Transcript American Moves to the City - North Ridgeville City Schools



Chapter 25
By
the year 1900, the United States’
upsurging population nearly doubled
from its level of some 40 million souls
in the census of 1870.
In the same time period, the population
of American cities tripled.
By 1900 New York, with some 3.5 million people, was
the second largest city in the world, outranked only by
London.
 Throughout the world, cities were exploding. London,
Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, Mexico City, Calcutta, and
Shanghai all doubled or tripled in size between 1850
and 1900.
 Americans were also becoming commuters; electric
trolleys propelled city limits outwards and near the end
of the century, the nation’s first subway opened in
Boston.

 Industrial
jobs, above all, drew people off
farms in America as well as abroad and into
factory centers.
 Cavernous department stores such as
Macy’s in NY and Marshall Field’s in Chicago
attracted urban middle-class shoppers and
provided urban working-class jobs, many of
them for women.
 In
each of the three decades from the 1850s
through the 1870s, more than 2 million
migrants had stepped onto America’s shores.
 By the 1880s the stream had swelled to a
rushing torrent, as more than 5 million
cascaded into the country.
 A new high for a single year was reached in
1882, when 788,992 arrived- more than 2,100
each day.
The
so-called New Immigrants came
from southern and eastern Europe.
Among them were Italians, Jews,
Croats, Slovaks, Greeks, and Poles.
 Antiforeignism,
or “nativism”, earlier touched
off by the Irish and German arrivals in the
1840s and 1850s, bared its ugly face in the
1880s with fresh ferocity.
 The New Immigrants had come for much the
same reasons as the Old, but “nativists”
viewed the eastern and southern Europeans
as culturally and religiously exotic hordes
and often gave them a rude reception.
Charles Darwin set forth the theory that higher forms of
life had slowly evolved from lower forms, through a
process of random biological mutation and adaptation.
 Though initially condemned by scientists, many people
in America and elsewhere embraced the theory of
organic evolution by 1875.
 French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argued that
traits acquired during the course of an individual’s life
could shape the future genetic development of a
species.

 War-torn
and impoverished, the South
lagged far behind other regions in public
education, and African Americans suffered
most severely.
 A staggering 44% of nonwhites were illiterate
in 1900.
 Booker T. Washington was called to head the
Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, AL in 1881.
He
began with 40 students in a tumbledown shanty.
Washington’s commitment to training
young blacks in agriculture and trades
guided the curriculum and made it the
ideal place for men like George
Washington Carver to teach and
research.
 Other
black leaders, most notably Dr. W.E.B.
Du Bois assailed Washington as an “Uncle
Tom” who was condemning their race to
manual labor and perpetual inferiority.
 Du Bois demanded complete equality for
blacks, social as well as economic and
helped found the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
in 1909.
Books continued to be a major source of edification
and enjoyment, for both juveniles and adults.
 Best sellers of the 1880s were generally old favorites
like David Copperfield and Ivanhoe.
 Two new journalistic tycoons emerged; Joseph
Pulitzer, who was Hungarian-born and near-blind ran
the New York World and William Randolph Hearst
who built a powerful chain of newspapers, beginning
with the San Francisco Examiner in 1887.

The urban era launched the era of divorce.
 From the late nineteenth century dates the beginning
of the “divorce revolution” that transformed the
United States’ social landscape in the 20th century.
 On the farm having many children meant having
more hands to help with hoeing and harvesting; but
in the city more children meant more mouths to feed,
more crowding in the tenements, and more human
baggage to carry in the uphill struggle for social
mobility.

