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William Monroe Trotter was born April 7, 1872, and raised in the wealthy Hyde Park suburb of Boston. He was the only African American in his high school, but was elected class president and graduated as the valedictorian. After college at Harvard, Trotter founded the activist newspaper The Boston Guardian. The paper was "propaganda against discrimination," and fought for equal rights for blacks. Trotter's paper frequently railed against Woodrow Wilson because the president had segregated some of the public offices. Trotter led a delegation to the White House 1914, where he debated Wilson until he was thrown out. William Monroe Trotter is remembered as an early civil rights activist and the founder of an African American newspaper. | |||
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Carr Van Anda was an editor at the New York Times when the Titanic struck an iceberg on Sunday April 14, 1912. The next morning, the Times was the only newspaper to report that the Titanic had sunk. When the survivors returned to New York, Van Anda organized the coverage by renting one floor of a local hotel and installing four phone lines. Van Anda reinvented the way the media covered disasters. | |||
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Richard Harding Davis was the first modern war correspondent. By the age of 26 he had become the managing editor of Harper's Weekly, but left to cover the Spanish War. He then went to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War, then the Greco-Turkish War, and then the Boer War in Africa. By the time World War I began in Europe, Davis had become such a respected war correspondent that he was paid $32,000 a year to report on it. He was captured by the Germans in 1914 and accused of being a British spy, but was released soon after they found he was an American. He covered the war until 1915, when he left because he disagreed with the Allied restrictions on the press. | |||
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Peggy Hull was the first woman accredited as a war correspondent. She covered General Pershing's pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico, traveled to Europe in a submarine during World War I, and went to Siberia with American soldiers keeping the peace in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. She was known for featuring the "ordinary" man in her stories. | |||
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Benito Mussolini broke from Socialism in 1914 when he founded a paper called "The Italian People." He also started a prowar group and coined the term "fascism" after a symbol of Roman power. After being wounded by a grenade in 1917, he returned to edit his paper until he was elected to the Italian parliament in 1921. | |||
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Floyd Gibbons was a war correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. He was aboard the S.S. Laconia when it was sunk by a German U-boat, and was later wounded in the trench warfare in Europe. Read his story here. | |||
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George Creel began his newspaper career at the Kansas City World, then started the Kansas City Independent. He was chosen by Wilson to head the Committee for Public Information in 1917, which was responsible for raising American support for the war effort. He organized poster campaigns, music tours, speaking engagements and cartoons to galvanize American sentiment. He also organized a campaign in America and Europe to raise support for Wilson's Fourteen Points, and he is credited in part with the acceptance of the plan. | |||
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1910-1919 was a decade of unrest throughout the world. In America, the decade began with a contentious election between the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Republican Taft, Progressive Roosevelt, and the Socialist Eugene Debs. With Republican voters split between Taft and Roosevelt, Wilson won 42 percent of the popular vote and 82 percent of the electoral college. In Europe, a war raged on. The isolationist United States entered the war in 1917 after the sinking of the S.S. LaconiaIn. The Treaty of Versaille ended the war in 1919, but the Allied leaders, Lloyd George of England, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, and Georges Clemenceau of France, forced unreasonable restrictions on Germany. Wilson's Fourteen Pointed were a starting point, and the League of Nations was established, but the U.S. Congress was dissatisfied with the arrangement. In Russia, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin seized control of the country, and the United States was worried that a revolution might be incited here as well. Legislation that was eventually ruled unconstitutional restricted Americans' speech. Eugene Debs is sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Sedition Act of 1918, and Emma Goldman in deported in 1919 under the California Criminal Syndicalism Act. |
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| Emma Goldman boards a ship at Ellis Island bound for Communist Russia with 248 deported radicals. | ||||
| British soldiers in trench warfare during World War I. | ||||
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World War I produced new technologies that killed soldiers more effictively than had ever been seen. Poison gases, heavy artillery, machine guns and tanks dragged the battles into muddy trench warfare with forces separated by a no-man's land. Socialism became a political force in American politics. Eugene Debs ran for president in 1912, and Victor Berger, a Socialist newspaper owner from Wisconsin, was elected to U.S. Senate. Both men were punished under new laws that condemned political dissent: The Espionage Act, the Trading-with-the-enemy Act. |
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| British soldiers in gas masks man a machine gun during World War I. | ||||
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| Slow but heavily armored, tanks like this early German model were used to cross a no-man's land under fire. | ||||
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1914- "Birth of a Nation:" D.W. Griffith's film based on the Dixon novel "The Clansman" was a huge success and put Griffith at the top of the film industry. He was called a racist and picketed by black leaders such as William Monroe Trotter, so in 1916 he released "Intolerance" to much less acclaim. | |||
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April 1912- Titanic sinks in Atlantic Ocean, Carr Van Anda coordinates coverage for New York Times that scoops world. | |||
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June 28, 1919: Treaty of Versailles signed in Paris, ending the war. Woodrow Wilson presented his Fourteen Points to keep the world safe for democracy, but other Allied leaders wanted to punish Germany for the war. At left, Lloyd George of England, Orlando Vittorio of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France and U.S. president Woodrow Wilson in Paris negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. | |||
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Radio Act of 1912- The first time Congress attempted to regulate radio. The act put radio waves in control of government, which divided the bandwidths up for different uses. Each broadcaster was assigned a three- or four-letter codes and all ships were required to carry wireless radio equipment, due largely in part to the Titanic disaster in April of 1912. American's tastes moved from muckraking news to investigative journalism. News magazines, such as The Nation, were founded during this decade and editors, such as Carr Van Anda, created a form of journalistic professionalism in newsrooms. World War I saw the need for print war correspondents, from Richard Harding Davis and Floyd Gibbons, to Ernest Hemingway, who was wounded while driving an ambulance for the Red Cross. He went on to write about his experiences in his work, "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Movies were becoming increasingly popular with the public, but many serious actors would not work in the new medium. One of the early silent film stars and a beloved actor of the decade was Charlie Chaplin. His first big-studio picture came out in 1914, which he starred in and directed. Chaplin was also known to write the accompanying music for the silent films.
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| Charlie Chaplin in "The Kid." The film debuted in 1921 and was written and directed by Chaplin. | ||||
| Public Broadcasting's American Experience- Web site featuring Woodrow Wilson's administration and policies, with many clips from the PBS series about the president. | ||
| Emma Goldman's Timeline- A timeline that leads up to Emma Goldman's expulsion from the United States under the Criminal Syndicalism Act of 1919. | ||
| World War I - This site features links to the equipment, forces, and political leaders of World War I. | ||
| Charlie Chaplin - Web site dedicated to the silent film actor and music composer. | ||
| William Monroe Trotter - Civil rights activist fifty years ahead of his time. | ||
| D.W. Griffith - Creator of many film production techniques and director of "Birth of a Nation." | ||
| 1910-1915 - Video review of the first half of the decade.. | ||
| World War I - Footage of the events leading up to the first world war. | ||
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Professor
Rick Musser :: rmusser@ku.edu
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