Temperance may be defined as: moderation in all things healthful; total abstinence from all things harmful. On November 10, 1891, the first meeting of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was held in Boston, Massachusetts. The meeting signaled a new era of social responsibility and the beginning of public charities. The move signaled the real dawn and consequence of an industrialized nation.
A number of people equated (and rightly so in most cases) a correlation between drinking and domestic violence, homelessness, poverty and crime. It was thought that if alcoholic drink was eliminated or extremely curtailed, the morals of the village may return to the uprooted families of the inner cities. And with enough people on the same page, a movement was born.
The main activities of the WCTU were “crusades.” These crusades involve mass prayer in local churches to petition God for assistance with making alcohol illegal and marching to local bars and saloons to demand the owner shut his or her doors. The women exacted a moral authority and used Christian beliefs as well as good old fashioned guilt and shame to pull people away from drink and into the movement.
Little by little, day after day, piracies dwindled as the murderous submarine was mastered and its menace strangled. On the land, the Allies, under the matchless leadership of Marshal Ferdinand Foch and the generous co-operation of Americans, British, French and Italians, under the great Generals Pershing, Haig, Petain and Diaz, wrested the initiative from von Hindenburg and Ludendorf, late in July, 1918. Then, in one hundred and fifteen days of wonderful strategy and the fiercest fighting the world has ever witnessed, Foch and the Allies closed upon the Germanic armies the jaws of a steel trap. A series of brilliant maneuvers dating from the battle of Chateau-Thierry in which the Americans checked the Teutonic rush, resulted in the defeat and rout on all the fronts of the Teutonic commands.
In that titanic effort, America’s share was that of the final deciding factor. A nation unjustly titled the “Dollar Nation,” believed by Germany and by other countries to be soft, selfish and wasteful, became over night hard as tempered steel, self-sacrificing with an altruism that inspired the world and thrifty beyond all precedent in order that not only its own armies but the armies of the Allies might be fed and munitioned.
Leading American thought and American action, President Wilson stood out as the prophet of the democracies of the world. Not only did he inspire America and the Allies to a military and naval effort beyond precedent, but he inspired the civilian populations of the world to extraordinary effort, efforts that eventually won the war. For the decision was gained quite as certainly on the wheat fields of Western America, in the shops and the mines and the homes of America as it was upon the battle-field.
This effort came in response to the following appeal by the President:
“These, then, are the things we must do, and do well, besides fighting–the things without which mere fighting would be fruitless:
We must supply abundant food for ourselves and for our armies and our seamen not only, but also for a large part of the nations with whom we have now made common cause, in whose support and by whose sides we shall be fighting; We must supply ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to carry to the other side of the sea, submarines or no submarines, what will every day be needed there; and Abundant materials out of our fields and our mines and our factories with which not only to clothe and equip our own forces on land and sea but also to clothe and support our people for whom the gallant fellows under arms can no longer work, to help clothe and equip the armies with which we are co-operating in Europe, and to keep the looms and manufactories there in raw material;
Coal to keep the fires going in ships at sea and in the furnaces of hundreds of factories across the sea; Steel out of which to make arms and ammunition both here and there; Rails for worn-out railways back of the fighting fronts; Locomotives and rolling stock to take the place of those every day going to pieces; Everything with which the people of England and France and Italy and Russia have usually supplied themselves, but cannot now afford the men, the materials, or the machinery to make.
I particularly appeal to the farmers of the South to plant abundant foodstuffs as well as cotton. They can show their patriotism in no better or more convincing way than by resisting the great temptation of the present price of cotton and helping, helping upon a large scale, to feed the nation and the peoples everywhere who are fighting for their liberties and for our own. The variety of their crops will be the visible measure of their comprehension of their national duty.”
The response was amazing in its enthusiastic and general compliance. No autocracy issuing a ukase could have been obeyed so explicitly. Not only did the various classes of workers and individuals observe the President’s suggestions to the letter, but they yielded up individual right after right in order that the war work of the government might be expedited. Extraordinary powers and functions were granted by the people through Congress, and it was not until peace was declared that these rights and powers returned to the people.
These governmental activities ceased functioning after the war: Food administration; Fuel administration; Espionage act; War trade board; Alien property custodian (with extension of time for certain duties); Agricultural stimulation; Housing construction (except for shipbuilders); Control of telegraphs and telephones; Export control.
These functions were extended: Control over railroads: to cease within twenty-one months after the proclamation of peace. The War Finance Corporation: to cease to function six months after the war, with further time for liquidation. The Capital Issues Committee: to terminate in six months after the peace proclamation. The Aircraft Board: to end in six months after peace was proclaimed; and the government operation of ships, within five years after the war was officially ended.
President Wilson, generally acclaimed as the leader of the world’s democracies, phrased for civilization the arguments against autocracy in the great peace conference after the war. The President headed the American delegation to that conclave of world re-construction. With him as delegates to the conference were Robert Lansing, Secretary of State; Henry White, former Ambassador to France and Italy; Edward M. House and General Tasker H. Bliss.
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Representing American Labor at the International Labor conference held in Paris simultaneously with the Peace Conference were Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor; William Green, secretary-treasurer of the United Mine Workers of America; John R. Alpine, president of the Plumbers’ Union; James Duncan, president of the International Association of Granite Cutters; Frank Duffy, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, and Frank Morrison, secretary of the American Federation of Labor. | |||||||||||
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World War I - A War for International Freedom
Source: History of the World War. An Authentic Narrative of the World’s Greatest War. Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish, 1919
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