Hey there and welcome back to Heimler’s History. So we’ve been going through Unit 7 of the AP U.S. History Curriculum and in the last video we talked about America’s involvement in World War I in terms of that actual fighting of the war, but in this video we’re going to look at what was happening on the homefront in World War I. So if you’re ready to get them brain cows milked, let’s get to it. Now World War I was what’s known as a total war, which means that for the countries fighting in the war, they mobilized much of their economic, industrial, and social resources in order to win. And that’s true not only in the actual fighting of the war, but those resources were also leveraged at home. Now once the U.S. was finally involved in the war, we got on mobilization like white on rice in glass of milk on a paper plate in a snow storm. President Wilson got busy establishing wartime agencies that operated with Progressive efficiency (remember Taylorism). For example, we got the War Industries Board which coordinated labor and management to keep factories pumping out war-related materials like armaments, uniforms, etc. There was also the Food Administration which ensured that food production was sufficient both for the troops and the folks at home. And because American industry was kicking into high gear, many folks migrated from rural area to urban industrial centers to find work, but we’ll talk more about migration and immigration in a moment. Now as you might imagine, not everyone was super happy about the United States leveraging all its assets to fight in a European war, and so some people raised their voices and spoke out against the flurry of mobilization. So in response to that there was an earnest effort put forward by the federal government to restrict civil liberties and silence dissenting speech. For example, in 1917 and 1918, respectively, the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act were passed. And taken together these two acts basically made it a crime to oppose the war or interfere with the draft or even to say anything disloyal about the war effort. Now if that sounds unconstitutional to you, well, then the Supreme Court would disagree with you, and for that, let me introduce you to a case called Schenck v the United States. So Charles Schenck and a few of his buddies in the Socialist Party wrote up some pamphlets urging young men to resist the draft, and when he was arrested for violating the Espionage Act, the appeal made it all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court upheld this restriction of civil liberties because, as they argued, freedom of speech is not absolute. In other words, when speech constitutes a “clear and present danger” then it is constitutional for it to be silenced. The federal government also sought to suppress the severity of reports of the Spanish Flu. As Americans were dying by the thousands from this unusually deadly strain of flu virus, the federal government sought to forbid publications that revealed the true death toll and the dangers of the illness on account of it damaging morale for the war effort. [Hey you know what else damages morale? 675,000 Americans dead because of the flu…] Now not only were people’s anxieties stoked by this restriction of civil liberties, but their anxiety kept blooming after the war because of the dang communists in a phenomenon known as the Red Scare. Now after the war there was, of course, much rejoicing, but there was also a growing anti-communist sentiment as well beginning in 1919. Americans began to fear a communist infiltration after the Russian Revolution was successful half a world away. This fear led to further xenophobia which is a fear and distrust of those from other countries, which in turn led to further immigration restrictions, on which more in a moment. But at the height of the Red Scare we had the Palmer Raids in which Attorney General Mitchell Palmer tasted an official named J. Edgar Hoover to secretly gather information on suspected radicals. Eventually they ordered the mass arrest of socialists, radicals, labor union leaders, and others, and in the end over 6000 arrests were made and over 500 were deported. Okay, now I said we were going to talk about immigration, so let’s talk about it. The rate of immigration from European countries reached its peak in the years before World War I and that, unsurprisingly, led to a backlash of nativism, or opposition to immigration. Now this wave of immigrants began during the Gilded Age, and if you’ll remember, some nativists were incensed that these folks were not Protestant. Poles and Italians were largely Catholic, and Eastern European Jews were mostly, you know, Jewish. And this nativist sentiment eventually led to immigration quotas, especially in the form of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. You also had the National Origins Act of 1924, and both of these taken together set the quotas for accepting new immigrants very low, especially immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe and Asia. Now, speaking of people moving around, let’s talk migration. Remember: immigration is people coming in from outside the country; migration is people moving around inside the country. And maybe the most significant migration that took place during this period was known as the Great Migration in which huge portions of the southern black population migrated to the urban industrial centers of the north. Now one of the main reasons they moved north was to escape the oppressive atmosphere of southern society in which they were treated as second-class citizens. As Jim Crow Laws proliferated throughout the southern states, black citizens were made to attend separate schools and use separate facilities. Additionally, they were often disenfranchised because of schemes like polls taxes and literacy tests that had to be paid or passed in order to gain access to the voting booth. But on the positive side, the southern black population migrated for the sake of finding jobs. Northern cities like New York and Chicago were experiencing a boom in industry. And unfortunately for these industries that huge pool of low cost immigrant labor that they had come to depend on was drained to its dregs by those immigration quotas I just mentioned, and so they needed workers. And as it turned out, black migrants from the South fit the bill. But you can’t get the impression that as black people migrated out of the oppressive, racially segregated south that they arrived in the color-blind north and it was just some kind of giant interracial hug fest. No, black migrants still experienced discrimination in the North, the only difference is that it wasn’t so entrenched in the legal structures of the North. Still, there were at least 25 race riots in 1919 alone. The deadliest race riot to occur during this time happened in 1921, so a couple years after World War I was over. The Tulsa Race Riots, otherwise known as the Tulsa Massacre, began because a white woman claimed a black shoe shine assaulted her. A white mob quickly assembled to lynch the young man, but an opposing group of black folks rose up to intervene. The result was the mass destruction of property in black neighborhoods leaving over 10,000 homeless, and in the end, 300 black folks had been killed. So all in all, life on the homefront during World War I was kind of rough all around… Okay, that’s what you need to know about Unit 7 Topic 6 of the AP U.S. History curriculum. I will in no way restrict your civil liberty to get an A in your class and a five on your here. 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