World War I: Home Front

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how the Selective Service Act of 1917, the War Industries Board, and the Food Administration combined federal authority with voluntary participation to mobilize the country for war.
• Explain how the Committee on Public Information used posters, films, speakers, and the press to manufacture wartime consent, and identify both the achievements and the costs of the campaign.
• Account for the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, the prosecutions of Eugene Debs and others, and the Supreme Court's reasoning in Schenck v. United States.
• Describe the wartime acceleration of the Great Migration of African Americans and the entry of women into industrial work, and explain the lasting demographic and cultural consequences each produced.
• Account for the 1918 influenza pandemic, the strikes and race riots of 1919, and the postwar Red Scare as connected episodes shaped by wartime mobilization.
• Use Skill 3.D to analyze a primary source and construct a historically defensible claim about the home front using specific evidence (Reasoning Process: Causation).

When Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917, the United States had a regular army of roughly one hundred thirty thousand men, no real industrial mobilization plan, and a population that had spent the previous three years arguing over whether the country should be in the war at all. By November 1918, the country had raised an army of four million, sent two million of them to France, financed roughly seventy percent of the war through borrowing, and built a federal regulatory apparatus that touched almost every sector of the economy. The home front of the First World War was the moment the modern federal government took shape, and the moment American institutions discovered both how much could be done quickly and what could be lost in the rush.

Mobilization began with manpower. The Selective Service Act, signed on May 18, 1917, was the first national draft since the Civil War and the first that operated through local civilian boards rather than through federal provost marshals. Roughly twenty-four million men eventually registered, and about two point eight million were inducted before the November 1918 armistice (KC-7.3.II.B). To organize war production, the Wilson administration created the War Industries Board under the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, with sweeping authority over priorities, prices, and standardization. The Food Administration under Herbert Hoover took a different approach, pressing voluntary rationing through public campaigns, "wheatless Mondays" and "meatless Tuesdays" and sugarless desserts, that asked households to police their own consumption in the name of feeding the army and the Allies. The Liberty Loan campaigns financed the war: five separate bond drives between 1917 and 1919 raised roughly twenty-one billion dollars, with movie stars, Boy Scouts, and door-to-door committees turning federal borrowing into a mass civic ritual (KC-7.3.II.B).

Mobilizing public sentiment was the work of the Committee on Public Information, created by executive order one week after the declaration of war and run by a Progressive journalist named George Creel. The CPI flooded the country with about seventy-five million pieces of printed material, distributed posters by the tens of thousands, sent some seventy-five thousand Four-Minute Men into churches, theaters, and union halls to deliver short patriotic talks at the start of every public gathering, and produced a small library of feature films with titles such as The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. Creel's stated goal was a "war of ideas," but in practice the campaign blurred the line between persuasion and intimidation. Anti-German feeling spread quickly. Sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage," frankfurters became "liberty sausages," and dachshunds were sometimes attacked on the street. State and local school boards in roughly half the states banned the teaching of German, a language that had been the second most common language of instruction in American schools the year before. The German-American community, the largest non-English-speaking community in the country in 1914, contracted permanently (KC-7.2.I.C).

The same mobilization pressure produced a federal crackdown on dissent. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it a federal crime to interfere with military recruiting, to convey false information that could obstruct the war effort, or to encourage disloyalty in the armed forces. The Sedition Act of 1918 went further, criminalizing "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the federal government, the Constitution, the flag, or the uniform. Federal prosecutors filed roughly two thousand cases under the two laws and obtained more than one thousand convictions, the vast majority against socialists, pacifists, immigrant radicals, and members of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs, who had drawn nine hundred thousand votes for president in 1912, was convicted under the Espionage Act for an antiwar speech delivered in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. He ran for president from his cell in the Atlanta penitentiary in 1920 and received roughly nine hundred thousand votes a second time. The Supreme Court ratified the prosecutions in Schenck v. United States in March 1919, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes producing the doctrine that speech could be punished when it produced "a clear and present danger" of the substantive evils Congress had a right to prevent. The decision read free expression as elastic in wartime and shaped First Amendment doctrine for the next half century (KC-7.2.I.C).