 In
1890 militant suffragists formed the National
American Woman Suffrage Association
(NAWSA), with again Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony as the founders.
 By 1900 a new generation of women had taken
command of the suffrage battle.
 Their most effective leader was Carrie Chapman
Catt, a pragmatic and business-like reformer of
relentless dedication.
 Militant
women entered the alcoholic arena,
notably when the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union (WCTU) was organized in
1874.
 Led by the saintly Frances E. Willard (who
also championed planned parenthood) and
the less saintly Carrie A. Nation (who was
mentally deranged and muscular,
nicknamed the “Kansas Cyclone”).
The
American Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was
created in 1866.
The American Red Cross was launched
in 1881, with the dynamic and
diminutive Clara Barton, the “angel” of
Civil War battlefields, at the helm.
Baseball,
already widely played before
the Civil War, was clearly emerging as
the national pastime, if not a national
mania.
Basketball was invented in 1891 by
James Naismith, a YMCA instructor in
Springfield, MA.
 College
football, the rugged game with its
dangerous flying wedge, had become
popular well before 1889, when Yale man
Walter C. Camp chose his first “All-American”
team.
 Boxing, with its long background of bare
knuckle brutality, gained a new and gloved
respectability in 1892.


Chapter 26
 The
federal government tried to pacify the Plains
Indians by signing treaties with the “chiefs” of
various “tribes” at Fort Laramie in 1851.
 The treaties marked the beginnings of the
reservation system in the West.
 They established boundaries for the territory of
each tribe and attempted to separate the Indians
into two great “colonies” to the north and south of
a corridor of intended white settlement.
 In
1886 a Sioux war party attempting to
block construction of the Bozeman Trail to
the Montana goldfields ambushed Capt.
William J. Fetterman’s command of 81
soldiers and civilians in Wyoming’s Bighorn
Mountains.
 One trooper’s face was split by 105 arrows.
 This attack led to one of the few triumphs by
the natives; the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Colonel Custer’s 7th Cavalry attacked what turned out
to be a superior force of some 2,500 well-armed
warriors camped along the Little Bighorn River in
present-day Montana.
 About 250 officers and men were completely wiped out
in 1876 when two supporting columns failed to come
to their rescue, but the Indians’ victory was short-lived.
 In a series of battles across the northern plains, the
U.S. army relentlessly hunted down the Indians who
had humiliated Custer.

 In
1890 the army stamped out the Dakota Sioux at
the Battle of Wounded Knee.
 In the fighting an estimated 200 hundred Indian
men, women, and children were killed, as well as
29 invading soldiers.
 3 years earlier that Dawes Severalty Act was
passed to dissolve many tribes as legal entities,
wiped out tribal ownership of land, and set up
individual Indian family heads with 160 free acres.
 The
Homestead Act of 1862 was a new law that
allowed a settler to acquire as much as 160
acres of land ( a quarter-section) by living on it
for five years, improving it, and paying $30.
 Before the act, public land had been sold
primarily for revenue; now it was to be given
away to encourage a rapid filling of empty
spaces and to provide a stimulus to the family
farm.
 During
the 40 years after its passage, about half a
million families took advantage of the Homestead
Act to carve out new homes in the vast open
stretches.
 The Homestead Act often turned out to be a cruel
hoax.
 The standard 160 acres frequently proved pitifully
inadequate on the rain-scarce Great Plains.
 Thousands of homesteaders were forced to give up
the one-sided struggle against drought.
 On
of the big issues in the Election of 1896 was
monetary policy- whether to maintain the gold
standard of inflate the currency by monetizing
silver.
 The leading candidate for the Republican
presidential nomination was former
Congressman William McKinley of OH.
 Fellow Ohioan and iron magnate Marcus Alonzo
Hanna was a huge backer of McKinley.
 Hanna
believed that a prime function of
government was to aid business.
 The Republican platform was to back the
gold standard, even though, as a
Congressman, McKinley had voted friendly to
silver.
 Dissension riddled the Democratic camp
with the party split among a new candidate
and Grover Cleveland.
As
new Moses suddenly appeared in
the person of William Jennings Bryan of
NE.
The Democratic minority, including
Cleveland, charged that the Populistsilverites had stolen both the name and
the clothes of their party.
 On
election day McKinley triumphed decisively.
 The vote was 271 to 176 in the Electoral College
and 7,102,246 to 6,492,559 in the popular
vote.
 The Bryan-McKinley battle heralded the advent
of a new era in American politics.
 The outcome was a resounding victory for big
business, the big cities, middle-class values,
and financial conservatism.


