act (VRA) in 1918. The VRA sought to retrain wounded returning soldiers for new roles, particularly if they were unable to return to their previous vocations due to disability. The implementation of this controversial legislation was met with resistance. The agency responsible for delivering training to disabled veterans largely failed in its mission. Numerous veterans argued that they were being forced into vocations while being denied access to academic courses that might serve as a bridge to more lucrative professional careers. The ongoing activism of World War I veterans would lay the groundwork for the modern disability movement. By 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, veterans organized a mass protest in Washington, D.C., over compensation promised to them as a result of their activism. Referred to as the "Bonus March," veterans demanded immediate payment of bonds that were not scheduled for conversion until 1945.
164. LOCEC4_170404_129.JPG: Medal of Honor Recipient An important way in which the United States officially remembered the war was by honoring the service of its veterans with medals and other awards. Lieutenant Joel T. Boone, a surgeon who had treated wounded marines at the "inferno" of Belleau Wood, earned the nation's highest award for valor in action, the Medal of Honor, for his heroism in France in July 1918. Through a heavy mist of gas, as guns blazed, Boone rushed into an open field with no protection to administer first aid. When Boone exhausted his medical supplies, he twice ran through artillery fire to replenish them and quickly returned to the wounded.
165. LOCEC4_170404_135.JPG: Lobbying for a Bonus As soldiers returned home, Americans considered the question of what the country owed veterans for their war service. In this letter, veteran Herbert G. Poland of Maine wrote his congressman urging him to support a bill granting a year's pay to all ex-service members who had served during the war. A common argument that veterans and their supporters made to advance such a postwar bonus was that the United States had prospered economically during the war and that those serving had missed out on economic opportunities enjoyed by other citizens. By 1924, Congress had passed a bill that provided veterans a bonus in savings bonds that would not mature until 1945.
166. LOCEC4_170404_138.JPG: Rehabilitation and Reintegration The war injured more than 200,000 Americans, one of the great human costs of the fighting. Congress responded to the issue of those who were permanently disabled with the Smith-Sears Vocational Rehabilitation Act. The act expanded the role of a federal board in assisting disabled veterans with rehabilitation and in finding productive employment and served as a model for future federal legislation on disabilities. In this letter to Wilson, Louisiana Congressman James B. Aswell argued that the armed forces should be the proper agencies to assist disabled veterans. The president signed the act into law in June 1918.
167. LOCEC4_170404_140.JPG: 2nd Lieutenant John Rosamond Johnson, 15th Infantry, New York Guard. "Welcome Home Again." New York: B. Harms and Francis, Day & Hunter, ca. 1919.
168. LOCEC4_170404_143.JPG: Returning Home Paul Rugh (left) and his younger brother Roy Rugh (seated on the right), both born in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, had this portrait made in July 1917 when they registered for military service. Paul, who had already served two four-year enlistments in the Marines between 1903 and 1912, joined this time to protect his younger brother. Instead, he was severely shell shocked and disabled. He was discharged and sent home to their brother Edward, who cared for him until Paul died. Roy saw action at Toul, Second Marne, Chemin des Dames, and St. Mihiel. He suffered lung damage from gasses used at the front but returned home able to work. John Rosamond Johnson, a prolific composer, producer, and performer of African American music, wrote "Welcome Home Again" in 1919. "Gather around and join the crowd in the jubilee, Shake the hand of 'Hero Boys' from over the sea." After serving less than one year as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 15th Infantry, New York Guard, Johnson resumed his musical career.
169. LOCEC4_170404_149.JPG: Service Records Communities across the country memorialized their members' service and sacrifice in the war in a number of ways. The City of Oswego, New York, compiled individual service records of Oswegans who served in all branches of the military, as well as those who served in foreign allied forces during World War I. Each service record is a typed form, and is signed by the individual service member. If the service member died in the war, the form is submitted by the member's parent or nearest relative and carries a gold star.
170. LOCEC4_170404_154.JPG: Remembering the War Immediately following the armistice, Americans worked hard to assure that future generations would remember the catastrophic war and honor those who served and sacrificed. Medals and military decorations signified the extraordinary contributions individual veterans had made. Local monuments, erected around the country, and publications memorializing soldiers and their war service embodied community sentiments and memories of the war. American military cemeteries in Europe provided a somber reminder of the human cost of the Great War. To honor U.S. soldiers missing in action with no known grave, the government erected the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. What and how to remember were not always easy questions to answer, and Americans offered an array of ways to memorialize the war. However, each of them testified to the profound impact and lasting significance of the Great War.
171. LOCEC4_170404_159.JPG: "All of No Man's Land Is Ours, Lieutenant Jim Europe and his Famous 369th U.S. Infantry 'Hell Fighters' Band" (cameo portrait of Nobel Sissle). New York: M. Witmark & Sons 1918.
172. LOCEC4_170404_161.JPG: James Reese Europe and Jazz Transported to Europe by African American regimental bands and troops, jazz took France by storm. Few individuals could claim more credit for this result than Washington, D.C., native and noted composer-arranger-conductor James Reese Europe, who led the 369th Infantry Regimental Band. Europe's band, which consisted of Puerto Rican and African American musicians, including famed singer-songwriter Nobel Sissle, helped to spread one of America's unique cultural contributions to the world. Simultaneously these bands worked to undo racial segregation by bringing Europeans and white and black Americans into common appreciation of the new musical form. The French, in particular, warmed to jazz. As Charles Hamilton Houston wrote in his diary: "Paris is taken away with [Jazz] and our style of dancing. The girls come after the boys in taxis and beg them to go to the dance. Colored boys are all the go."
173. LOCEC4_170404_163.JPG: Genuine jazz for the yankee wounded In the courtyard of a Paris hospital for the American wounded, an American negro military band, led by Lt. James R. Europe, entertains the patients with real American jazz.
174. LOCEC4_170404_167.JPG: Charles Hamilton Houston. Diary entry, January 16, 1919
175. LOCEC4_170404_186.JPG: 1919 Nobel Peace Prize On December 11, 1920, the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament awarded Woodrow Wilson the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in creating the League of Nations, despite the fact that the United States had failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or join the League. The prize recognized Wilson's vision of a new world order guided by an international organization where states could resolve disputes and keep the peace. However, the medal also serves as a reminder of the later failures of the League of Nations. And despite the prediction by author H. G. Wells to the contrary, the Great War was not "the war that will end war."
176. LOCEC5_170404_004.JPG: From the onset of World War I, newspapers provided the public with a steady stream of war front and home front coverage. Sometimes accurate, sometimes conjecture, these headlines and front pages demonstrate the challenges of reporting in real time and often stand in contrast to the historical events on this timeline. The images were drawn principally from World War History: Daily Records and Comments as Appeared in American and Foreign Newspapers, 1914-1926, a 400-volume, 80,000-page set, assembled after the war under the direction of Otto Spengler, owner of a newspaper clipping service. Its fragile pages are currently being digitized and will join a wealth of other World War I era newspapers already accessible through the Library of Congress's website, including in "Chronicling America," a database containing more than eleven million newspaper pages from across the United States. These online resources supplement the microfilm and paper collections of the Library -- one of the largest newspaper collections in the world.
177. LOCEC5_170404_006.JPG: 1914 June 28: Assassination of Archduke of Austria-Hungary Franz Ferdinand July 28: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia August 1–4: Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Russia, and Britain all commit to war August 4: Germany invades Belgium; United States declares its neutrality August 15: Panama Canal officially opens August 23: Japan declares war on Germany August 24: American poet Alan Seeger volunteers for French Foreign Legion; many individual Americans go to Europe and join both sides in the conflict August 26: German forces burn Louvain, Belgium
178. LOCEC5_170404_009.JPG: August 25–30: Battle of Tannenberg in which Germany defeats Russia on the Eastern Front; more than 90,000 Russian soldiers surrender to German forces September: Marie Curie becomes director of the Red Cross Radiology Services and begins leading an effort to set up France's first military radiology centers September 5–10: First Battle of the Marne (France); at the time, the largest battle ever with one million soldiers on each side September 14–October 14: 24,000 soldiers from India arrive in France to fight for Allies October 22: Herbert Hoover takes the helm of the Commission for Relief in Belgium October 22–November 22: First Battle of Ypres; combat between German, British, and French forces bogs down into attritional trench warfare October 29: Ottoman Empire attacks Russia December 24: German planes make first air attack on Britain at Dover
179. LOCEC5_170404_016.JPG: 1915 January 25: First official transcontinental telephone call February 8: D. W. Griffith's film, later titled Birth of a Nation, premieres and sweeps the nation May 7: Sinking of British ocean liner Lusitania by a German submarine results in nearly 1,200 deaths, 128 of which are American May 23: Italy enters war on Allied side July 9: German South-West Africa (modern Namibia) surrenders to South Africa July 17: British women demand equal rights to work in war industries September 15: "Jelly Roll Blues" by Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton is published; the piece later is called the "first jazz composition"
180. LOCEC5_170404_018.JPG: October 15: J. P. Morgan & Co. and other American bankers agree to loan Britain and France $500,000,000 to purchase war supplies; it is still the largest private loan floated in any country ever October 23: More than 25,000 women, demanding the right to vote, march in New York City November 25: Albert Einstein publicly presents his general theory of relativity December 4: Henry Ford's Peace Ship sets sail to Europe; peace activists aboard seek an end to the war through mediation December: Allies evacuate from Gallipoli almost 83,000 men, many of these soldiers are from Australia and New Zealand; Ottoman victory boosts standing of future Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
181. LOCEC5_170404_020.JPG: 1916 February 21: Battle of Verdun opens with German artillery assault deploying more than 1,600 artillery pieces and firing 100,000 shells per hour March 15: U.S. troops under the command of General John J. Pershing cross the border into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa April 16: American pilots form the Lafayette Escadrille in France April 24: Easter Rising: more than 1,600 Irish nationalists rebel against British government; uprising results in 2,000 dead and its leaders executed June 5: Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire begins with an uprising in Medina
