WWI: Home front and Battlefront

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WWI Home front and Battlefront
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Building up the Army

• 1917 300,000 troops
• More needed to be drafted
• Progressives believed conscription was
  undemocratic
• Set up a selective service
• All men 21-30 must register for draft
• Lottery
• 2 mil drafted, 2 mil volunteer

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African Americans

• 400,000 drafted
• Racial discrimination
• Segregated units under white officers
• Fought with distinction

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Women

• First war in which women served in the armed
  forces
• Noncombatant
• Served as nurses earning ranks
• Filled clerical positions, radio operators,
  photographers, etc.
• Army Nursing Corps only women sent overseas

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War Industries Board

• 1917, coordinated the production of war materials
• Ran by Bernard Baruch
• Told manufactures what they could and could not
  produce
• Even set prices

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Food Administration

• Run by Herbert Hoover
• Increasing food production while reducing
  civilian consumption
• Instead of rations families were encouraged to
  save their own food
• Victory gardens to raise their own vegetables

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Fuel Administration

• Managed the nations use of coal and oil
• Daylight savings time to conserve energy
• Shortened work weeks for factories not producing
  war materials
• Heatless Mondays

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Bills

• 32 billion effort
• Liberty Bonds and Victory Bonds 20 billion
  borrowed from Americans
• People charged interest

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National War Labor Board

• Set up to prevent strikes from disrupting the war
  effort
• Mediated labor disputes
• Concessions to workers

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Filling Jobs

• Women fill factory jobs while men are drafted
• Great Migration AA leave the South for jobs in
  the North
• Mexicans as well
• Temporary

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Committee on Public Information

• Sold the war to the American people
• Posters, movies, songs, public speakers
• Four Minute Men delivered patriotic speeches

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Espionage Act

• Espionage Spying to acquire secret government
  information
• act established penalties and prison terms for
  anyone who aided the enemy or being disloyal to
  US
• Sedition Act, 1918 illegal to publicly express
  opposition to the war
• Anti-German

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Trench Warfare

• no mans land space between the opposing
  trenches
• High casualties with massive artillery barrages
• Started using poison gas, tanks, airplanes

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Russia

• Problems with food shortages caused an overthrow
  of the government
• Bolshevik Revolution led by Stalin set up a
  communist government
• Russia leaves the war
• Give up territory to Germany so that troops would
  leave

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Armistice

• Revolution in A-H and Germany
• Germany signed armistice on 11/11 at 11
• Ended the war

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Negotiations

• Big Four Wilson, David Lloyd George, Georges
  Clemenceau, Vittorio Orlando
• Wilsons Fourteen Points
• 5 points addressed free trade, disarmament,
  freedom of the seas
• 8 points addressed self determination
• Last point called for the creation of a League of
  Nations preserve peace and prevent future wars

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Treaty of Versailles

• Discarded Wilsons proposals
• Germany was stripped of armed forces and made to
  pay reparations (33 billion), must take blame
  for the war
• Dissolution of Ottoman, A-H, German and Russian
  Empires
• 9 new countries

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Opposition

• America rejected Treaty and League
• Believed the League would become too powerful
• Wilson leaves office with the issue unresolved