Chapter 27
 After
the Civil War, America remained
astonishingly indifferent to the outside world.
 The sunset decades of the 19th century
witnessed a momentous shift in U.S. foreign
policy.
 The world now had to reckon with a new
great power, potentially powerful but with
diplomatic ambitions and principles that
remained to be defined.
 As
trade with Japan and the Far East grew, the U.S.
needed ports in the Pacific where they could refuel
and resupply.
 A recession hit Hawaii in 1872 and the U.S.
exempted Hawaiian sugarcane from tariffs.
 In exchange for the tariff, the U.S. insisted that
Hawaii allow the U.S. to build a naval base at Pearl
Harbor.
 Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown by Hawaiian
planters and U.S. Marines.
 President
Cleveland opposed imperialism, so
he withdrew the annexation treaty from the
Senate and tried to restore the Queen to
power (Blount Report).
 Hawaii’s new leaders refused to restore the
monarchy of the Queen.
 Five years later, when Cleveland left office,
the U.S. annexed Hawaii.
In
1993 President Clinton signed the
Apology Resolution, officially
apologizing for overthrowing a sovereign
nation.
Hawaii became a U.S. state in 1959.
 Cuba
was under Spanish rule and frequently
revolted against their rule.
 The U.S. regarded the Spanish as tyrants
and supported Cuba.
 The U.S. issued a declaration of war against
the Spanish.
 Although it was a short war, it altered the
position of the U.S. on the world stage.
 Exiled
Cuban leader Jose Marti, rallied support for
an invasion of Cuba while living in New York City in
the late 1880s.
 In 1894, the U.S. imposed a new tariff on Cuban
sugar that devastated the Cuban economy.
 Marti and his followers launched a rebellion in
1895.
 Marti died, but his followers seized control of
eastern Cuba, declared independence, and
established the Republic of Cuba in 1895.
 While
the U.S. remained neutral with regard
to Cuba, many Americans publically
supported the Cuban rebels.
 Stories of atrocities in Cuba were reported in
two of the leading newspapers of the time;
o The New York Journal published by William
Randolph Hearst
o The New York World published by Joseph
Pulitzer
Both
of these newspapers were
accused of sensationalizing stories
about Cuba in order to sell more copies.
The act of exaggerating and even
making up stories is known as yellow
journalism.
 New
U.S. Pres. William McKinley did not want to
intervene, but feared he would have to if the
Spanish and Cubans could not reach a agreement.
 The Spain offered the Cubans autonomy- the right
to their own government- but only if Cuba remained
part of the Spanish empire. The Cubans said no.
 After an American ship exploded, Congress
authorized McKinley to spend $50 million on war
preparations.
 There
was a strong amount of jingoismaggressive nationalism- by the Republicans
who felt McKinley needed to appear strong
against the Spanish.
 On April 19, 1898 Congress proclaimed
Cuba independent and demanded Spain
withdraw.
 On April 24, 1898 Spain declared war on the
United States
The
U.S. navy North Atlantic Squadron
blockaded Cuba.
Commodore George Dewey,
commander of the American naval
squadron based in Hong Kong,
attacked the Spanish fleet in the
Philippines.
 Dewey
quickly blew up 8 Spanish ships in Manila
Bay.
 The victory was so quick that Pres. McKinley wasn’t
even ready to send the army to help Dewey.
 The army assembled 20,000 troops and set off for
Manila, stopping on the way to capture Guam
(another Spanish island).
 Filipino refugee Emilio Aguinaldo helped the U.S.
capture the Philippine capital of Manila.
 Neither
the Americans nor the Spanish were ready
for war.
 The “Rough Riders” led by Theodore Roosevelt
were able to defeat the Spanish at the Battle of
Kettle Hill.
 The Spanish warships fled, but the Americans sank
most of their ships.
 Two weeks later, the Spanish surrendered and
Cuba was now under American control.
 There
were supporters on both sides of the
annexation debate.
 When it all ended according to the Treaty of
Paris (1898);
o Cuba became independent
o The U.S. acquired Puerto Rico and Guam
o The U.S. agreed to pay Spain $20 million
for the Philippines.
 The
Platt Amendment specified the
following:
o Cuba could not make a treaty with another
nation that would weaken its independence.
o Cuba had to allow the U.S. to buy or lease naval
stations in Cuba.
o Cuba’s debts had to be kept low to prevent
foreign countries from landing troops to enforce
payment
o The U.S. would have the right to intervene to
protect Cuban independence and keep order.
 In
1900, the Foraker Act was passed to
establish civil government for the island.
 In 1917, America granted Puerto Ricans
citizenship.
 The debate still rages on today as to whether
Puerto Rico should become a state, become
independent, or continue as a self-governing
U.S. commonwealth.
 After
its defeat by Japan in 1894-1895, the
imperialistic European powers (Russia and
Germany) moved in to take advantage.
 In the summer of 1899, Secretary of State John
Hay dispatched to all great powers communication
(Open Door note) urging all countries to respect
certain Chinese rights and the ideal of fair
competition.
 Hay had not bothered to consult the Chinese.
 Patriotic
Chinese did not care to be used as
a doormat by the Western powers.
 In 1900 a superpatriotic group known as
“Boxers”, broke loose with the cry of “Kill
Foreign Devils”.
 In what became known as the Boxer
Rebellion, they murdered more than 200
foreigners and thousands of Chinese
Christians.
 Kindly
William McKinley had scarcely served
another six months when, in Sept. 1901, he
was murdered by a deranged anarchist in
Buffalo, NY.
 Vice President Theodore Roosevelt took the
reins of the presidency.
 Born into a wealthy and distinguished New
York family, Roosevelt was partly educated in
Europe and graduated from Harvard.
He
loved people and mingled with those
of all ranks.
TR believed that the president should
lead, boldly.
The president, he felt, may take any
action in the general interest that it not
specifically forbidden by the laws of the
Constitution.
 Nations
such as Venezuela and the Dominican
Republic were chronically in arrears in their
payments to European creditors.
 Roosevelt feared that if the Germans or British got
their foot in the door as bill collectors, they might
remain in Latin America (violating the Monroe
Doctrine).
 Roosevelt signed the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the
Monroe Doctrine.
 Roosevelt
announced that in the event of
future financial malfeasance by the Latin
American nations, the U.S. itself would
intervene, take over the customs-houses,
pay off the debts, and keep the troublesome
Europeans on the other side of the Atlantic.
 As time wore on, the new corollary was used
to justify wholesale interventions and
repeated landings of the marines.
 The
Russians were trying to take over the
ports (Port Arthur) in Chinese Manchuria.
 The Japanese felt uneasy about the
Russians being so close to their country.
 The Japanese pounced on the Russians at
Port Arthur and dealt them a series of
humiliating defeats.
 Even
though they were winning, the Japanese
began to run low on manpower and yen, which they
did not want the Russians to learn.
 Japanese leaders met in secret with Roosevelt in
order to help come up with a peace settlement.
 Roosevelt helped achieve an agreement in 1905 in
Portsmouth, MA.
 For achieving the agreement, Roosevelt was given
the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize.
The
price for diplomatic glory was high
as the U.S. alienated 2 different allies.
The Russians implausibly accused
Roosevelt of robbing them of victory.
The Japanese, once the protégé of the
U.S., felt it did not get the
compensation they so deserved.


