Brinkley Chapter 21 vocabulary

At home, the nation became preoccupied with a search not just for victory but also for social unity—a search that continued and even intensified in the troubled years following the armistice, and that helped shatter many of the progressive ideals of the first years of the century.

Many Americans had favored the repression of Sedition Act.

He established a pattern of American intervention in the region that would long survive his presidency.

Harding offered no ideals, only a vague promise of a return, as he later phrased it, to “normalcy.”

Concerns about the communist threat grew in 1919 when the Soviet government announced the formation of the Communist International (or Comintern), whose purpose was to export revolution around the world.

As the conference progressed, the European leaders developed increasing resentment of Woodrow Wilson’s high (and some of them thought sanctimonious) moral posture in the negotiations.

It created stiff penalties for spying, sabotage, or obstruction of the war effort, and it empowered the Post Office Department to ban “seditious” material from the mails.

Many Americans, accustomed to their nation’s isolation from Europe, questioned the wisdom of this major new commitment to internationalism.

Gradually, however, as the war dragged on and the tactics of Britain and Germany began to impinge on American trade and on freedom of the seas, the United States found itself drawn into the conflict.

Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson said that sedition, included statements that might “impugn the motives of the government and thus encourage insubordination,” anything that suggested “that the government is controlled by Wall Street or munitions manufacturers, or any other special interests.”

Employers aggravated the resentment by using the end of the war (and the end of government controls) to rescind benefits they had been forced to give workers in 1917 and 1918—most notably recognition of unions.

They were convicted in a trial of extraordinary injudiciousness, before an openly bigoted judge, Webster Thayer, and were sentenced to death.

It created stiff penalties for spying, sabotage, or obstruction of the war effort, and it empowered the Post Office Department to ban “seditious” material from the mails.

But the changes were not enough to mollify his opponents, and Wilson refused to go further.

The possible message: Stay quiet, don’t cooperate with prosecutors, and Trump will use the president’s unilateral pardon powers to absolve you of wrongdoing and keep you out of jail. — Bob Van Voris, Bloomberg.com