World War I The Great War and the American Century PHOTOGRAPH BY A. R. COSTER/TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY American servicemen parade through the streets of London on August 15, 1917. CONTENTS Introduction: A Crisis That Redefined Us War in Europe and Peace at Home The U.S. Goes In The Cost of Peace A New Age in the U.S. Epilogue: A Century Later Just One More FRONT COVER Scottish soldiers from the 10th Battalion leaving the safety of their trench to attack the German lines, on March 24, 1917. Photograph by Lt. J .W. Brooke/IWM/Getty PHOTOGRAPH FROM HAECKEL COLLECTION/ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY Launched in June 1915, the USS Arizona super-dreadnought battleship served as a gunnery trainer during the war and would be sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. 1914–1917 War in Europe and Peace at Home As the world descends into conflict, the United States struggles with whether to join in ROBERT HUNT COLLECTION/MARY EVANS CANADIAN TROOPS leave their trenches and head over the top at the Battle of the Somme. The 141-day offensive in 1916 failed to break through the German line and led to more than one million dead and wounded of all nationalities. As the Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Countess Sophie Chotek, strolled through a bazaar in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, on June 27, 1914, they passed carpet shops and coppersmiths, singing street clowns and citizens who happily greeted the couple. But as these visiting royals made their way through the market’s winding paths, they were not aware that 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip stalked them. The next day was St. Vitus Day, the anniversary of the Serbs’ defeat by the Turks in 1389. Many Serbs resented Austria-Hungary’s 1908 annexation of Bosnia- Herzegovina, which they considered part of Greater Serbia. For them, it was outrageous that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne dared come to Sarajevo on a somber day so rich with nationalist feeling. When the couple returned to the capital that morning, several radicals from the revolutionary group Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia)—of which Princip was a member—awaited them. Hoping to assassinate the archduke and free their land, the group set out with bombs and semiautomatic pistols given to them by the Black Hand, a secret Serbian nationalist group. The morning was warm in this city with its minarets and villas along the Miljacka River. Colorful banners and flags hung from homes and shops, and Sarajevans lined the main boulevard to watch the six-car procession and catch a glimpse of the proud archduke sporting a helmet with bright green ostrich feathers. But as the procession moved along, a bomb—thrown by one of the Mlada Bosna conspirators—bounced off of Franz Ferdinand’s Gräf and Stift double phaeton and exploded under the following vehicle. Despite the attack, the archduke was determined to keep to his schedule and commented that the man who had thrown the bomb was “clearly insane.” His driver sped off to the town hall, and after a visit there, the party headed to the hospital to see those wounded by the blast. Along the way, the driver took a wrong turn. As he slowed down to reverse, he happened to stop in front of Princip. The youth pulled out a pistol, jumped onto the car’s running board and shot Franz Ferdinand in the jugular and Sophie in the abdomen. Within minutes, the two were both dead. Princip had no idea of the events he was setting in motion. While no clear evidence linked the attack to Serbia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire delivered a series of ultimatums to punish that nation for what had happened. After Serbia balked at one of them, the empire declared war on July 28, and a tangle of existing treaties led to an international cataclysm. When Austria-Hungary bombed the Serbian capital of Belgrade, Serbia’s ally Russia mobilized its troops. Austria-Hungary and its ally Germany subsequently declared war on Russia. Germany also declared war on France and invaded Belgium, in response to which Belgium’s ally Britain declared war on Germany. In just a week, much of Europe was engulfed in war. Strutting German, French, Russian, and British soldiers headed off for what they believed would be a brief rout, their rifles adorned with flowers from proud sweethearts. But by the fall, the Allies (Britain, France, Russia, and Italy) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria) found themselves in an intractable military deadlock. Troops on the western front dug 460 miles of trenches, stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland, transforming pastoral farmlands and urban centers into a shell-pocked no-man’s-land of death. Meanwhile, on the eastern front, soldiers fought large battles that ranged across the Meanwhile, on the eastern front, soldiers fought large battles that ranged across the land. In the United States, it all seemed very far away. As news of the fighting made its way across the Atlantic, many Americans counted themselves lucky that an ocean stood between them and the conflict. The Chicago Herald noted that “peace-loving citizens of this country will now rise up and tender a hearty vote of thanks to Columbus for having discovered America.” On August 4, President Woodrow Wilson declared the nation’s determination to remain “impartial in thought as well as in action.” Born in Virginia and raised in the South during the Civil War and its aftermath, the professor turned President had seen the devastation of battle and sought to keep America neutral. Though the calendar might have read 1914, the United States was still a largely 19th- century society, decidedly Victorian in nature. Women lacked the vote, and few were employed outside the home. One in 10 infants died before turning one, less than 20 percent of homes contained stoves, and few had radios. More than half the U.S. population of nearly 100 million lived in rural areas or small towns. Men of whom the war would make heroes lived quiet lives. Harry Truman lived in Grandview, Missouri, on his family’s 600-acre farm, sharing a room with his brother and the farmhands. A young Alvin York lived in the hamlet of Pall Mall, Tennessee, farming alongside the other 12 members of his family. York later recalled that “the logs were chinked with clay and sticks” in the two-room cabin that was their home. But change was coming, especially thanks to industrialization and migration. While there were only two million cars on the roads—one for every 50 people—in 1913 Ford Motors began its integrated moving assembly line. Progressive politics nurtured labor federations, women’s leagues, and social welfare groups. The era saw the start of child- labor