Chapter 28
Nearly
76 million Americans greeted the
new century in 1900.
Almost one in seven of them was
foreign-born.
“Progressives” waged war on many
evils, notably monopoly, corruption,
inefficiency, and social injustice.
 Progressive
theorists were insisting that
society could no longer afford the luxury of a
limitless “let-alone” (laissez-faire) policy.
 Socialists, mostly European immigrants
inspired by the strong movement for state
socialism in the Old World, began to register
appreciable strength at the ballot box.
 The social gospel promoted a brand of
progressivism based on Christian teachings.
University-based
economists urged new
reforms modeled on European
examples.
Feminists in multiplying numbers added
social justice to suffrage on their list of
needed reforms.
 Waging
fierce circulation wars, newspapers
began digging deep for the dirt that the
public loved to hate.
 Enterprising editors financed extensive
research and encouraged pugnacious writing
by their bright young reporters, whom
President Roosevelt branded as muckrakers.
 Despite presidential scolding, these
muckrakers boomed circulation.
 In
diverse ways, and sometimes with divergent
aims, the progressives sought to modernize
American institutions to achieve two goals: to use
the state to curb monopoly power and to improve
the common person’s conditions of life and labor.
 Reformers pushed for direct primary elections so
as to undercut power-hungry party bosses.
 They favored the initiative so that voters could
directly propose legislation themselves, thus
bypassing the boss-bought legislatures.