The wartime economy reshaped the country's demographic geography. The 1917 cutoff of European immigration combined with surging demand from northern factories produced an opening that Black Southerners had been waiting for. Roughly half a million African Americans left the South for the industrial cities of the North between 1916 and 1919, the first wave of what historians call the Great Migration, with another million following during the 1920s (KC-7.2.II.C). The push factors were familiar: Jim Crow laws, the threat of lynching, sharecropping debt, and the boll weevil's destruction of the southern cotton crop. The pull factors were the war: factory wages two and three times higher than southern farm income, recruiters from the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Chicago packinghouses sometimes offering free transportation, and the African American press, especially Robert Abbott's Chicago Defender, urging readers to leave. Chicago's Black population grew by about one hundred forty-eight percent between 1910 and 1920; Detroit's by more than six hundred percent. The migration produced a new urban Black political voice, the cultural ferment that became the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and a violent white backlash that culminated in the Chicago race riot of late July 1919, one of the central episodes of the so-called Red Summer. Riots that summer in Washington, D.C., Knoxville, Omaha, and Elaine, Arkansas, killed dozens; the Tulsa massacre two years later in 1921 destroyed the Greenwood district known as Black Wall Street.

Women filled the second large gap that war mobilization opened. Roughly one million American women entered paid employment for the first time during the war, working in shell-loading plants, streetcar companies, federal offices, and the Women's Land Army, while another eight million already at work moved into higher-paying positions vacated by departed soldiers. The Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor was created in 1920 to track the consequences. Wartime service supplied a politically decisive argument for the suffrage movement, and the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in August 1920. Many of the wartime gains in industrial employment proved temporary as veterans returned and union contracts pushed women out, but the cultural shift, the more visible presence of women in the wage economy, the offices, and the public sphere, carried directly into the consumer economy and the so-called New Woman of the 1920s (Theme MIG, KC-7.2.II.A.i).

The home front faced a second enemy that the federal government could not draft, regulate, or imprison. The 1918 influenza pandemic, mistakenly remembered as the Spanish flu because neutral Spain reported the disease frankly while belligerent governments censored their own newspapers, swept across the country in three waves between the spring of 1918 and the spring of 1919. Roughly six hundred seventy-five thousand Americans died, more than ten times the United States combat dead of the war. Globally the toll ran somewhere between fifty million and one hundred million. The pandemic struck young adults at unusually high rates, including soldiers in crowded training camps; the second wave that began at Camp Devens in Massachusetts in September 1918 spread through the army system in weeks. American public health authorities ordered theaters, churches, and schools closed in many cities, mandated face coverings in San Francisco and elsewhere, and recorded the most lethal three-month period in American demographic history. The pandemic deepened the wartime sense of crisis and, in some accounts, accelerated the war's end (KC-7.2.I.C).

When the fighting stopped in November 1918, the federal apparatus did not. Wartime inflation, the demobilization of four million soldiers, and the abrupt end of war contracts produced a wave of strikes in 1919 that involved roughly four million workers, including the Seattle general strike in February, a Boston police strike that fall, and a national steel strike led by William Z. Foster. A series of anarchist mail bombings in April and June, including a bomb that destroyed the front of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's Washington home, combined with the success of the Bolshevik Revolution to produce a federal panic about radicalism. Palmer, working through a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover who would later run the Federal Bureau of Investigation for forty-eight years, launched what came to be called the Palmer Raids: a series of mass arrests of suspected anarchists, communists, and immigrant radicals between November 1919 and January 1920. Federal agents arrested several thousand people in coordinated raids across more than thirty cities, often without warrants, and deported about five hundred fifty foreign-born radicals on the troopship Buford, including the anarchist writer Emma Goldman. The first Red Scare collapsed in mid-1920 when a predicted May Day uprising failed to occur and federal courts began throwing out arrest warrants for lack of evidence, but its institutional residue, the deportation power, the General Intelligence Division at Justice, and the political habit of treating dissent as disloyalty, carried into the second Red Scare of the late 1940s (KC-7.2.I.C, KC-7.2.II.B.i).

The five excerpts below place students inside the home-front debate. They span federal statute, Supreme Court doctrine, government propaganda, and the photographic record of migration.

1. (Causation) Account for the way the federal government raised, financed, and supplied an army of four million between April 1917 and November 1918. Which of the wartime agencies do you think did the most consequential work, and on what grounds?
2. (Continuity and Change) Compare the Espionage Act of 1917 with earlier federal restrictions on dissent in American history, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 or the Civil War suspension of habeas corpus. Which precedent does the 1917 statute most closely resemble, and what does the comparison reveal about wartime expansion of federal power?
3. (Comparison) Compare the experience of African Americans who participated in the Great Migration with the experience of women who entered war work for the first time. In what ways did the war alter their position in the country, and in what ways did the changes prove temporary?
4. (Causation) Trace the causal chain from the November 1918 armistice through the strikes of 1919 to the Palmer Raids of late 1919 and early 1920. At which step in the chain do you think federal officials had the most freedom to choose a different course?
5. (Continuity and Change) Holmes's "clear and present danger" test in Schenck shaped First Amendment doctrine for half a century. Identify one twentieth-century case in which the test was applied or rebalanced, and explain what the later case reveals about the lasting reach of the World War I home front.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.