182. LOCEC5_170404_024.JPG: July 1: Battle of the Somme begins; the conflict results in massive casualties: 419,000 for the British, 202,000 for the French, and as many as 600,000 for the Germans July 30: Explosion in New Jersey set by German saboteurs destroys the Black Tom munitions depot, resulting in 3 dead and more than 30 million dollars in damages September 15: Britain first uses the tank in battle at the Somme November 7: Woodrow Wilson, campaigning on the slogan "He kept us out of war," barely wins the presidential election of 1916 November 18: Battle of the Somme ends after four and a half months December 18: The nine-month-long Battle of Verdun ends; French African troops contribute to fighting at Verdun; by the end of the war, 450,000 soldiers from France's African colonies serve in combat
183. LOCEC5_170404_050.JPG: 1917 February 1: Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare; submarines threaten all shipping to Britain, endangering U.S. trade and travelers February 20: Food riots begin in New York City and spread to other cities, as several hundred female protesters grow angry over sharp jumps in food prices due to the war March 1: White House releases Zimmermann telegram to the press, exposing Germany's attempt to draw Mexico into war against the United States March 15: Tsar Nicholas II abdicates during the Russian Revolution and is replaced by a provisional government April 6: U.S. declares war on Germany April 24: Emergency Loan Act passes; U.S. begins First Liberty Loan Bond Campaign to fund war efforts, to be followed by four other bond drives May 18: Selective Service Act passes, which enabled the U.S. to form its first army derived largely from conscription
184. LOCEC5_170404_053.JPG: June 15: Congress passes Espionage Act, which limits civil liberties during wartime June 26: U.S. 1st Division (approximately 14,000 soldiers) of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) lands in France, the first American combat troops to arrive in Europe June 28: "Over There" by George M. Cohan is recorded July 2: East St. Louis Race Riots: pressures arising from the movement of blacks north during the Great Migration results in violence as white residents attack their African American counterparts who attempt to defend themselves from attack July 6: Arab forces aligned with the Allies seize the port of Akaba on the Red Sea July 28: Silent Parade: 10,000 African Americans march in New York City to protest lynching, specifically the violence of the East St. Louis Riots August 28: Ten suffragists are arrested protesting outside the White House
185. LOCEC5_170404_056.JPG: October 21: U.S. troops enter the frontline trenches in France for the first time November 2: Balfour Declaration is issued in London, giving British support for establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine November 7: Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin seize power from the Provisional Government in Russia November 10: Battle of Caporetto ends with a disastrous Italian retreat December 7: U.S. declares war on Austria-Hungary to prevent Italy from leaving war December 17: Congress passes prohibition amendment to the U.S. Constitution
186. LOCEC5_170404_083.JPG: 1918 January 8: Woodrow Wilson delivers his "Fourteen Points" address January 9: Wilson announces his support for a constitutional amendment to grant women the right to vote February 8: U.S. armed forces newspaper The Stars and Stripes begins publication March 3: Russia's Bolshevik government signs the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany; Russia leaves the war but loses roughly 1/2 of its industry, 1/3 of its farmland, and 1/3 of its population March 4: First U.S. soldiers are reported ill with influenza at Camp Funston in Kansas; the global epidemic will claim more lives than the war itself with more than 30 million of the global population succumbing to the pandemic March 21: German spring offensives begins; this series of German attacks on the Western Front will strain Allies almost to the breaking point March 26: In the U.S. Senate, it is admitted that the United States will have 37 aircraft ready for the AEF by July, rather than the 12,000 that had been promised March 31: U.S. initiates Daylight Savings Time
187. LOCEC5_170404_086.JPG: April 21: The "Red Baron" Manfred von Richthofen is shot down and killed April 21: Guatemala at war with Germany May 16: Sedition Act of 1918; extends provision of the Espionage Act and further limits free speech June: Civil war in Russia erupts June 6: Battle of Chateau-Thierry; U.S. Marines launch attack at Belleau Wood July 15–17: Second Battle of the Marne; French and U.S. forces stop German advance on Paris July 16–17: Bolsheviks execute Tsar Nicholas II and his family August 10: U.S. First Army organized; U.S. now has an independent fighting force in France capable of conducting large-scale offensives August 16: First U.S. soldiers arrive in Vladivostok, Russia's Siberian port; these occupying forces eventually grow to 9,000
188. LOCEC5_170404_089.JPG: September 4: 4,500 U.S. soldiers land in Archangel, North Russia September 12–16: Battle of St. Mihiel; first U.S. led offensive in World War I proves largely successful September 14: Socialist leader Eugene Debs is sentenced to ten years imprisonment for violating the Espionage Act by giving an anti-war speech. September 26: Meuse-Argonne Offensive begins; the battle in which more Americans were killed than in any battles of the Civil War or World War II October 6: Germany requests armistice; Allies refuse request October 28: Czechoslovakia declares independence from Austria-Hungary October 30: Ottomans agree to armistice October 31: In one week, influenza virus kills 21,000 in the United States
189. LOCEC5_170404_101.JPG: 1918 November 3: Austria-Hungary agrees to armistice November 9: Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II leaves for exile in the Netherlands November 11: Armistice with Germany December 1: Allies begin occupying Germany's Rhineland region; W. E. B. Du Bois sails for France to begin organizing the First Pan African Conference December 13: Woodrow Wilson arrives in Paris for peace conference; he becomes the first serving president to travel to Europe
190. LOCEC5_170404_104.JPG: 1919 January 18: Paris Peace Conference begins January 19: 18th Amendment on prohibition ratified March 3: In Schenck v. U.S., the Supreme Court rules free speech may be limited during wartime, notably when it presents a "clear and present danger" June 4: Congress approves the 19th Amendment on women's right to vote June 28: Germany and Allies sign Treaty of Versailles
191. LOCEC5_170404_107.JPG: July 27 – August 3: Chicago Race Riots: arising from the pressures of the Great Migration, white mobs attack African Americans and African Americans fight back, 15 whites and 23 blacks perish in riot, illustrative of a series of riots across the nation including Washington, D.C., referred to as "Red Summer" September 3: Woodrow Wilson begins his tour of the U.S. to promote the Treaty of Versailles; later, on tour, he collapses from his efforts November 19: U.S. Senate refuses to ratify the Treaty of Versailles
192. LOCEC5_170404_109.JPG: 1920 January 16: League of Nations holds its first meeting August 18 – 19: Amendment on women's suffrage ratified
193. LOCEC5_170404_112.JPG: 1921 August 25: Peace treaty signed between U.S. and Germany
194. LOCEC5_170404_132.JPG: Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I This exhibition was made possible, in part, by the Library of Congress Third Century Fund and developed with the support of the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. The Veterans History Project preserves the wartime experience of U.S. veterans from World War I through the current U.S. conflicts. Visit www.loc.gov/vets to see these collections and to learn more about how you can interview a veteran.
195. LOCECH_170408_001.JPG: Belleau Wood The time needed to train and organize the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) meant that American troops did not engage in extensive combat until spring 1918. That spring, German troops had left their trenches and launched a series of major offensives trying to win the war before the Americans arrived in even greater numbers. In early June, the fight for Belleau Wood, a boulder-strewn forest close to Paris, was one of the AEF's early battles. There, the U.S. 2nd Division, a combination of Army and Marine Corps units, helped the French repel a German offensive and then retook Belleau Wood in a ferocious battle that lasted twenty days. For the Marines, who faced the heaviest fighting; June 6, the first day of their assault,was the bloodiest day in the Corps' history up to that point, leaving 222 dead. Belleau Wood took on special meaning for Marines as a demonstration of the Corps' bravery and tenacity.
196. LOCECH_170408_005.JPG: Bois de Belleau This map from the papers of General James G. Harbord, commander of the Marines at Belleau Wood (Bois de Belleau), depicts the course of the battle waged in June 1918. The hand-drawn colored lines show the advancing American front in the vicinity of Bois de Belleau. One can see how gains at first were slow across the open country in front of the woods as Marines had little cover from the German guns hidden in the tree line and behind. However, once the Marines gained a solid foothold among the trees aided by heavy artillery barrages, the entire wood fell much more quickly. On the final day of battle, Sergeant Major Fifth Regiment U.S. Marines Claude Charles Hamel recounts: "Our dead are being piled alongside the road, as there is no time to bury them and we have not enough men to do it."
197. LOCECH_170408_015.JPG: Claude Charles Hamel. "Diary of Claude C. Hamel, Formerly Regimental Personnel Sergeant Major Fifth Regiment U.S. Marines AEF, April, 1917 to August 15, 1919," June 1922. Bound typescript memoir.
198. LOCECH_170408_025.JPG: Hard Fought Victory As Marines fought their way into Belleau Wood, the Germans retreated. By the end of June, the 2nd Division's mixed Marine-Army force had retaken the wood. The hard won victory demonstrated that the Marines could fight successfully as large units on land next to the Army, marking the emergence of the modern Marine Corps.
199. LOCECH_170408_029.JPG: St. Mihiel By summer 1918, the Allies had repelled the last of the German offensives on the western front and had gone on the counterattack. General Pershing had also achieved his goal of building up a substantial American army of more than 500,000 under his direct command and at the ready to conduct a major offensive against the Germans. On September 12, U.S. forces with the assistance of 100,000 French soldiers, attacked the Germans where the front lines bulged into Allied-held territory around the French town of St. Mihiel. This was the first taste of combat for many American soldiers. The five-day battle succeeded in pushing the Germans out of the St. Mihiel pocket. The quick success came, in part, because the Germans had already begun withdrawing forces from the area before the attack began in order to improve their defensive position.
200. LOCECH_170408_032.JPG: Joel T. Boone; U.S. Navy; 6th Marines, medical officer. Diary, June 1918.
201. LOCECH_170408_036.JPG: "A Perfect Inferno" Lieutenant Joel T. Boone, a surgeon from Pennsylvania with the 6th Marines, saw the carnage of Belleau Wood like few others. The first night of the battle he described as "a perfect inferno." Working twelve hours straight in a dressing station near the fighting, he bandaged wounds and treated shock in preparation for the injured Marines to be driven back to field hospitals. During the fight, Boone helped set up a field dressing station to treat the wounded at the Petit Montgivault farm. They had their hands full, as the fierce resistance from the German infantry that occupied the woods inflicted horrendous casualties on the 4th Marine Brigade. A single day of the battle, June 6, when the Marines suffered 1,087 casualties, was the costliest in Marine Corps history, until the battle for the island of Tarawa during World War II.
202. LOCECH_170408_043.JPG: "Belleau Wood Amer Cemetary [sic]. Petit Montgivault Farm Dressing Station. The Dressing Station occupied by Doctor Joel T. Boone, U.S. navy and his hospital corpsmen for more than two weeks. . ." Photograph.