Progressives agitated for the referendum, a device that
would place laws on the ballot for final approval by the
people.
Finally, the recall would enable voters to remove faithless
elected officials particularly those who had been bribed by
bosses or lobbyists.
Direct election of U.S. Senators became a favorite goal of
progressives as well.
The 17th Amendment was approved in 1913, establishing
direct election of U.S. Senators.
 By
1900 cities like New York and San Francisco
had one saloon for about every two hundred
people.
 Antiliquor militant organizations received powerful
support from several militant organizations, notably
the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
 Frances E. Willard mobilized nearly 1 million
women to “to make the world homelike” and built
the WCTU into the largest organization of women in
the world.
Roosevelt’s
“Square Deal” for capital,
labor was essentially an embracing of
the three C’s: control of the
corporations, consumer protection, and
conservation of natural resources.
 Spurred
by the former-cowboy president,
Congress passed effective railroad
legislation, beginning with the Elkins Act of
1903.
 This curb was aimed primarily at the rebate
evil.
 Heavy fines could now be imposed both on
the railroads that gave the rebates and the
shippers that accepted them.
 Free
passes, with their hint of bribery, were
severely restricted by the Hepburn Act of 1906.
 Roosevelt concluded that there were “good” trusts,
with public consciences, and “bad” trusts, which
lusted greedily for power.
 Roosevelt never swung his trust-crushing stick with
maximum force.
 In many ways the huge industrial behemoths were
healthier- perhaps more “tame”- at the end of
Roosevelt’s reign than they had been before.
 Appetite
for reform was whetted by Upton Sinclair’s
sensational novel The Jungle, published in 1906.
 Sinclair intended his revolting tract to focus
attention on the plight of workers in the big canning
factories, instead he appalled the public with his
description of disgustingly unsanitary food
products.
 Roosevelt induced Congress to pass the Meat
Inspection Act of 1906.
 It
decreed that the preparation of meat
shipped over state lines would be subject to
federal inspection from corral to can.
 As a companion to the Meat Inspection Act,
the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was
designed to prevent the adulteration and
mislabeling of foods and pharmaceuticals.
Roosevelt
felt bound by his postelection
promise after the election of 1904 to
not run for President again.
The man of his choice was William
Howard Taft, former Secretary of War.
The Democrats nominated twice-beaten
William Jennings Bryan.




A majority of voters chose stability with Roosevelt-endorsed
Taft, who polled 321 electoral votes to 162 for Bryan.
Several other contributions of Roosevelt lasted beyond his
presidency. First, he greatly enlarged the power and
prestige of the presidential office.
Second, he helped shape the progressive movement and
beyond it the liberal reform campaigns later in the century.
Finally, to a greater degree than any of his predecessors, TR
opened the eyes of Americans to the fact that they shared
the world with other nations.




