624 Chapter 23 Woodrow Wilson and the Great War
for suggesting that the draft law was unconstitutional
and for criticizing private organizations like the Red
Cross and the YMCA. One woman was sent to prison
for writing, “I am for the people, and the government
is for the profiteers.”
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality
of the Espionage Act in Schenck v. United States
(1919), a case involving a man who had mailed circu-
lars to draftees urging them to refuse to report for
induction into the army. Free speech has its limits,
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., explained. No
one has the right to cry, “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
When there is a “clear and present danger” that a par-
ticular statement would threaten the national interest,
it can be repressed by law. In peacetime Schenck’s cir-
culars would be permissible, but not in time of war.
The “clear and present danger” doctrine did not
prevent judges and juries from interpreting the espi-
onage and sedition acts broadly, and although in
many instances higher courts overturned their deci-
sions, this usually did not occur until after the war.
The wartime repression far exceeded anything that
happened in Great Britain and France. In 1916 the
French novelist Henri Barbusse published Le Feu
(Under Fire), a graphic account of the horrors and
purposelessness of trench warfare. In one chapter
Barbusse described a pilot flying over the trenches on
a Sunday, observing French and German soldiers at
Mass in the open fields, each worshiping the same
God. Yet Le Feucirculated freely in France and even
won the coveted Prix Goncourt.
Buffington,Friendly Words to the Foreign
Bornatwww.myhistorylab.com
Wartime Reforms
The American mobilization experience was part and
product of the Progressive Era. The work of the pro-
gressives at the national and state levels in expanding
government functions in order to deal with social and
economic problems provided precedents and condi-
tioned the people for the all-out effort of 1917 and
- Social and economic planning and the manage-
ment of huge business operations by public boards
and committees got their first practical tests. College
professors, technicians, and others with complex skills
entered government service en masse. The federal
government for the first time actively entered such
fields as housing and labor relations.
Many progressives believed that the war was cre-
ating the sense of common purpose that would stim-
ulate the people to act unselfishly to benefit the poor
and to eradicate social evils. Patriotism and public ser-
vice seemed at last united. Secretary of War Newton
D. Baker, a prewar urban reformer, expressed this
ReadtheDocumentattitude in supporting a federal child labor law: “We
cannot afford, when we are losing boys in France, to
lose children in the United States.”
Men and women of this sort worked for a dozen
causes only remotely related to the war effort. The
women’s suffrage movement was brought to fruition,
as was the campaign against alcohol. Both the
Eighteenth Amendment, outlawing alcoholic bever-
ages, and the Nineteenth, giving women the vote,
were adopted at least in part because of the war.
Reformers began to talk about health insurance. The
progressive campaign against prostitution and vene-
real disease gained strength, winning the enthusiastic
support both of persons worried about inexperienced
local girls being seduced by the soldiers and of those
concerned lest prostitutes lead innocent soldiers
astray. One of the latter type claimed to have per-
suaded “over 1,000 fallen women” to promise not to
go near any army camps.
The effort to wipe out prostitution around military
installations was a cause of some misunderstanding with
the Allies, who provided licensed facilities for their
troops as a matter of course. When the premier of
France graciously offered to supply prostitutes for
American units in his country, Secretary Baker is said to
have remarked, “For God’s sake... don’t show this to
the President or he’ll stop the war.” Apparently Baker
had a rather peculiar sense of humor. After a tour of the
front in France, he assured an American women’s
group that life in the trenches was “far less uncomfort-
able” than he had thought and that not a single
American doughboy was “living a life which he would
not be willing to have [his] mother see him live.”Women and Blacks in Wartime
Although a number of prominent feminists were paci-
fists, most supported the war enthusiastically, moved
by patriotism and the belief that opposition to the war
would doom their hopes of gaining the vote. They
also expected that the war would open up many kinds
of high-paying jobs to women. To some extent it did;
about a million women replaced men in uniform, but
the numbers actually engaged in war industries were
small (about 6,000 found jobs making airplanes, for
example), and the gains were fleeting. When the war
ended, most women who were engaged in industrial
work either left their jobs voluntarily or were fired to
make room for returning veterans. Some women
went overseas as nurses, and a few served as ambu-
lance drivers and YMCA workers.
Most unions were unsympathetic to the idea of
enrolling women, and the government did little to
encourage women to do more for the war effort
than prepare bandages, knit warm clothing for