203. LOCECH_170408_055.JPG: St. Mihiel Offensive On September 12, 1918, southeast of Verdun, France, General John J. Pershing launched the first American-led offensive of the war, hurling the recently organized American First Army -- half a million Americans and four French divisions under U.S. command -- against positions the Germans had held around the town of St. Mihiel for nearly four years. Mounting frontal assaults from three sides, Pershing's force suffered thousands of casualties as they fought through curiously light resistance, having attacked as the Germans were in the midst of withdrawing. On September 16 the American offensive ended in victory.
204. LOCECH_170408_060.JPG: Ralph Irving Carey After New Hampshire native Ralph Irving Carey was drafted into the Army, his notebook became a trusted companion, both on and off duty. He recorded lists of procedures, chain of command, rosters, and entries about his daily activities and involvement in the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne Offensives, as well as poetry and the humorous words to tunes including the "Trench Song" and "English Marching Song," which he records here.
205. LOCECH_170408_070.JPG: Vincent Reed. Company K, 358th Infantry, 90th Division. Diary entry September 12, 1918.
206. LOCECH_170408_084.JPG: Vincent Cornelius Reed For World War I infantryman Vincent Reed, the horrors of combat were a sharp contrast to his experiences with the Army of Occupation. Reed fought in the St. Mihiel Offensive, which decimated his company. Reed records his experience on the first day of battle from the front line trenches: "The barrage which our artillery was to put over was to begin at 1 a.m. Our forces moved into that sector all kinds of artillery and when they opened up, it seemed as though the whole world were rocking from the vibration caused by these mighty guns."
207. LOCECH_170408_093.JPG: Enlist! Posters were a powerful tool for propaganda throughout the war. This image by Fred Spear is one of the most stirring in the Library's collection of more than 1,700 from the First World War. In June 1915, the Boston Committee of Public Safety published this poster in response to the sinking of the Lusitania. The haunting image of a mother and infant sinking further into the sea is based on a news account of the recovered dead. The Omaha Daily Bee wrote: "Most of the bodies there are women . . . . At the Cunard Wharf lies a mother still clasping in her arms the body of her 3-month-old baby."
208. LOCECH_171102_015.JPG: Roman decorative certificate bestowing honorary citizenship on Woodrow Wilson, December 23, 1918. G
209. LOCECH_171102_017.JPG: Recognition from Poland The government of Poland conferred their country's highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, upon President Woodrow Wilson in recognition of his role in the re-establishment of a free Polish state. Under the U.S. Constitution, Wilson could not accept decorations from a foreign government while he was president. In 1922, after his term of office was over, however, he consented to receive the honor at a quiet ceremony in his Washington home.
210. LOCECH_171102_022.JPG: 1919 Nobel Peace Prize On December 11, 1920, the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament awarded Woodrow Wilson the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in creating the League of Nations, despite the fact that the United States had failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or join the League. The prize recognized Wilson's vision of a new world order guided by an international organization where states could resolve disputes and keep the peace. However, the medal also serves as a reminder of the later failures of the League of Nations. And despite the prediction by author H. G. Wells to the contrary, the Great War was not "the war that will end war."
211. LOCECH_171102_026.JPG: Peace and a New World Order? Even before the end of the war, Woodrow Wilson, in his "Fourteen Points" address, outlined a vision for a new peaceful postwar world order that fostered global collaboration and free trade among nations. The international conference that convened in Paris in January 1919 to negotiate a peace settlement presented the president with the opportunity to realize this vision. However, the war had transformed the world, and U.S. allies and other Americans had ideas contrary to Wilson's proposals. As the conference delegates negotiated compromises, Wilson placed his hopes in a new League of Nations, an organization where disputes between countries could be addressed. The resulting Treaty of Versailles imposed severe terms on Germany, arousing criticism within the United States, but most objections centered on the League of Nations. Ultimately, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty or join the League. The United States would play a very different role in the postwar world from the one Wilson had envisioned.
212. LOCECH_171102_029.JPG: Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" Long before the armistice, President Woodrow Wilson advocated a peace settlement in Europe based on what he viewed as sound principle and humane justice. Wilson's "Fourteen Points" address of January 8, 1918, in which he laid out a vision of a peaceful international order, was one of his most famous speeches. Wilson's vision included freedom of the seas, arms limitations, the return of territory conquered by Germany, autonomy for nationalities ruled by the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and a new association of nations to guarantee the political independence and territorial integrity of all states. Wilson drafted many of his speeches in shorthand -- displayed here with the typed reading copy.
213. LOCECH_171102_055.JPG: Official War Pictures
214. LOCECH_171102_057.JPG: Armistice On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, an armistice negotiated between Germany and the Allies ended the major fighting of World War I. The Meuse-Argonne offensive had given the Allies an important victory, but Germany itself had not been invaded and a large German army remained in the field. However, its allies Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria had already abandoned the fight; the Allied blockade increasingly threatened the food supply and economy of Germany; and the prospect of millions more American soldiers flowing across the Atlantic convinced German leaders that their situation would only worsen. Worldwide, the fighting killed about ten million soldiers and wounded approximately twenty million more. Included in these numbers were more than 100,000 dead and 200,000 wounded Americans. Millions of civilians also died directly or indirectly from the conflict, many by starvation and disease. The war had taken a catastrophic human toll.
215. LOCECH_171102_066.JPG: War's End
216. LOCECH_171102_070.JPG: Lester Westcott Lester B. Westcott served with the 51st Pioneer Infantry in France and Germany, erecting barbed wire entanglements, building a stockade, and pulling guard duty. He could not share many details in his letters, but Westcott regularly assured his mother that he was healthy and would be home soon. Three days after the armistice that ended the fighting, he was able to write to his mother: "Well I suppose you are very much relieved now that I have scared the Kaiser out of Germany and I have come out of the mill without a scratch and have every reason to believe I will return O.K."
217. LOCECH_171102_076.JPG: Germany Requests an Immediate Armistice
218. LOCECH_171102_080.JPG: Armistice
219. LOCECH_171102_082.JPG: Dr. Anna Howard Shaw. What the War Meant to Women. Published by League to Enforce Peace, ca 1920.
220. LOCECH_171102_086.JPG: W.E.B. Du Bois W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and longtime editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. When the United States entered the Great War, Du Bois argued convincingly that full participation by African Americans in the war effort would lead to gains in civil rights. More than 350,000 African Americans served in the segregated American military and more than 200,000 were posted overseas. On the home front, many thousands more black men and women supported the war effort in a variety of ways, encouraged by Du Bois and others. Illustrator Frank Walts created an evocative portrait of Du Bois for the February 1
221. LOCECH_171102_094.JPG: The Pan African Conference During the war, the interaction of African colonial troops and black American soldiers helped to establish a distinct strain of pan-African politics. NAACP co-founder and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois and Senegalese official Blaise Diagne organized the Pan African Conference of 1919. Held over three days in February, it brought together fifty-seven delegates from Africa, the West Indies, and the United States and helped to create a foundation for the development of black internationalism that contributed to African and Asian independence movements in the decades that followed World War I.
222. LOCECH_171102_095.JPG: Europe Honors Wilson Before the peace conference began in Paris, President Wilson traveled to Britain and Italy. In Rome, he received a tremendous welcome. The king and queen and the Italian cabinet met Wilson at the train station, crowds lined the streets, and the city made Wilson an honorary Roman citizen, as this stunning certificate indicates. Wilson's reception in Rome and other Allied cities reflected gratitude for American military intervention in the war and popular support for the president's peace proposals, including a League of Nations. Yet the president's popularity also alarmed other Allied leaders who had different agendas for the postwar settlement.
223. LOCECH_171102_112.JPG: Does He Get a Job? After serving their country, returning soldiers needed to be reintegrated into the workforce. In January 1918, an arm of the federal government established in 1907 principally to coordinate and study the influx of immigrant labor was transferred to the Department of Labor as the U.S. Employment Service. The wartime employment service aimed both to assist returning soldiers and to place workers in new jobs created by the war effort. In its first year, the service referred 6 million workers for 10 million job openings and issued broadsides like these to remind the public and employers of the country's obligation to those who had served. After the armistice, funding for the U.S. Employment Service rapidly dwindled. Within a year, the much-smaller service was operating chiefly as a clearinghouse for information.
224. LOCECH_171102_121.JPG: Returning Home Reintegrating soldiers into American life greatly concerned government policymakers. In addition to the War Risk Insurance Act of 1917, which established disability pensions for AEF soldiers, Congress approved the Vocational Rehabilitation Act (VRA) in 1918. The VRA sought to retrain wounded returning soldiers for new roles, particularly if they were unable to return to their previous vocations due to disability. The implementation of this controversial legislation was met with resistance. The agency responsible for delivering training to disabled veterans largely failed in its mission. Numerous veterans argued that they were being forced into vocations while being denied access to academic courses that might serve as a bridge to more lucrative professional careers. The ongoing activism of World War I veterans would lay the groundwork for the modern disability movement. By 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, veterans organized a mass protest in Washington, D.C., over compensation promised to them as a result of their activism. Referred to as the "Bonus March," veterans demanded immediate payment of bonds that were not scheduled for conversion until 1945.
225. LOCECH_171102_125.JPG: Service Records Communities across the country memorialized their members' service and sacrifice in the war in a number of ways. The City of Oswego, New York, compiled individual service records of Oswegans who served in all branches of the military, as well as those who served in foreign allied forces during World War I. Each service record is a typed form, and is signed by the individual service member. If the service member died in the war, the form is submitted by the member's parent or nearest relative and carries a gold star.
226. LOCECH_171102_128.JPG: The Gold Star
227. LOCECH_171102_130.JPG: Remembering the War Immediately following the armistice, Americans worked hard to assure that future generations would remember the catastrophic war and honor those who served and sacrificed. Medals and military decorations signified the extraordinary contributions individual veterans had made. Local monuments, erected around the country, and publications memorializing soldiers and their war service embodied community sentiments and memories of the war. American military cemeteries in Europe provided a somber reminder of the human cost of the Great War. To honor U.S. soldiers missing in action with no known grave, the government erected the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. What and how to remember were not always easy questions to answer, and Americans offered an array of ways to memorialize the war. However, each of them testified to the profound impact and lasting significance of the Great War.
228. LOCECH_171102_132.JPG: Medal of Honor Recipient An important way in which the United States officially remembered the war was by honoring the service of its veterans with medals and other awards. Joel T. Boone, a surgeon who had treated wounded marines at the "inferno" of Belleau Wood, earned the nation's highest award for valor in action, the Medal of Honor, for his heroism in France in July 1918. Through a heavy mist of gas, as guns blazed, Boone rushed into an open field with no protection to administer first aid. When Boone exhausted his medical supplies, he twice ran through artillery fire to replenish them and quickly returned to the wounded.