Taft managed to gain some fame as a smasher of
monopolies.
The ironic truth is that the colorless Taft brought 90 suits
against the trusts during his 4 years in office, as compared
with some 44 for Roosevelt in 7.5 years.
In 1911 Taft decided to press an antitrust suit against the
U.S. Steel Corporation, which infuriated Roosevelt.
Once Roosevelt’s protégé, President Taft was increasingly
taking on the role of his antagonist. The stage was being set
for a bruising confrontation.
 Weakened
by internal divisions, the Republicans
lost badly in the congressional elections of 1910.
 The Democrats emerged with 228 seats, leaving
the once-dominant Republicans with only 161.
 The Republicans, by virtue of holdovers, retained
the Senate, 51 to 41, but the insurgents in their
midst were numerous enough to make that hold
precarious.
 Early
in 1911 the National Progressive
Republican League was formed, with fiery,
white-maned Senator Robert LaFollette of WI
its leading candidate for the Republican
presidential nomination.
 Roosevelt decided to throw his hat back into
the ring and seized the Progressive banner
from the pushed aside LaFollette.
 The
Rooseveltites, who were about 100
delegates short of the winning nomination,
challenged the right of some 250 Taft
delegates to be seated.
 Roosevelt refused to quit the game.
 Having tasted for the first time the bitter cup
of defeat, he was now on fire to lead a thirdparty crusade.


Chapter 29
 Democrats
thought that if they could come
up with an outstanding reformist leader, they
had an excellent chance of winning the
White House in the election of 1912 for the
first time 1897.
 Such a leader appeared in Dr. Woodrow
Wilson, once a mild conservative but now a
militant progressive.
 The
Democrats gave Wilson a strong
progressive platform to run on; dubbed the
New Freedom program, it included calls for
stronger antitrust legislation, banking
reform, and tariff reduction.
 Roosevelt boasted that he felt “as strong as
a bull moose,” and the bull moose took its
place with the donkey and the elephant in
the American political zoo.
 Roosevelt
and Taft were bound to slit each
other’s political throats; by dividing the
Republican vote, they virtually guaranteed a
Democratic victory.
 Beyond clashing personalities, the
overshadowing question of the 1912
campaign was which of two varieties of
progressivism would prevail- Roosevelt’s
New Nationalism or Wilson’s New Freedom.
 Both
men favored a more active government role in
economic and social affairs, but they disagreed
sharply over specific strategies.
 TR favored continued consolidation of trusts and
labor unions, paralleled by the growth of powerful
regulatory agencies in Washington.
 Wilson’s New Freedom, by contrast, favored small
enterprise, entrepreneurship, and the free
functioning of unregulated and unmonopolized
markets.
 Former
professor Wilson won handily, with
435 electoral votes.
 The “third party” candidate, Roosevelt
finished second, receiving 88 electoral
votes. Taft received only 8 electoral votes.
 Taft and Roosevelt together polled over
1.25 million more votes than the
Democrats.
 Wilson
called for an all-out assault on what he
called “the triple wall of privilege”: the tariff, the
banks, and the trusts.
 The House swiftly passed the Underwood Tariff,
which provided substantial reduction of rates.
 The Tariff substantially reduced import fees as well
as tax legislation.
 Congress, under the newly ratified 16th
Amendment, enacted a graduated income tax on
incomes over $3,000.