regulations, the popular election of senators, environmental preservation, and the birth of a centralized bank system. From 1865 to 1914, the U.S. economy grew faster than any other in the world. And a couple by the name of Shemin, who had fled the pogroms of Russia, settled in New Jersey, where their son William was born and would go on to play semiprofessional baseball. Jobs beckoned in the industrial north, in steel mills, factories, and railroads in places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. The age witnessed the beginning of the Great Migration, a vast movement of African Americans fleeing southern sharecropping and racist Jim Crow laws. A man named Henry Johnson joined the northern wave, leaving Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and finding work as a porter at Union Station in Albany, New York. “The war in Europe cut off the flow of immigrant labor to the United States,” Professor Jennifer Keene, chair of the history department at Chapman University and author of Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, tells LIFE. “You had labor agents going to the South to recruit people to come up.” While the United States had waged war against Spain in the Philippines in 1898, it had since remained more focused on its own hemisphere. In the summer of 1915, Haiti became a U.S. protectorate. The following year, Wilson sent General John Pershing to Mexico to capture the revolutionary Pancho Villa. A West Point graduate, the Missouri-born Pershing had amassed an enviable military record. He had led the African American 10th Cavalry during the Indian War campaigns of the late 19th century—earning the moniker “Black Jack”—and in the 1898 Battle of San Juan Hill under Lt. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Later, when Roosevelt ended up in the White House, the President so appreciated the work of the officer who was said to be as “cool as a bowl of cracked ice” that he promoted Pershing to brigadier general. Quite a few Americans lived in Europe in August 1914. Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou, had recently settled in London. A prosperous mining engineer from Iowa, Hoover had assisted fellow Americans besieged in Tientsin in 1900 during China’s Boxer Rebellion. Now, as his fellow citizens, fleeing the present conflict, poured into England from the Continent, he arranged for food, shelter, and the evacuation of 100,000. To the expats trapped by the fighting, who desperately wanted to get home, the shores of the United States seemed an oasis of peace and prosperity. Meanwhile, the trenches of Europe’s western front had become lice-infested sores of humanity, assaulted by artillery shells, machine gun fire, and poisoned gas. Lieutenant Colonel Winston Churchill of England wrote in November 1915 of the “filth and rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defenses” and how “about this scene in the dazzling moonlight troops of enormous bats creep & glide.” While President Wilson and most of his countrymen had no desire to be dragged into such a battle, sitting on the sidelines proved difficult. Many Americans felt a cultural connection to Britain and France. People like Hoover —who had also been called upon to assist starving Belgian and French citizens by U.S. ambassador to England Walter Hines Page—engaged in charity at home and abroad. And at the same time, many Americans who claimed German roots endured harassment. The family of Baltimore bookkeeper Henry Gunther came from Germany, and after one of them was accused of being a spy, the police picked her up for questioning. But help wasn’t all a matter of charity: The combatants needed both supplies and food, and the United States—already the world’s largest producer of coal and steel— was positioned to provide. Allied agents rushed to its shores to buy raw materials, as was positioned to provide. Allied agents rushed to its shores to buy raw materials, as well as meat, cotton, livestock, and grain. Armament makers churned out rifles, machine guns, and light artillery shells. Since supplies cost the British $10 million a day, Britain had to liquidate overseas investments and send gold stateside. The U.S. economy boomed. Exports increased from more than $2 billion in 1913 to $6 billion in 1916, and America’s industrial capacity soon surpassed Britain’s. Though the United Kingdom could acquire goods from abroad, they had instituted a naval blockade that made it difficult for Germany to do the same, leading to the starvation deaths of 200 citizens a day. Desperate to break the blockade, Germany retaliated with submarines—Unterseeboote, or U-boats—sinking roughly two ships a day. Wilson warned that if they attacked American ships, the United States would hold Germany to “strict accountability.” Then on May 7, 1915, the submarine U-20 torpedoed the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania off the coast of Ireland. It took less than 20 minutes for the liner to go down. Lieutenant Commander Walther Schwieger recalled watching the ship through his periscope and how “men and women jumped into the water and tried to swim to empty overturned lifeboats.” Among the nearly 1,200 killed by the attack were 128 Americans. Their deaths galvanized the movement for the United States to abandon neutrality. Soon after the sinking, the hawkish Roosevelt, who had run for President against Wilson three years earlier, said, “It seems inconceivable to me that we can refrain from taking action in this matter.” In mid-August, a German U-boat sank the British passenger ship Arabic, killing 44 people, including two Americans. Not wishing to pull the United States into the war, Germany promised to stop unannounced attacks on passenger ships. And so America maintained its stance of neutrality as the war raged on. In western Turkey, the Allies had begun their badly planned Gallipoli Campaign, attacking the Dardanelles Strait. The assault would lead to the deaths of more than 110,000 Allied and Turkish troops. In France, along the Meuse River, German general Erich von Falkenhayn launched an assault on the fortified city of Verdun in February of 1916, in order to “bleed France white” by killing as many soldiers as possible. “When the first wave of the assault is decimated, the ground is dotted with heaps of corpses, but the second wave is already pressing on,” said one French officer of the carnage, which led to the deaths of some 300,000. Then, to relieve pressure at Verdun, in July the British and French launched the Somme Offensive. On the first day, 19,000 died. Staggering battle losses appalled observers, and during the 1916 presidential campaign, Wilson won reelection under the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Even so, many Americans believed that Wilson would not—and should not—be able to