229. LOCECH_171102_140.JPG: Honoring General Pershing In September 1919, responding to a formal vote of thanks, General John J. Pershing addressed a joint session of Congress, with members of the diplomatic corps, the president's cabinet, and leading officers of the army and navy also in attendance. Of the many honors Pershing received following World War I, perhaps the greatest was promotion in his lifetime to the rank of General of the Armies, the highest rank ever bestowed in the United States Army. Only George Washington shares the rank, having been promoted posthumously in 1976.
230. LOCECH_171102_149.JPG: Souvenir of War Individual veterans often returned with souvenirs that marked their wartime experiences. From Virginia and the son of a former slave, Walker Harrison Jordan served with the 351st Field Artillery Regiment in France. During the war, Walker wrote about the regiment's war service, which he later published as the book "Old Eph" in the Army: A Simple Treatise on the Human Side of a Colored Soldier. Jordan likely brought this Bavarian spiked helmet back to the United States as a war souvenir. The motto on the helmet "In treue fest" translates as "steadfast in loyalty."
231. LOCECH_171102_159.JPG: Over Here Never before had the United States mobilized for war on such a scale. Government agencies sought to shape public opinion; private industry geared up war production; home front volunteerism surged to unprecedented heights; bond drives raised funds to finance the war; and labor unions and workers organized to increase national output. For the first time in its history, the nation's military would be derived largely from conscripts rather than volunteers. General John J. Pershing crafted the largest army in U.S. history from a force that in 1915 was a fraction of the size of the armies contesting in Europe. Newly inducted soldiers found themselves training for war in military camps throughout the United States. Women dedicated themselves to the war effort by laboring in war industries, organizing food conservation, and growing crops. Civil liberties contracted as the Espionage and Sedition Acts limited free speech and made dissent a risky proposition. German Americans found their loyalties questioned and were subject to occasional violence. U.S. mobilization revealed contradictions within the American democratic experiment. Conscription heightened questions regarding the rights and obligations of citizenship. For women, immigrants, and African Americans the war simultaneously provided an opportunity to demand expanded rights previously denied and demonstrated the limits of such efforts. Women's contributions to the war effort bolstered their long-standing claims for equal voting rights. Immigrants and African Americans hoped that military service would lead to greater inclusion into civic life in the United States. African Americans endured a rigidly segregated military, and experienced discrimination and racial violence as many moved into northern cities to take advantage of wartime employment opportunities.
232. LOCECH_171102_170.JPG: Conscientious Objectors Of the twenty-four million men who registered for the draft more than 64,000 claimed Conscientious Objector (CO) status; 56,830 of these claims were validated by local draft boards, and roughly 20,800 of those men were called up for military service. Either through coercion or persuasion, approximately 80 percent of the 20,800 eventually went to war. Most of the remaining 20 percent served in noncombat roles, and a devoted 1,500 would refuse any sort of service all together. Four hundred and fifty individuals were court-martialed and sent to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Pictured in Russian-born Maurice Becker's drawing is conscientious objector W. Oral James speaking on behalf of striking prisoners at Fort Leavenworth to Commandant Colonel Sedgwick Rice. Rice brought the strikers' requests to the War Department in early 1919. Crucifixions in the Twentieth Century "The Cases of Jacob Wipf and the Three Hofer Brothers, Religious Objectors to War...", 1919
233. LOCECH_171102_175.JPG: Raising an Army In previous conflicts, the United States had utilized conscription, but World War I marked the first time the nation's military raised its army primarily through a draft. In order to balance federal power with state autonomy, local civilian draft boards administered the selective service system. Posters, printed materials, films, and music all helped the government to conduct a national campaign that conveyed the legal requirement for men to register with the selective service or to enlist. Officials struggled to forge a unified fighting force from a segregated military consisting mostly of native-born whites, American Indians, and African Americans, along with large numbers of immigrants. The draft also raised questions about the obligations of citizenship, especially the duty to serve. Though the policy developed and changed over the course of the war, the U.S. War Department created the status of "conscientious objector" for Americans who viewed military service as a violation of their religious, ethical, or political beliefs.
234. LOCECH_171102_184.JPG: First Philippine Division The Library of Congress houses in its collections a large number of company rosters, many illustrated with photographs. This roster shows members of the 9th Regiment, who were Filipino, including the officers. At the time, the Philippines were governed by the United States as part of an American empire in the Pacific. The regiment was part of a 15,000-man division, which was still in training at the time of the 1918 Armistice. The roster was intended as a souvenir for unit members and includes every member's name as well as character sketches of the unit's officers.
235. LOCECH_171102_193.JPG: Drafting an Army The Selective Service Act of 1917 gave the government the power to conscript a national army. Raising an army largely through conscription represented a dramatic new obligation for citizens. Ever mindful of the tension between federal powers and states' rights, the draft occurred nationally, but draft boards at the local level conducted the actual selections. They appealed to local populations by including regional languages such as this example from the Territory of Hawaii issued in Hawaiian, Portuguese, and Chinese (on view). By comparison with the Civil War, in which eight percent of Union soldiers were conscripts, draftees made up seventy-two percent of the United States Army in World War I.
236. LOCECH_171102_205.JPG: African American National Guard
237. LOCECH_171102_215.JPG: Maurice Becker. CO: Test (Fort) Leavenworth. How long have you been in this country? ..., 1925.
238. LOCECH_171102_221.JPG: Recruiting for the Navy
239. LOCECH_171102_223.JPG: Conscientious Objectors Of the twenty-four million men who registered for the draft more than 64,000 claimed Conscientious Objector (CO) status; 56,830 of these claims were validated by local draft boards, and roughly 20,800 of those men were called up for military service. Either through coercion or persuasion, approximately 80 percent of the 20,800 eventually went to war. Most of the remaining 20 percent served in noncombat roles, and a devoted 1,500 would refuse any sort of service all together. Four hundred and fifty individuals were court-martialed and sent to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Pictured in Russian-born Maurice Becker's drawing is conscientious objector W. Oral James speaking on behalf of striking prisoners at Fort Leavenworth to Commandant Colonel Sedgwick Rice. Rice brought the strikers' requests to the War Department in early 1919.
240. LOCECH_171102_225.JPG: Slackers
241. LOCECH_171102_240.JPG: Commanding Images
242. LOCECH_171102_249.JPG: I Want You Originally published as the cover for the July 6, 1916, issue of Leslie's Weekly with the title "What Are You Doing for Preparedness?" this portrait of "Uncle Sam" went on to become -- according to its creator, James Montgomery Flagg -- "the most famous poster in the world." More than four million copies were printed between 1917 and 1918, as the United States entered World War I and began sending troops and materiel into war zones.
243. LOCECH_171102_272.JPG: Woman's Land Army Unlike many organizations contributing to the war effort, the Woman's Land Army (WLA) of America consisted of female leadership and female staff. Inspired by the women's land army of Britain, the WLA sought to use women's labor to address the threat of food shortages resulting from the war. The director of the Committee on Public Information, George Creel, recognized the symbolic power of the WLA and eventually embraced the effort. Initially, the WLA received no federal funding or even state support. However, the New Jersey WLA proved particularly adept at fundraising, often depending on its established network of women's associations and local businesses. The organization also utilized various events including bake sales, concerts, and movie nights to raise money. New Jersey WLA chairperson Anne MacIlvaine's appeal for government support would be realized when the Department of Labor absorbed the organization in the fall of 1918, which ironically led to the WLA's demise the following September.
244. LOCECH_171102_276.JPG: Farmerettes Known as "farmerettes," WLA workers were on the job in thirty-three states by summer 1918. Success varied from state to state. WLA units in Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Illinois were among the most productive. In California, WLA leaders secured labor contracts guaranteeing wages, hours, and working conditions that agricultural workers would rarely have again. Between its establishment in late 1917 and its demise in 1919, WLA employed roughly 15,000 to 20,000 women.
245. LOCECH_171102_282.JPG: Food Thriftiness
246. LOCECH_171102_284.JPG: Home Front Contributions The need for labor, food conservation, and a variety of volunteer efforts only increased with America's deepening involvement in the war. Women played a critical role on the home front whether working in factories, growing and harvesting crops in Victory gardens, or organizing knitting circles to provide socks for troops. The federal government harnessed state and municipal activism through women's organizations including the General Federation of Women's Clubs and the National Association of Colored Women. In many organizations, like the Red Cross and Committee on National Defense, a glass ceiling prevented women from holding the most influential positions. While a handful of states gave women the franchise, most did not. Despite these barriers and disappointments, women viewed the war as a chance to expand upon their rights thereby serving as the fulcrum upon which volunteerism functioned.
247. LOCECH_171102_290.JPG: War Time Conservation
248. LOCECH_171102_292.JPG: Lest Liberty Perish As head of the U.S. Government Division of Pictorial Publicity during World War I, renowned illustrator Charles Dana Gibson recruited fellow artists to contribute their work in support of the war and appointed Joseph Pennell as an associate. Prominent in Pennell's body of wartime prints and drawings is his startling poster design for the Fourth Liberty Loan drive of 1918. Pennell stressed the potentially dire consequences of inaction: "New York City bombed, shot down, burning, blown up by an enemy. A fleet of aeroplanes fly over Lower Manhattan, flames and smoke envelop the burning skyscrapers, in the foreground Liberty, from a pile of ruins, rises headless on her pedestal, her torch shattered." His proposed title, "Buy Liberty Bonds or You Will See This," was ultimately softened to a more poetic alternative.
249. LOCECH_171102_296.JPG: Lest Liberty Perish
250. LOCECH_171102_304.JPG: Funding the War Not wanting to disrupt the economic advances the nation had enjoyed under neutrality, Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo and the government as a whole heavily promoted the sale of war bonds called Liberty Loans. Mounting four Liberty Loans drives and one Victory Loan drive, the U.S. government raised $20 billion with nearly one third coming from people making less than $2,000 annually. Celebrities exhorted citizens to buy bonds. Artists produced posters that were powerful tools in each of the separate bond drives. The three posters shown here are "car cards," so called because of their placement on buses, trams, and subway cars to attract the attention of riders.
