World War I-End of Great Depression

World War I

• Although American entry into the Great War came later than the Allied Powers hoped for, when Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war in April 1917, he did so in an effort to continue promoting America’s vision for the world. When American troops arrived in Europe in the fall of 1917, their participation helped bring an end to the war and establish the United States as a global power. (HSS Framework, 390)
• Students should read Wilson’s Fourteen Points as a justification for why he felt America should go to war, analyze how the Fourteen Points were an extension of earlier policies, and identify which of the points might be controversial in the context of the war. (HSS Framework, 390)
• Students may identify the significance of World War I in transforming America into a world leader, but they should also understand that the aftermath of the war ushered in a decade of isolationism, which by the end of the 1920s would have serious consequences for the world economies. (HSS Framework, 390)

Culture and Society

• The war also stands as an important event that started a century-long growth of the federal government. Once the United States entered the war, the government grew through the administration of the draft, the organization of the war at home, and the promotion of civilian support for the war. (HSS Framework, 390)
• In California, women received the right to vote in 1911; on the national level, it took several more years. Students read about leading suffragists and their organizations, especially the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Women’s Party (NWP). (HSS Framework, 398) 
• Women, who had just secured national suffrage with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, experienced new freedoms but also faced pressure to be attractive and sexual through the growing cosmetics and entertainment industries, and related advertisements.(PHSS Framework, 391)
• American culture was also altered by the first Great Migration of over a million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North during and after World War I, which changed the landscape of black America. The continued flow of migrants and the practical restrictions of segregation in the 1920s helped to create the Harlem Renaissance, the literary and artistic flowering of black artists, poets, musicians, and scholars such as Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, and Zora Neale Hurston. Their work provides students with stunning portrayals of life during segregation, both urban and rural. (HSS Framework, 391-2)
• The Harlem Renaissance led many African Americans to embrace a new sense of black pride and identity, as did Marcus Garvey, the Black Nationalist leader of a “Back to Africa” movement that peaked during this period.(HSS Framework, 392)

Nativism, Nationalism, and White Supremacy

• [In the context of World War I], German Americans experienced prejudice and extreme nativism. African Americans, who served in the military—in segregated units—came home and often moved to industrial centers as part of the “Great Migration,” and were typically met with hostility from locals. (HSS Framework, 391)
• [T]he 1920s is a decade of extremes: broad cultural leaps forward to embrace modernity and simultaneously a deep anxiety about the country changing too fast and for the worse. (HSS Framework, 392)
• In addition to American political leaders’ reluctance to embrace change, many Americans did not embrace the social and cultural openness of the decade. These people found a voice in many organizations that formed to prevent such shifts. The Ku Klux Klan launched anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and moralizing campaigns of violence and intimidation; vice squads targeted speakeasies, communities of color, and LGBT venues. (HSS Framework, 395)
• Congress, encouraged by eugenicists who warned of the “degradation” of the population, restricted immigration by instituting nationality quotas the following year in 1924. (HSS Framework, 395)
• Fears of communism and anarchism associated with the Russian Revolution and World War I provoked attacks on civil liberties and industrial unionists, including the Palmer Raids, the “Red Scare,” the SaccoVanzetti case, and legislation restraining individual expression and privacy. Legal challenges to these activities produced major Supreme Court decisions defining and qualifying the right to dissent and freedom of speech. By reading some of the extraordinary decisions of Justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes (Schenck v. U.S. (1919) and Whitney v. California (1927)), students will understand the continuing tension between the rights of the individual and the power of government. Students can engage in a debate that weighs the need to preserve civil liberties against the need to protect national security. Learning about the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), formed in 1920 with the purpose of defending World War I dissenters, and the NAACP, established in 1909 to protect and promote the constitutional rights of minorities, helps students identify organizational responses to unpopular views and minority rights. (HSS Framework, 395)

Great Depression and New Deal

• The collapse of national and international financial systems in 1929 led to the crash of the American stock market in October 1929. The stock market crash revealed broad underlying weaknesses in the economy, which resulted in the most intense and prolonged economic crisis in modern American history. An interconnected web of international investments, loans, monetary and fiscal policies, and World War I reparations collided in 1929 and led to a worldwide economic downturn. (HSS Framework, 396)
• Key New Deal innovations included the right to collective bargaining for unions, minimum wage and hours laws and Social Security for the elderly, disabled, unemployed, and dependent women and children. Taken together, these new developments created the principle that the government has a responsibility to provide a safety net to protect the most vulnerable Americans; the legacy of these safety net programs created the notion of the modern welfare state. (HSS Framework, 397)
• Though the New Deal coalition forged a Democratic voting bloc that comprised workers, farmers, African Americans, Southern whites, Jews, Catholics, and educated Northerners, the New Deal generated controversy and inspired significant opposition to Roosevelt. (HSS Framework, 398)
• The economic crisis also led to the Mexican Repatriation Program [and Filipino Repatriation Act]: a massive effort by government officials and some private groups to get rid of Mexicans, citing federal immigration law, the need to save jobs for “real Americans,” and a desire to reduce welfare costs. (HSS Framework, 399)