In 1913 Wilson signed the epochal Federal Reserve Act, the
most important piece of economic legislation between the
Civil War and the New Deal.
The new Federal Reserve Board, appointed by the
president, oversaw a nationwide system of 12 regional
reserve districts, each with its own central bank.
The
board was also empowered to issue
paper money-”Federal Reserve Notes”backed by commercial paper, such as
promissory notes of businesspeople.
The Federal Reserve Act carried the
nation with flying banners through the
financial crises of the First World War of
1914-1918.
 In
1914 Congress passed the Federal Trade
Commission Act.
 The new law empowered a presidentially appointed
commission to turn a searchlight on industries
engaged in interstate commerce, such as
meatpackers.
 The commissioners rooted out unfair trade
practices, including unlawful competition, false
advertising, mislabeling, adulteration, and bribery.
 The
Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914
lengthened the Sherman Act’s list of
business practices that were deemed
objectionable, including price discrimination
and interlocking directorates.
 The Clayton Act sought to exempt labor and
agricultural organizations from antitrust
prosecution, while explicitly legalizing strikes
and peaceful picketing.
Wilson
further helped workers with the
Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1916,
granting assistance to federal civilservice employees during periods of
disability.
 Europe’s
powder magazine, long smoldering, blew
up in the summer of 1914, when the flaming pistol
of a Serb patriot (Gavrilo Princip) killed the heir to
the throne of Austria-Hungary (Franz Ferdinand) in
Sarajevo.
 An outraged Vienna government, backed by
Germany, forthwith presented a stern ultimatum to
neighboring Serbia.
 Tiny Serbia, backed by Russia, refused to bow
down sufficiently.
 The
Russian tsar began to mobilize his
ponderous war machine, menacing Germany
on the west.
 The Germans struck suddenly at France
through unoffending Belgium.
 Great Britain, its coastline jeopardized by
the assault on Belgium, was sucked into the
conflagration on the side of France.
Central
Powers: Germany, and
Austria-Hungary (later Turkey and
Bulgaria).
Allied Powers: France, Britain, and
Russia (later Japan and Italy).
 President
Wilson’s grief at the outbreak of
war was compounded by the recent death of
his wife.
 He sorrowfully issued the routine neutrality
proclamation and called on Americans to be
neutral in thought as well as deed.
 Both sides wooed the U.S., the great neutral
in the West.
 The
Germans and the Austro-Hungarians counted
on the natural sympathies of their transplanted
countrymen in America.
 Most Americans were anti-German from the outset.
 When a German operative in 1915 absentmindedly
left his briefcase on a New York elevated car, its
documents detailing plans for industrial sabotage
were quickly discovered and publicized.
 When
Europe burst into flames in 1914, the U.S.
was bogged down in a worrisome business
recession.
 The J.P. Morgan Company advanced to the Allies
$2.3 billion during the period of American
neutrality.
 Central Powers protested bitterly against the
immense trade between America and the Allies,
but this traffic did not in fact violate the
international neutrality laws.
In
response to a British blockade, the
Germans announced a submarine
warfare area around the British Isles,
but said they would try not to sink
neutral shipping…even though, they
said, mistakes may occur.
In the first months of 1915 the German
U-boats sank 90 ships in the war zone.
 The
issue became acute when the British
passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed and
sank off the coast of Ireland on May 7th,
1915, with the loss of 1,198 lives, including
128 Americans.
 The Lusitania was carrying forty-two hundred
cases of small-arms ammunition, a fact the
Germans used to justify the sinking.
After another British liner, the Arabic, was sunk in
August 1915, with the loss of 2 American lives, Berlin
reluctantly agreed not to sink unarmed and unresisting
passenger ships without warning.
 The pledge was violated in March 1916 when the
Germans torpedoed a French passenger steamer, the
Sussex.
 Wilson informed the Germans that unless they
renounced the inhuman practice of sinking merchant
ships, he would break diplomatic relations.

The Progressives uproariously renominated Theodore
Roosevelt, but the Rough Rider, who loathed Wilson
and all his works, had no stomach for splitting the
Republicans again and ensuring the reelection of hi
hated rival.
 In refusing to run, he sounded the death knell of the
Progressive Party.
 The Republicans drafted Supreme Court justice
Charles Evans Hughes, who was known for his fencestraddling and often called “Charles Evasive Hughes”.

 Wilson
barely squeaked through, with a final
vote of 277 to 254 in the Electoral College.
 Wilson had not specifically promised to keep
the country out of war, but probably enough
voters relied on such implicit assurances to
ensure his victory.
 Their hopeful expectations were soon rudely
shattered.