251. LOCECH_171102_334.JPG: Rivets are Bayonets
252. LOCECH_171102_342.JPG: War Industry The challenge of global war required the cooperation of organized labor, industry, and a broader public on an unprecedented level. Hoping to avoid accusations of government coercion,the Wilson administration encouraged voluntary collaboration between government and business. The coordinating agency Congress established, the War Industries Board, could only keep business aligned with national interests through cajolery, growing profit margins, and the threat of negative publicity that would label uncooperative businesses as unpatriotic. Large unions including the American Federation of Labor saw the war as an opportunity to secure better wages and working conditions. Labor conflicts still arose. In 1917, more than 4,000 strikes caused work stoppages, many of which occurred in the mines, shipyards, and forests of the western United States where smaller but more militant unions exerted greater influence. More than one million women found skilled temporary employment in factories and offices as they left domestic service and non-factory textile labor.
253. LOCECH_171102_346.JPG: United War Work Campaign
254. LOCECH_171102_355.JPG: Go Over the Top
255. LOCECH_171102_359.JPG: Arming the Military During World War I, as men left for military duty, millions of women contributed to the war effort, not only through volunteer service but by entering the labor force as nurses, agricultural laborers, and office and factory workers. Women were critical to maintaining production in the nation's ordnance plants. In this photograph a woman is seated at a cartridge venting machine at the U.S. Cartridge Co. plant in Lowell, Massachusetts, as her right arm is resting on a tray of empty shell casings.
256. LOCECH_171102_364.JPG: Surveillance and Censorship Fighting a war in Europe required a clear message and a cooperative public. The federal government established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which deployed propaganda to convince Americans of World War I's legitimacy and the importance of civic contributions. Congress also passed the Espionage (1917) and Sedition (1918) Acts to enforce loyalty and silence dissent. Postmaster General Albert Burleson used the Espionage Act to ban from the mail those magazines and newspapers he perceived as promoting discord against the government and undermining national unity. Government policies and wartime nationalism encouraged citizens to police one another's loyalty and patriotism. As a result, political dissidents, ethnic minorities, and militant labor organizations and their leaders were subject to increased scrutiny and, on occasion, violence. Ultimately, challenges by citizens to limits on free speech would help create a modern conception of citizenship based on individual rights and civil liberties.
257. LOCECH_171102_365.JPG: Four Minute Men In order to convince the public of the war's importance, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) engaged patriotic local residents around the nation to urge Americans in movie houses (where it took four minutes to change reels) and, later, many other venues to support war measures, including the Liberty Loan drives. More than 75,000 citizens -- men, women, and children -- took part in the Four Minute program, and it is estimated that up to 400 million listeners at movie houses, union halls, churches, parks, and other public forums heard their short, carefully vetted speeches. With a blank space for messaging, Four Minute posters served as another important tool in this propaganda campaign.
258. LOCECH_171102_378.JPG: Wake Up America!
259. LOCECH_171102_384.JPG: Suspicion and Suppression
260. LOCECH_171102_387.JPG: Report Suspicion or Disloyalty During World War I, no centralized intelligence infrastructure existed. To augment its efforts, the state depended on the vigilance, and in some cases vigilantism, of citizens. Broadsides like this one issued by the Committee of 100 on Public Safety in New Hampshire imbued Americans with a sense of responsibility for safeguarding their communities against potential German spies and dissidents posing a threat to U.S. security. Vigilance sometimes slipped into coercion and suppression amidst the pressures of war. Ashes left from a 1918 bonfire fueled by German textbooks in Baraboo, Wisconsin, are visible in this photograph. The Baraboo fire may have been as much a protest over the difficulty of local German language courses as an expression of anti-German sentiment prevalent across the nation at that time.
261. LOCECH_171102_391.JPG: Questions of Loyalty Born in New York City in 1882, Hermann Hagedorn was the son of German emigrés and had himself trained at the University of Berlin. During the war, Hagedorn vociferously expressed American nationalism, promoting war preparedness and, along with other writers and artists, formed the pro-war Vigilantes group. Hagedorn also tried to bolster the image of German Americans by forming the League of Loyal Americans of German Origin. In this questionnaire Hagedorn is soliciting information from publishers and civic leaders across the nation information about German Americans in their communities.
262. LOCECH_171102_399.JPG: Raising an Army In previous conflicts, the United States had utilized conscription, but World War I marked the first time the nation's military raised its army primarily through a draft. In order to balance federal power with state autonomy, local civilian draft boards administered the selective service system. Posters, printed materials, films, and music all helped the government to conduct a national campaign that conveyed the legal requirement for men to register with the selective service or to enlist. Officials struggled to forge a unified fighting force from a segregated military consisting mostly of native-born whites, American Indians, and African Americans, along with large numbers of immigrants. The draft also raised questions about the obligations of citizenship, especially the duty to serve. Though the policy developed and changed over the course of the war, the U.S. War Department created the status of "conscientious objector" for Americans who viewed military service as a violation of their religious, ethical, or political beliefs.
263. LOCECH_171102_405.JPG: Lobbying the President
264. LOCECH_171102_407.JPG: African American Officers' Training Camp Camp Fort Des Moines, Iowa, welcomed its first black recruits for training in May 1917. Trainee Charles Hamilton Houston, who graduated as a 1st lieutenant and was the youngest officer in the camp, is pictured in the second row, fifth from the right. His dog tags, coat buttons, and a bullet represent his first months of military service. Of the 1,250 men who entered Camp Fort Des Moines, forty percent were college graduates. Despite their enthusiasm and dedication, training was limited to the infantry and neglected specialized areas such as artillery or engineering. After four months, the camp graduated 204 2nd lieutenants, 329 1st lieutenants, and 106 captains. They were assigned to the 92nd Division, where they faced fierce racial prejudice from many of their white superior officers and white enlisted men.
265. LOCECH_171102_410.JPG: Enlistment [Not the same text as found on the web] America's entrance into the war sparked debate within the African American community regarding enlistment and segregation. While some believed opposing military service could be a means to protest the nation's racial policies, others believed supporting the war effort by enlisting offered an imperfect opportunity to advance civil rights. Black college students at Amherst College, Howard University, and the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, among other schools, demanded that officers' training be offered to qualified African American soldiers. Washington, D.C., minister and civic leader Reverend J. Milton Waldron and the Committee of One Hundred, consisting of black leaders from across the nation, repeatedly lobbied Secretary of War Newton Baker and President Woodrow Wilson to establish officer's training for qualified African American soldiers.
266. LOCECH_171102_416.JPG: Enlistment America's entrance into the war sparked debate within the African American community regarding enlistment and segregation. While some believed opposing military service could be a means to protest the nation's racial policies, others believed supporting the war effort by enlisting offered an imperfect opportunity to advance civil rights. Black college students at Amherst College, Howard University, and the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, among other schools, demanded that officers' training be offered to qualified African American soldiers. Washington, D.C., minister and civic leader Reverend J. Milton Waldron and the Committee of One Hundred, consisting of black leaders from across the nation, repeatedly lobbied Secretary of War Newton Baker and President Woodrow Wilson to establish officer's training for qualified African American soldiers.
267. LOCECH_171102_425.JPG: Training across the Nation
268. LOCECH_171102_430.JPG: Training Across the Nation Training camps sprang up all across the nation to prepare the nation's rapidly expanding armed forces to fight. This map issued by Union Pacific Railroad in 1917 locates "Post and Stations of the Army, National Guard Camps, Aero Training Stations, Marine Barracks and Naval Training Stations." At this time there was no separate Air Force. There were eventually thirty-two training cantonments, or temporary military installations, spread across the nation.
269. LOCECH_171102_438.JPG: Augustus Bennett Warfield A veteran of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, Major Augustus Bennett Warfield commanded the 332nd Field Artillery Regiment as they trained for overseas service. World War I was fought largely with artillery, and Warfield's meticulous notes of his instruction of his artillerymen and accompanying photographs document the regiment's preparations at Camp Sherman, Ohio. Warfield went on to serve in France and Germany and was wounded in October 1918.
270. LOCECH_171102_450.JPG: Richard Thomas Crump Very little is known about Richard Crump's life, aside from the meticulous scrapbook he assembled documenting his World War I service as an ambulance driver. The album begins with his days in training at the University of Virginia, including the page shown here with its photographs of an orderly drill in pleasant surroundings. The later photos in the album, which show the ravaged French countryside in San Sulpice and Wailley, damaged ambulances, and buildings reduced to rubble by German shelling, are in stark contrast to these earlier images.
271. LOCECH_171102_455.JPG: Training for Trench Warfare By 1917, the Western Front, where the vast majority of Americans troops would serve, had long been the scene of military stalemate, with two intricate webs of fortified trench lines facing one another. Americans were well aware of the bitter losses each side sustained as they struggled through storms of heavy artillery, aerial bombing, and machine-gun fire in largely unsuccessful attempts to break through opposing lines. Yet, the name of this manual notwithstanding, for many months the U.S. Army continued training new soldiers for a war of movement and only gradually and incompletely incorporated new methods for fighting a war stalemated in the trenches.
272. LOCECH_171102_468.JPG: Patton's First Morning of Battle
273. LOCECH_171102_484.JPG: Summary of Action in the Meuse-Argonne
274. LOCECH_171102_487.JPG: General Pershing's Diary General John J. Pershing's diary describes the first day of the largest and deadliest battle that the United States fought in the Great War. Not all went as planned. Pershing wrote that the failings of green troops and new staff officers who did not yet work well together hindered progress. Emphasizing the importance of transportation and logistics, he judged that the most serious problem of the day was mending the roads across No Man's Land, which had been obliterated by years of fighting.
275. LOCECH_171102_491.JPG: Meuse-Argonne At dawn on September 26, 1918, General Pershing's troops launched an attack along the Meuse River and into northern France's rugged Argonne Forest that would prove to be the deadliest battle in American history. While British forces attacked the German lines to the far north in Belgium, more than 600,000 American and French troops supported by almost 5,000 artillery pieces, 500 tanks, and 500 airplanes slowly forced their way through strong German defenses. During the nearly seven weeks of combat, the Allied forces made significant advances against the exhausted Germans, breaking the stalemate in the trenches and nearly pushing the Germans out of France. The battle lasted until the end of the war, and 26,277 Americans died in this final fight, the highest American death toll for any single battle in U.S. history, not surpassed even by the fierce battles of the Civil War or World War II.
