AP® United States History review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/us-history/units/7/7-6)
Unit 7 · Topic 7.6
7.6 World War I: Home Front
World War I expanded federal power over the economy, public opinion and speech. The government ran propaganda campaigns, coordinated industry and jailed critics under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which the Supreme Court upheld in Schenck v. United States (1919). War jobs drew African Americans north in the Great Migration and Mexican workers across the border, and postwar fear of radicals produced the First Red Scare.
Key terms
- Committee on Public Information
- Espionage and Sedition Acts
- Schenck v. United States
- Great Migration
- First Red Scare
Organizing the economy and opinion
- War Industries Board (led by Bernard Baruch): set production priorities and prices for industry.
- Food Administration (led by Herbert Hoover): encouraged 'meatless' and 'wheatless' days to save food without strict rationing.
- National War Labor Board: settled labor disputes; unions gained members in exchange for a pledge to avoid strikes.
- Liberty Bonds: Americans lent money to the government; the war was also paid for by higher income taxes, now possible under the 16th Amendment.
- Committee on Public Information (led by George Creel): produced posters, films and speeches (by 'Four-Minute Men') to build support for the war and demonize Germany.
Limits on dissent
The Espionage Act (1917) punished interfering with the draft or the war effort, and the Sedition Act (1918) made it a crime to criticize the government, the flag or the military in 'disloyal' language. Socialist leader Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for an antiwar speech in 1918; he ran for president from his cell in 1920 and won over 900,000 votes.
In Schenck v. United States (1919), Charles Schenck, a Socialist Party official, had mailed leaflets urging men to resist the draft. A unanimous Supreme Court upheld his conviction. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that speech can be limited when it creates a 'clear and present danger' of harm Congress can prevent, especially in wartime, comparing it to falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.
Anti-German feeling ran high. Schools dropped German classes, sauerkraut was renamed 'liberty cabbage', and in 1918 a mob in Illinois lynched German-born Robert Prager. Nativism also shaped law. European immigration had peaked just before the war, topping a million arrivals in several years. The Immigration Act of 1917, passed over Wilson's veto, added a literacy test for adult immigrants and banned nearly all immigration from an 'Asiatic Barred Zone' stretching from the Middle East to Southeast Asia.
The Great Migration and Mexican migration
The Great Migration was the movement of African Americans from the rural South to Northern and Midwestern cities. Push factors included Jim Crow, lynching, poor schools and a boll weevil plague that damaged cotton crops. Pull factors were war jobs (the war cut off European immigration just as factories needed workers), higher wages, and encouragement from Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender. About half a million Black Southerners moved north between 1915 and 1920, and many more followed in the 1920s.
Migrants still faced discrimination and violence. Race riots broke out in East St. Louis (1917) and during the 'Red Summer' of 1919, when white mobs attacked Black communities in Chicago and many other cities.
Mexican migration also grew, as people fled the violence of the Mexican Revolution (which began in 1910) and found work on farms, railroads and in factories in the Southwest and Midwest.
Women and the First Red Scare
Women filled some industrial jobs and joined the war effort as nurses and volunteers. Wilson endorsed women's suffrage as a war measure in 1918, helping the 19th Amendment pass Congress in 1919.
After the war, Americans feared radicals. The Russian Revolution (1917) brought communists to power, a wave of strikes hit in 1919 (including the Seattle general strike and the Boston police strike), and anarchists mailed bombs to public officials. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer led the Palmer Raids (1919–1920), arresting thousands of suspected radicals, many of them immigrants, often without warrants. Hundreds were deported. The scare faded by late 1920 when predicted uprisings never happened, but it fed the nativism of the 1920s (7.8).
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Applying a court case to a new scenario
In 1918 a speaker tells a crowd that the draft is unjust and urges young men to refuse to report. Using Schenck v. United States, explain how courts at the time would likely rule on punishing her.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: State the test from Schenck: speech can be punished if it creates a clear and present danger of harm Congress can prevent.
- Step 2: Apply it to the facts: urging draft resistance in wartime directly threatens the war effort.
- Step 3: Reach a conclusion and note the wartime context Holmes stressed.
Answer: Model answer: Under Schenck v. United States (1919), the courts would likely uphold her conviction. The Court ruled that speech is not protected when, in its circumstances, it creates a 'clear and present danger' of harm that Congress has the power to prevent. Urging men to refuse the draft during wartime threatened military recruitment, just like Schenck's leaflets, so the government could punish it under the Espionage Act.
Common mistakes
- Saying Schenck expanded free speech. It upheld limits on speech during war. Later cases, like Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), narrowed what can be punished.
- Starting the Great Migration in World War II. It began around 1915; a second, larger wave came during and after World War II.
- Mixing up the First Red Scare (1919–1920, Palmer Raids) with the Second (late 1940s–1950s, McCarthyism, 8.3).
On the exam
- Questions often ask how wars expand federal power. Compare WWI controls with WWII mobilization (7.12).
- The tension between national security and civil liberties runs from the Sedition Act of 1798 (3.10) through Schenck, Korematsu (7.12) and the PATRIOT Act (9.6).
Connected topics
Videos
Check yourself
4 questions on 7.6 World War I: Home Front. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. . . . The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right."
Source: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court in Schenck v. United States, 1919, upholding the conviction of a Socialist Party official for mailing leaflets urging resistance to the draft.
The Court's reasoning in the excerpt holds that
The decision is best understood in the context of
The Great Migration of African Americans that began during World War I was caused mainly by
The Palmer Raids of 1919–1920, in which federal agents arrested thousands of suspected radicals, are best understood as part of
0 of 4 answered