The breadth and brutality of World War I was such that in many ways the world is still reeling from its impact. More than 37 million soldiers were killed, wounded or missing in action, a number that represents more than half of all soldiers mobilized to fight. By toppling the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the war redrew the map of Europe, while the war also forced the final dissolution of czarist rule in Russia and led to the ten world-shaking days in November 1917 that marked the beginning of Soviet Communism.
America saw its own upheavals throughout the decade. Most of the disputes were over ideologies: socialism, anarchism, unionism against Americanism, which seemed to encompass anything that the others weren't.
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Infantry with gas masks in World War I
Socialists could claim a small victory in 1910, when Victor L. Berger became the first of their members to claim a Congressional seat. The federal government experienced other firsts in the decade: Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to the House; the federal income tax was approved, courtesy of the Seventeenth Amendment; Louis Brandeis became the first Jew named to the US Supreme Court; while the Seventeenth Amendment permitted the direct election of US Senators.
Working conditions continued to be extremely unsafe, especially for those toiling in mines. From 1906 to 1910, there were eighty-four recorded mine disasters. Unsafe conditions also caused the death of more than 100 young women at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York. Strikes could be equally dangerous for workers, as battles in Ludlow, Colorado, and Lawrence, Massachusetts, demonstrated. At Lawrence, a police attack on a train taking starving children to safety was so naked in its brutality that the textile company being struck was forced by public opinion to give in to the workers' demands.
Progressivism got its own party when a breakaway group of Republicans organized behind Wisconsin's Robert LaFollette in 1911, while Teddy Roosevelt launched his ill-fated bid for the Presidency under the Bull Moose banner in 1912. Republican infighting would cost them the election, and Woodrow Wilson became only the second Democrat elected to the presidency since the Civil War. Roosevelt could savor at least one victory in the decade -- the court-ordered break-up of Standard Oil. Other than that, he had little to celebrate. His son Quentin was killed in World War I, and his broken heart never recovered. In January 1919, he was dead (The Nation's obituary for Roosevelt).
Nearly 1,500 people lost their lives when the Titanic was sunk by a collision with an iceberg in April 1912. Fewer people died when the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-Boat in 1915, but the German attack contributed mightily toward turning American sentiment in favor of joining the Allies. Wilson was re-elected with the slogan "He kept us out of war" (although he did send troops to Mexico in a fruitless effort to capture Pancho Villa), but on April 4, 1917, he asked Congress to approve sending troops to Europe, saying American involvement was necessary to make "the world safe for democracy."
Wilson may have made the world safe for democracy, but it was in trouble at home. Leo Frank, a Jewish factory worker, was lynched by a mob in Marietta, Georgia, after he was wrongly convicted of murdering a young girl. In Utah, Joe Hill, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, was hung after also being framed for murder.
Civil liberties often fell victim to pro-war sentiment. After a bomb exploded during a Preparedness Day rally in San Francisco, two militants, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were tried and convicted for the crime even though they had had nothing to do with it. They would remain in jail until 1939. The radical Greenwich Village magazine The Masses was shut down by the government, while Big Bill Haywood and other leaders of the IWW were arrested for their antiwar activities. Anti-radical violence increased in intensity in 1919, culminating with the Palmer Raids in November of that year. As a result of the raids, scores of radicals were jailed and many were subsequently deported; notable among them were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
The 1900s