276. LOCECH_171102_493.JPG: Gifts for Servicemen As the first Christmas after U.S. entry into the war approached, the Franklin Simon store on New York's Fifth Avenue advertised gifts to send the troops. The ad featured radium dial wrist watches, a tempting gift for servicemen, who could then read their glowing watch dials in the dark. The manufacture of these watches posed considerable health risks for young female workers at the United States Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company factories, who painted the tiny numbers on the dials. Dubbed "Radium Girls," the women were encouraged to lick their paintbrushes to keep the tips pointed, thereby ingesting fatal radiation doses. Radium paint was also used on the gauges of military instruments during the war.
277. LOCECH_171102_503.JPG: "The Greatest Mother" Almost one-third of the U.S. population contributed to the Red Cross as volunteers or donors, with a staggering $400 million in funds and material raised in support of its programs at home and abroad. This monumental poster titled "The Greatest Mother in the World," makes a clear visual connection to Christian imagery in which the Virgin Mary cradles the figure of Christ in her lap. According to the Committee on Public Information, the image "appeared in newspapers, magazines, and posters with greater repetition and force than any other advertisement for any phase of Government endeavor since the war began."
278. LOCECH_171102_505.JPG: Saving Lives For World War I, Americans mobilized a medical and public health effort unprecedented in its scale and scope. With only a small medical corps in the standing armed forces, the American Red Cross played a critical role in providing medical care to wounded and sick service members. Thousands of Americans, women and men, volunteered for the Red Cross, many of them staffing dozens of hospitals in Europe. In addition to treating those wounded by war, the medical services struggled to fight the worldwide influenza epidemic that broke out in 1918. The flu killed more than 30 million people around the world, including 675,000 Americans, more than were killed in the fighting of the Great War.
279. LOCECH_171102_511.JPG: American Red Cross
280. LOCECH_171102_530.JPG: "In Your Company"
281. LOCECH_171102_533.JPG: Shipping Off
282. LOCECH_171102_535.JPG: "The Yanks Are Coming!" Approximately 35,000 patriotic songs, military marches, love ballads, and protest songs were copyrighted during World War I. More than half were written by women, who usually collaborated as lyricist with a male composer. Lyrics ranged from rallying cries and odes to bravery to pleas for pacifism and celebrations of peace. George M. Cohan, considered the father of American musical comedy, became the first entertainer to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, which he received in 1940 particularly for his 1917 patriotic standards "A Grand Old Flag" and "Over There" -- the latter song most closely identified with the American experience of the war. On view is one of the many sheet music versions of the song and Cohan's own manuscript, which he signed. Due in part to the absence of radio, World War I was the last American war in which singing was a widespread and popular pastime among the troops. Whether filling the time on the tedious passage across the Atlantic Ocean or helping to boost morale on the battlefield, song could be heard nearly everywhere among the American Expeditionary Forces as this "songster" pamphlet published by the YMCA helps to illustrate.
283. LOCECH_171102_547.JPG: War Over Seas With most of the German navy bottled up in the North Sea by the British fleet, the United States never engaged in any major naval battles with the Central Powers. However, the U.S. Navy played a vital role in the extraordinary movement of a massive army across an ocean. By the end of the war, the Allies had shipped two million American military personnel to Europe. Because of the comparatively small size of the U.S. merchant marine fleet, a majority of these Americans were transported by British ships or ships confiscated from the Central Powers. The Navy escorted these troop and supply convoys while under constant threat of German submarine attacks. This successful sealift operation allowed the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), commanded by General John J. Pershing, to become the largest U.S. force deployed overseas to that point.
284. LOCECH_171102_553.JPG: Moving the Troops
285. LOCECH_171102_563.JPG: Willard B. Prince
286. LOCECH_171102_568.JPG: "Be and For the Soldiers of the A.E.F."
287. LOCECH_171102_576.JPG: Harry Frieman
288. LOCECH_171102_581.JPG: Albert John Carpenter
289. LOCECH_171102_585.JPG: U-boat Attacks These German maps highlight the widespread and numerous attacks launched by Germany's U-boats throughout the war. By November 1918, Germany had sunk more than 5,000 merchant ships and more than 100 warships; tens of thousands of lives were lost. This was achieved at a high cost to the German navy, as 217 of its 351 submarines were sunk with a loss of more than 5,000 sailors. The German effort, nonetheless, could not overcome Allied sea power and their industrial capacity to replace lost ships and supplies. The map of the restricted zones depicts areas where Germany threatened to sink both Allied and neutral merchant ships and shows cross-sections and detailed plans of a German U-boat.
290. LOCECH_171102_607.JPG: Tanks When tanks were first introduced, it was hoped they could help break the stalemate by plowing through the enemy lines. The earliest tanks were large, slow, prone to breakdowns, and often got stuck in craters. In 1917, French automaker Renault introduced the FT, a lighter, quicker tank with a rotating turret that was equipped with either a cannon or a machine gun. It proved to be more effective in battle.
291. LOCECH_171102_612.JPG: Industrialized Warfare World War I was unlike any that had preceded it. At the war's outbreak, Europeans had expected the conflict to be short. However, combat soon bogged down into a stalemate. On the western front, both sides dug complex trench networks that stretched for hundreds of miles across Belgian Flanders and northern France. Industry mass-produced artillery, machine guns, and ammunition at extraordinary rates while railroads carried a continuous flow of munitions and soldiers to the front. At the same time, the combatants pursued technological means to break the stalemate. The results -- tanks, poison gas, and the military use of airplanes -- were too new to have dramatic effects on the outcome of the Great War, but they would transform future warfare.
292. LOCECH_171102_621.JPG: Albert John Carpenter Albert Carpenter enlisted in the 36th Division of the 142nd Infantry as a nineteen-year-old student. Carpenter served in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in France during the final days of the war. As a soldier in the trenches along the Hindenberg Line, he experienced the gassings, mud, and bloodshed for which the war is infamous. In a series of short but vivid entries, his diary chronicles a single month, October 1918, which he calls "the most eventful month of [my] life." On this page of his diary, Carpenter describes enduring a gas attack: "My lungs very soar [sic] and throughing [sic] up blood."
293. LOCECH_171102_628.JPG: The Loss of a Son July 1918 was a rending time for the family of Theodore Roosevelt. On July 14, Theodore Roosevelt's youngest son, Quentin, an AEF pilot, was shot down and killed. All four of Roosevelt's sons served in World War One, but only Quentin was killed in action. In this letter, noted author Rudyard Kipling, whose own son had perished in the war, attempts to console Theodore Roosevelt. The Roosevelts chose not to bring Quentin home for burial, his gravesite pictured here is in France. Writing to General Peyton March, Roosevelt noted: "We have always believed, that ‘where the tree falls, there let it lie.'" Although many American families brought their fallen sons home, numerous others, like the Roosevelts, chose to have them buried where they died.
294. LOCECH_171102_633.JPG: The War in the Air
295. LOCECH_171102_644.JPG: Belleau Wood The time needed to train and organize the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) meant that American troops did not engage in extensive combat until spring 1918. That spring, German troops had left their trenches and launched a series of major offensives trying to win the war before the Americans arrived in even greater numbers. In early June, the fight for Belleau Wood, a boulder-strewn forest close to Paris, was one of the AEF's early battles. There, the U.S. 2nd Division, a combination of Army and Marine Corps units, helped the French repel a German offensive and then retook Belleau Wood in a ferocious battle that lasted twenty days. For the Marines, who faced the heaviest fighting, June 6, the first day of their assault was the bloodiest day in the Corps' history up to that point, leaving 222 dead. Belleau Wood took on special meaning for Marines as a demonstration of the Corps' bravery and tenacity.
296. LOCECH_171102_648.JPG: Bois de Belleau This map from the papers of General James G. Harbord, commander of the Marines at Belleau Wood (Bois de Belleau), depicts the course of the battle waged in June 1918. The hand-drawn colored lines show the advancing American front in the vicinity of Bois de Belleau. One can see how gains at first were slow across the open country in front of the woods as Marines had little cover from the German guns hidden in the tree line and behind. However, once the Marines gained a solid foothold among the trees aided by heavy artillery barrages, the entire wood fell much more quickly. On the final day of battle, Sergeant Major Fifth Regiment U.S. Marines Claude Charles Hamel recounts: "Our dead are being piled alongside the road, as there is no time to bury them and we have not enough men to do it."
297. LOCECH_171102_655.JPG: "Jaws of Death"
298. LOCECH_171102_672.JPG: St. Mihiel Offensive
299. LOCECH_171102_675.JPG: St. Mihiel Offensive On September 12, 1918, southeast of Verdun, France, General John J. Pershing launched the first American-led offensive of the war, hurling the recently organized American First Army -- half a million Americans and four French divisions under U.S. command -- against positions the Germans had held around the town of St. Mihiel for nearly four years. Mounting frontal assaults from three sides, Pershing's force suffered thousands of casualties as they fought through curiously light resistance, having attacked as the Germans were in the midst of withdrawing. On September 16 the American offensive ended in victory.
300. LOCECH_171102_681.JPG: A Town in Ruins
301. LOCECH_171102_690.JPG: St. Mihiel By summer 1918, the Allies had repelled the last of the German offensives on the western front and had gone on the counterattack. General Pershing had also achieved his goal of building up a substantial American army of more than 500,000 under his direct command and at the ready to conduct a major offensive against the Germans. On September 12, U.S. forces with the assistance of 100,000 French soldiers, attacked the Germans where the front lines bulged into Allied-held territory around the French town of St. Mihiel. This was the first taste of combat for many American soldiers. The five-day battle succeeded in pushing the Germans out of the St. Mihiel pocket. The quick success came, in part, because the Germans had already begun withdrawing forces from the area before the attack began in order to improve their defensive position.
302. LOCECH_171102_694.JPG: Vincent Cornelius Reed For World War I infantryman Vincent Reed, the horrors of combat were a sharp contrast to his experiences with the Army of Occupation. Reed fought in the St. Mihiel Offensive, which decimated his company. Reed records his experience on the first day of battle from the front line trenches: "The barrage which our artillery was to put over was to begin at 1 a.m. Our forces moved into that sector all kinds of artillery and when they opened up, it seemed as though the whole world were rocking from the vibration caused by these mighty guns."
