Topic 7.6 Notes – World War I: Home Front

How World War I Changed Life on the Home Front

U.S. entry into the war meant total mobilization. The country needed weapons, rail transport, food, fuel, soldiers, and public unity all at once. That pushed the federal government deeper into everyday life than before.

This fit the Progressive Era idea that expert-led government could solve big problems. In wartime, that meant agencies that coordinated the economy instead of leaving everything to private businesses.

The pattern to remember is simple. Mobilization created new chances for workers, women, and migrants, but it also expanded federal power, repression, and nativism.

Federal Mobilization and Wartime Labor

The government built a wartime economy through temporary agencies.

• War Industries Board under Bernard Baruch coordinated industrial production. It set priorities, allocated raw materials, and standardized goods so factories could produce faster.
• United States Railroad Administration under William G. McAdoo took federal control of railroads to reduce delays and move troops and supplies efficiently.
• The Lever Food and Fuel Control Act gave Washington more control over essentials.

Food and fuel

• The Food Administration under Herbert Hoover relied mostly on voluntary conservation. Campaigns pushed “Meatless Tuesdays,” “Wheatless Mondays,” and home gardens.
• The Fuel Administration promoted “heatless Mondays” and daylight saving time to save coal and energy.

Paying for the war

• The war was funded by higher taxes and by borrowing through Liberty Loans and the Victory Loan.
• Bond drives turned patriotism into a public test. Buying bonds showed loyalty, and refusing could make people look suspicious.

Wartime mobilization also depended on mass persuasion and enlistment campaigns, like the famous Uncle Sam recruiting poster.

World War I Uncle Sam recruiting poster

Labor shortages came from three things at once: reduced European immigration, men leaving for military service, and rising war production.

• The AFL under Samuel Gompers backed the war effort.
• The National War Labor Board mediated disputes, supported the 8-hour day in many industries, recognized workers’ right to organize, and accepted equal pay for women doing equal work.
• Union membership rose during the war.

About one million additional women entered the workforce. They worked in munitions, railroads, offices, communications, nursing, and as Navy yeomen. The war expanded women’s job options, even though many gains faded after 1918. Their service also strengthened support for the Nineteenth Amendment.

Limits mattered too. Employers and the government were much harsher toward radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World.

Propaganda, Repression, and Wartime Nationalism

The Wilson administration wanted unity, so it sold the war aggressively.

• The Committee on Public Information led by George Creel used posters, films, pamphlets, and newspapers.
• Four-Minute Men gave short pro-war speeches in public places.

Four-Minute Men wartime propaganda poster

Posters like this one helped spread the message of “100 percent Americanism,” and that pressure quickly turned into anti-German hysteria.

• German Americans were suspected of disloyalty.
• German language teaching shrank, books were removed, place names changed, and even sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage.”
• Robert Prager was lynched in Illinois.
• The American Protective League helped investigate “disloyalty.”

The legal side of repression mattered just as much:

• Espionage Act of 1917 banned interference with recruitment and blocked mailing of “disloyal” material.
• Sedition Act of 1918 punished disloyal speech about the government, flag, Constitution, or armed forces.
• Eugene V. Debs was jailed for an antiwar speech and ran for president from prison in 1920.
• In Schenck v. United States (1919), the Supreme Court upheld limits on anti-draft speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. used the “clear and present danger” test.

The core contradiction is classic APUSH. The U.S. said it was defending democracy abroad while restricting dissent at home.

Migration, Nativism, and the Red Scare

War disrupted Atlantic travel and cut European immigration, so employers looked harder for workers already in the U.S. That pulled people toward industrial cities in the Northeast, Great Lakes, and West Coast. Cities grew fast, and that meant overcrowding, housing shortages, and more racial tension.

The Great Migration

About 1.6 million African Americans left the South between 1910 and 1930, heading especially to cities in the Midwest, Northeast, and on the West Coast.

• Push factors included Jim Crow, disfranchisement, lynching, low wages, sharecropping, and the boll weevil.
• Pull factors included factory jobs, higher wages, voting opportunities, and existing Black communities.
• The Chicago Defender encouraged migration.
• Migrants still faced segregation and job discrimination.
• Major violence included East St. Louis 1917, Red Summer 1919, and the Chicago riot of 1919.

This migration helped build larger Black urban communities, expand the NAACP, and lay groundwork for the Harlem Renaissance and later civil rights activism.

Mexican migration and restriction

The Mexican Revolution pushed migrants north, and U.S. labor demand pulled them into agriculture, mining, railroads, and Southwest industry. They also faced segregation and hostility.

Wartime nativism fed directly into immigration law:

First Red Scare

Fear shifted from Germans to radicals after 1918. The Russian Revolution, strikes, and bombings sparked the First Red Scare.

• Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover targeted suspected radicals.
• The Palmer Raids arrested many people and often violated civil liberties.
• Labor activism, immigrant culture, socialism, anarchism, and communism got lumped together as threats.