1. World War I: The Home Front

2. Growth of Government

3. The War Industries Board
and War Socialism

4. Bernard Baruch
The Experience of the War Industries Board points
to the desirability of investing some government
agency with the powers to encourage, under
strict government supervision, such cooperation
and coordination in industry as should tend to
increase production, eliminate waste, conserve
natural resources, improve the quality of
products, promote efficiency in operation, and
thus reduce costs to the ultimate consumer.

5. Powers
• Allocate scarce resources
• Control the flow of raw materials
• Order factories to convert to war production
• Set prices
• Demand levels of efficiency
• Coordinate purchasing
• Organize railroad shipping
• Cost Plus Contracts
• No bid contracts
• Relaxing of Anti-Trust laws to encourage concentration in
production
• Food Administration
• The power to compel compliance

6. The War Labor Board

7. Powers
• Granted workers the right to organize
• Empowered the government to arbitrate
contracts
• Limited the power of workers to strike
• It supported the 8 hour day and overtime pay
• It supported equal pay for women
• It does not have the power to compel
compliance

8. The Committee on Public Information:
The Creel Commission, 1917-1919

9. Activities
• 75,000 community speakers
• Daily newspaper
• Feature length films
• Posters

10. Civil Liberties
• "The war power is of
necessity an inherent
power in every
sovereign nation. It is
the power of self-
reservation and that
power has no limits
other than the extent of
the emergency."
• A. Mitchell Palmer
December 1918

11. Expanded Federal Power
• The Espionage Act
• The Sedition Act
• The Trading with the Enemies Act
These impacted the press and the mail service
• Deportation of aliens
• The Draft
• Citizen’s and local government groups used violence and
intimidation
• Lots of anti German activity leading to at least one lynching
of a German American in St Louis
• Wide spread attacks on peace groups, socialists, and radical
labor and political organizations

12. Taking Direction from the Top
Woodrow Wilson Theodore Roosevelt
Woe be to the man He who is not with us
absolutely and without
who seeks to stand reserve of any kind, is
in our way in this day against us, and should be
of high resolution treated as an alien enemy.
Our bitterest experience
when every principle should teach us for a
we hold dearest is to generation to crush under
be vindicated and our heal every movement
that smacks in the smallest
made secure. degree of playing the
German game.

13. The Red Summer of 1919
• Labor and Post War Conditions: The Seattle General Strike,
Boston Police Strike, The Great Steel Strike
• The creation of a US Communist party
• Some bombings in the mails by fringe anarchists
• The Red Scare and Palmer Raids: All things progressive tied to
anti-Communism and the emergence of Herbert Hoover
• Massive deportations of immigrants suspected of leftist
activity without any due process, culminating in the
executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927
• More than 20 race riots occurred in 1919, marking a distinct
change in the pattern of racial violence in the US

14. Other Critical WWI Era changes
• Immigration from Europe greatly reduced
leading to immigration restriction legislation
in 1924
• The association of all progressive activity with
Communism
• The Great Migration
• Woman Suffrage