303. LOCECH_171102_704.JPG: For or Against War With the world around them at war, Americans' debate over the conflict often centered on the issue of military preparedness and the wisdom of making loans and selling arms overseas. Many feared that a large army would threaten American democracy and that an expanded arsenal would menace other countries. This fear of militarism also reinforced antagonism toward Germany, a well-armed and authoritarian monarchy. Preparedness advocates, however, believed that defending the country's security and borders outweighed other considerations, especially as the revolution in Mexico made the United States seem unready to defend itself. Some war opponents believed the greed of munitions makers, bankers, and others who stood to profit from war might draw Americans into an expanded conflict. Peace activists, pacifists, and others dreaded the inevitable loss of lives and drain on the economy that going to war would bring.
304. LOCECH_171102_706.JPG: The Dangers of Preparedness This meeting notice, published by the Anti-War League of the District of Columbia, illustrates one group's opposition to the preparedness movement. The flyer argued that building up the armed forces -- what American groups like the Navy League were calling "preparedness" -- caused the war in Europe. The D.C. Anti-War League also feared that a large military and a society regimented by its preparations for war would bring a militarized culture to the United States, which would threaten American values.
305. LOCECH_171102_709.JPG: Advocating for Peace The Women's Peace Party, organized in January 1915 and led by Jane Addams, was one of the most prominent organizations opposing the preparedness movement and American military intervention. In this 1915 letter to President Wilson, the party leaders argued that preparations against threats from Europe, through the buildup of the U.S. military, would only lead to arms races that would cause more problems than they solved. "These preparations," they wrote, "would create rivalry, suspicion and taxation in every country." They believed that, instead, President Wilson should concentrate his efforts on the opportunity for the "establishment of permanent peace" that "this world crisis offers." The photograph shows the American delegates, including Jane Addams, en route to the 1915 International Congress of Women that was held in The Hague, Netherlands.
306. LOCECH_171102_719.JPG: The Preparedness Lobby With war raging overseas, America's military ranked far behind other global powers. The U.S. Army comprised fewer than 130,000 officers and men when the major belligerents had forces numbering in the millions. Established in January 1915, the National Security League (NSL) was the most prominent U.S. preparedness lobby, promoting enlistment, universal military training, and an expanded army and navy. Similar efforts to help prepare civilians for military service had begun as early as 1913, but in late spring 1915, the NSL sponsored its own summertime officer training camps for college students and businessmen. Critics assailed aspects of preparedness as an attempt by reactionary, moneyed interests to spread their influence across the country. Others, including Teddy Roosevelt, believed that the NSL supported patriotism, civic responsibility, and the idea of service among all Americans.
307. LOCECH_171102_721.JPG: The Preparedness Lobby With war raging overseas, America's military ranked far behind other global powers. The U.S. Army comprised fewer than 130,000 officers and men when the major belligerents had forces numbering in the millions. Established in January 1915, the National Security League (NSL) was the most prominent U.S. preparedness lobby, promoting enlistment, universal military training, and an expanded army and navy. Similar efforts to help prepare civilians for military service had begun as early as 1913, but in late spring 1915, the NSL sponsored its own summertime officer training camps for college students and businessmen. Critics assailed aspects of preparedness as an attempt by reactionary, moneyed interests to spread their influence across the country. Others, including Teddy Roosevelt, believed that the NSL supported patriotism, civic responsibility, and the idea of service among all Americans.
308. LOCECH_171102_726.JPG: A Case for War
309. LOCECH_171102_741.JPG: Answer Songs "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier," published in January 1915, a few months after war broke out in Europe became a rallying cry for the nation's pacifists. Reflecting the official U.S. policy of neutrality, the song was one of the most popular of the era. Two years later, after America entered the war, "answer" songs, such as "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Slacker," "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Coward," and "Don't Marry a Slacker, Girls" offered a decidedly pro-war sentiment. The Library of Congress holds more than 14,000 pieces of sheet music relating to World War I.
310. LOCECH_171102_745.JPG: "Answer" Songs
311. LOCECH_171102_747.JPG: Arguing Over War Americans were deeply divided over how to respond to the Great War and expressed a diverse range of views on the conflict. President Woodrow Wilson declared U.S. neutrality on August 4, 1914, and many Americans saw little reason to entangle themselves in what they viewed as European quarreling and intrigue. As the war persisted and the destruction spread, many Americans could not ignore the crisis. President Wilson and other leading Americans, like industrialist Henry Ford, attempted to facilitate negotiations for peace to end the conflict in Europe. Americans organized and provided humanitarian aid to war victims, particularly the monumental relief operation led by Herbert Hoover to feed German-occupied Belgium. But other forces drew the United States toward war. Cultural ties to Britain tended to outweigh those that German Americans and other European ethnic groups had to their ancestral homelands. Although the United States did profit financially from the war as a neutral nation, Great Britain's naval domination of the seas and blockade of Germany and the other Central Powers meant that Americans primarily traded with the Allies during the war. Germany attempted to counter this imbalance with the widespread use of submarines, the first time these weapons had been extensively deployed in war. German submarines sank merchant ships engaged in what Americans viewed as peaceful trade and killed American passengers on British ocean liners, most notably the Lusitania. As the war raged on in Europe, to many, including eventually President Wilson, the conflict became a matter of principles: whether to uphold the freedom of the seas, to make the world safe for democracy in the face of autocracy, or to establish a new world order ensuring permanent peace and governed by rational law. The United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.
312. LOCECH_171102_755.JPG: Enlist!
313. LOCECH_171102_760.JPG: Lusitania On May 7, 1915, a German submarine sank the British Cunard Company ocean liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland. The ship sank in 18 minutes and at least 1,191 passengers and crew died, including some 128 Americans. The majority of those lost were never recovered, but three days after the sinking, 150 bodies that had been retrieved were buried in mass graves in Queenstown (later Cobh), County Cork, Ireland. The sinking and its aftermath received massive worldwide news coverage. In America, it led to a surge in pro-British and anti-German sentiment.
314. LOCECH_171102_768.JPG: Humanitarian Aid As long as the United States remained out of the war, humanitarian assistance offered an alternative response to the international crisis. Neutral Belgium invaded and occupied by Germany and other war-ravaged countries faced food shortages and the threat of starvation. At the urging of the U.S. embassy in London, Herbert Hoover -- then a forty-year-old mining engineer and wealthy business leader -- organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB). Designed to feed all of Belgium, it was the largest humanitarian relief operation to date. Relief efforts later expanded to occupied northern France, and by 1918 the CRB had delivered three million tons of food, largely averting starvation in the occupied territories. Americans also undertook much smaller voluntary relief efforts for suffering peoples within the Central Powers' territories including Germany, Austria, Hungary, Armenia, and Syria.
315. LOCECH_171102_773.JPG: Commission for Relief in Belgium After German armies occupied neutral Belgium in August 1914, the nation faced food shortages and other deprivations. Belgium did not produce enough food to feed itself, and Germany refused to divert resources from its war effort to assist the Belgians. The plight of Belgium attracted worldwide sympathy. Successful businessman and future U.S. president Herbert Hoover undertook leadership of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which sought to feed and clothe the Belgians and avert starvation. This letter summarizes the results of that relief effort through the middle of 1915, which included the collection of 71 million francs worth of food. These pages from a trade publication for American wheat manufacturers show bags of flour at a distribution depot in Brussels as well as other means of directly feeding the population. The Commission shipped close to 700 million bags of wheat to towns across Belgium. By mid-1915 the Commission was also assisting the people of German-occupied northern France.
316. LOCECH_171102_774.JPG: Giving Thanks In an expression of gratitude for U.S. humanitarian aid, thousands of Belgian schoolchildren and many of their teachers wrote letters of thanks to President Wilson and the American people. Ten-year-old Fritz van der Mensbrugghe lived in the city of Ghent with his parents, eighty-year-old grandmother, and ten brothers and sisters. In neatly written English, the boy's letter expressed his family's appreciation for "the generous American people, who take care of us." He observed that "the war will perhaps ruin us but thanks to the providing America we will not starve." In 1919 Belgian schools sent photographs to students in United States to thank them for their support during the war. These young girls from Seraing, just outside of Liege, had probably lived under Germany occupation most of their lives since the city was taken in the first weeks of the war. On March 8, 1915, the young teacher Louise Fontaine sent a letter from Brussels on behalf of her pupils. Thanking the American nation for its sympathies and the plentiful relief it had sent, she wrote, "Washington's Birthday has perhaps been more celebrated in the Belgian schools than in any American one." Many of the letters in this flood of thank-you correspondence were also accompanied by photographs, drawings, or other objects, such as these cornhusk and paper dolls.
317. LOCECH_171102_787.JPG: Lest They Perish Starting in 1915, the American Committee for Relief in the Near East sent millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, Persian, and other minorities in the Ottoman Empire. The Committee was established after U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau reported on the suffering of these peoples to his friends and philanthropic groups in the United States. It sought to help victims of wartime deportation and starvation in Ottoman territories. The organization still exists today as the Near East Foundation, which conducts development assistance in the region.
318. LOCECH_171102_800.JPG: Charles Dana Gibson Calls for Action Striding across a war-torn landscape, Democracy pushes the figure of German militarism into Death's arms so forcefully that she disarms him, sending his sword and helmet flying. Artist Charles Dana Gibson boldly asserts his support for American intervention in World War I in this scene published two weeks before the country formally declared war on Germany. A far cry from the feminine ideal Gibson created earlier, his allegorical female figure references monumental forms of classical antiquity, the age that gave rise to democracy itself. This drawing stands out as particularly forceful among many Gibson created before and during the time he led the Division of Pictorial Publicity, a U.S. government body that recruited top illustrators to contribute to the nation's war effort.
319. LOCECH_171102_812.JPG: 1917 Battle Fronts
320. LOCECH_171102_816.JPG: The Zimmermann Telegram In January 1917, the British intercepted a coded telegram from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann to Germany's ambassador to Mexico that offered to assist Mexico in reconquering U.S. territory in exchange for joining the Central Powers against the Allies should the United States declare war. In early March, U.S. papers published the contents of the telegram, and on March 5, 1917, the text was entered in the Congressional Record. Playing on fears of what would happen if Americans did not unite behind the war effort, cartoonist Clifford Berryman drew a hand in a gauntlet (decorated with the imperial German eagle) carving up a map of the southwestern United States. Transcript On the 1st of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this, it is our intention to endeavor to keep neutral the United States of America. If this attempt is not successful, we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give general financial support, and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. The details are left to you for settlement.
321. LOCECH_171102_832.JPG: U.S. Enters the War On April 7, 1917, newspapers across the country announced that a state of war existed between the United States and Germany. Many, including the New York Times, printed President Wilson's proclamation in full, including its declaration of war and twelve points focused on "Alien Enemies." Following the president's April 2 speech asking Congress to pass a war declaration, only fifty-six members of Congress voted against the measure, which the president signed on April 6. By that time, public opinion had also swung heavily in favor of American belligerence, moved by Germany's recent renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare and publication of the "Zimmerman telegram."
322. LOCECH_171102_840.JPG: Wilson Before Congress On April 2, 1917, President Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. He condemned German submarine attacks on U.S. and other neutral shipping. He also argued that autocratic governments, such as the German regime, with their habitual intrigue, unrestrained by the will of their people, were a threat to free and self-governing nations. The president asserted, "The world must be made safe for democracy." Transcript The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We see no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.
323. LOCECH_171108_017.JPG: "Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" Already a well-known songwriter when the war began, Irving Berlin, himself an immigrant whose family came from Siberia, was drafted into the U.S. Army in early 1918 and was assigned to Camp Upton, located in Yaphank, Long Island, New York. There Berlin wrote a Ziegfeld-style revue featuring a cast of soldiers called Yip, Yip, Yaphank, which helped raise money to construct a camp community center. "Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," one of the show's hit tunes, expressed Berlin's distress over early morning reveille.
324. LOCECH_171108_024.JPG: Americanization Dating back to the late eighteenth century, native-born Americans worried about assimilating immigrants; the nation's entrance into the war heightened this already palpable concern. In 1917, one out of every three U.S. citizens was either a first- or second-generation American. Nearly one fifth of the army had been born abroad. Despite scant evidence of disloyalty, U.S. political and military leaders wondered if citizens could balance allegiances between their nation of ancestry and their new home. "Americanization," the name given to the process of imbuing in immigrants an American identity, took numerous forms. Roughly speaking, however, Americans divided into two camps regarding Americanization. One side demanded what many called "100% Americanism" or the complete abandonment of Old World languages, traditions, and loyalties. In contrast, progressive reformers, and eventually military leaders, encouraged the adoption of American values while still respecting Old World traditions and culture. Some communities found 100% Americanization far more oppressive. German Americans lived under increased government and public surveillance, and were sometimes subject to vilification and violence.
325. LOCECH_171108_047.JPG: How the War Came The United States government undertook a comprehensive propaganda campaign under the auspices of the Committee for Public Information (CPI) headed by George Creel. The agency shaped public opinion on the war effort through an unprecedented multimedia campaign that lasted throughout U.S. involvement in the war. These pamphlets illustrate the efforts of the CPI to reach diverse communities within the United States by publishing their message in German, Spanish, and English. With this approach, they sought to forge a unified, government-sponsored view of why Americans were fighting in distant lands. More than 6,250,000 copies of How War Came to America were in circulation, and it proved to be one of CPI's most popular publications.
326. LOCECH_171108_062.JPG: Americanization
327. LOCECH_171108_066.JPG: The Great Migration Even before the outbreak of World War I, African Americans had begun to migrate from rural areas to urban centers. The war accelerated this process. Many took advantage of train lines running north to escape the segregation of the Jim Crow South and to find new opportunities in bustling cities like Chicago. However, new forms of discrimination and segregation greeted them upon arrival. Known as the "Great Migration," this exodus continued through the following decades, helping to spawn industrial growth and cultural movements in the 1920s such as the Harlem Renaissance, while also reshaping urban politics in northern cities. ... kindly send information in regards to the race coming north as I am anxious to learn something about coming. There are many people on this side anxious to come north and do not know how to get there.
328. LOCECH_171108_076.JPG: Silent Protest Whites reacted with discrimination and sometimes violence to the increasing numbers of African Americans in northern cities. On July 9, 1917, one of the most violent riots of the twentieth century exploded in East St. Louis, Illinois, resulting in the destruction of hundreds of black homes and businesses and the deaths of at least thirty-nine African Americans. The NAACP organized a "Silent Protest Parade" in New York City to denounce the riot and to appeal for equal rights. This memorandum distributed to participants highlights black contributions to American history and notes that, although African Americans had "fought for the liberty of white Americans in six wars; our reward is East St. Louis."
329. LOCECH_171108_077.JPG: A Changing America With the rise of industry in the nineteenth century, U.S. cities grew with every passing decade. The war helped to fuel what we today refer to as the Great Migration, a decades-long process that ultimately reshaped American culture, society, and politics. Beginning in the 1910s, African Americans migrated from southern farms and small towns into northern cities. Many hoped to escape Jim Crow, the South's system of legalized segregation and disenfranchisement, while simultaneously exploiting employment opportunities created by the war. Adjusting to their new urban circumstances, migrants endured segregation, discrimination, and sometimes physical violence. At the same time, women worked to expand the right to vote nationally. The suffrage movement predated the war by decades, but World War I proved a pivotal moment. Radical suffragists picketed the White House, while more moderate groups touted their contributions to the war. As a result, Woodrow Wilson became the first president to advocate a constitutional amendment. In 1919, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote, which was ratified in 1920.
330. LOCECH_171108_081.JPG: National Woman's Party Some suffrage organizations tempered their demand for the vote in hopes that support for the war effort would further their cause. The National Woman's Party (NWP), however, kept securing for women the right to vote at the top of its agenda throughout the war. Enduring insults, physical violence, and legal prosecution for their efforts, NWP members first picketed the White House in January 1917. In the fall, dozens of members were arrested and imprisoned. Drawing attention to the cause, suffragists such as Virginia Arnold (pictured here) turned Woodrow Wilson's outspoken sympathy for self-government into a critique of the president and his opposition to a constitutional amendment for women's suffrage. Initially Wilson had said that women's voting rights should be left to the states to decide.
331. LOCECH_171108_094.JPG: Women's Right to Vote
332. LOCECH_171108_100.JPG: African American Soldiers and Sailors
333. LOCECH_171108_107.JPG: Tending to the Wounded
334. LOCECH_171108_116.JPG: Lucius Byron Nash
335. LOCECH_171108_126.JPG: Otto Ferdinand Leven
336. LOCECH_171108_136.JPG: Establishing the Boundaries of Poland Prior to World War I, Poland's territory was divided among the empires of Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. The war reignited Polish dreams of self-determination. President Wilson and his administration wanted to redraw the country's borders based on the dominant language of the people in a given area. However Great Britain feared that approach would give Poland too much of Germany's natural resources and industries in the east. Britain wanted Germany left in a position to pay restitution for the war and to avoid a communist uprising, like the one in Russia.
337. LOCECH_171108_142.JPG: Drawing New Borders After the 1918 Armistice, the victorious Allies, along with violent struggles among the peoples formerly governed from Istanbul, put an end to the Ottoman Empire. This process of imperial collapse created new countries and established national borders that have, for the most part, lasted to the present day. Some of those new borders were quite literally drawn on old maps, as Allied leaders considered attempting to group peoples by their nationality and languages and to protect their own imperial and economic interests. This map from Woodrow Wilson's papers shows a proposal for a large Armenian state and Jewish homeland that was never implemented.
338. LOCECH_171108_148.JPG: World Overturned The end of the war on November 11, 1918, brought tremendous relief around the globe but left in its wake questions about the new world the Great War had molded and about Americans' role in it. World War I was a world-changing event. During the war, four large powerful empires -- Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German -- fell apart. In Africa and Asia, the wartime contributions of colonial troops, a weakened Europe, and Wilson's promise of "self-determination" planted the seeds of decolonization. Revolution took hold in Russia under the communists and threatened the governments of Germany, Italy, and others. Facilitated by the flow of millions of people put in motion by the war, the exchange of ideas, customs, and artistic expression spread new forms of global culture, even fueling an international jazz craze. In this transformed world, Americans confronted the challenges of how to help negotiate a lasting peace, how to uphold the principles President Wilson and others claimed the country had fought for, and how to redraw the map of the world, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa -- the former imperial territories of the defeated Central Powers. At home, they considered what the role of the United States should be in this emerging international order, how to reintegrate veterans returning from the war, and how to remember the war and those who served and sacrificed. World War I had shaken the lives of Americans and shaped a modern world to which they now needed to adapt.
339. LOCECH_171108_151.JPG: Helping Disabled Veterans Return to the Work Force In the spring of 1917, as the United States entered the war, the American Red Cross founded the Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men in New York, headed by Douglas McMurtrie. Intended to address all disabilities, the charity was soon overwhelmed by veterans who had survived the devastating effects of modern warfare. McMurtie, observing the efforts of the European belligerents to retrain disabled men, believed America could become a leader in that effort and make it possible for disabled veterans to have meaningful and adequately compensated employment. The Soldiers Rehabilitation Act (Smith-Sears Act), passed by Congress in June 1918 to provide federal funds to assist disabled veterans, served as a model for future federal legislation on disabilities.
340. LOCECH_171108_159.JPG: Rehabilitation and Reintegration
341. LOCECH_171108_168.JPG: Allen Melancthon Sumner
342. LOCECH_171108_178.JPG: Mary Curry Desha Breckinridge
343. LOCECH_171108_194.JPG: James Reese Europe
344. LOCECH_171108_206.JPG: James Reese Europe and Jazz Transported to Europe by African American regimental bands and troops, jazz took France by storm. Few individuals could claim more credit for this result than Washington, D.C., native and noted composer-arranger-conductor James Reese Europe, who led the 369th Infantry Regimental Band. Europe's band, which consisted of Puerto Rican and African American musicians, including famed singer-songwriter Nobel Sissle, helped to spread one of America's unique cultural contributions to the world. Simultaneously these bands worked to undo racial segregation by bringing Europeans and white and black Americans into common appreciation of the new musical form. The French, in particular, warmed to jazz. As Charles Hamilton Houston wrote in his diary: "Paris is taken away with [Jazz] and our style of dancing. The girls come after the boys in taxis and beg them to go to the dance. Colored boys are all the go."
345. LOCECH_171108_212.JPG: Air War over Meuse-Argonne At Meuse-Argonne, Colonel William Mitchell, the AEF's chief aviation officer, led a force of 842 airplanes in bombing raids against German concentrations behind the frontlines, strafing runs against machine gun nests, and aerial reconnaissance missions to observe enemy movements. In this letter to his mother two weeks into the battle, he praised the performance of the air service and noted, "Our ground troops also do well, but are pretty new." This map depicts the entire Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The engagement lasted from September 26, 1918, until the Armistice on November 11, 1918. During these forty-seven days, more than 1.2 million American soldiers went into action.
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