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672 Chapter 23 | Americans and the Great War, 1914-1919
schools banned the teaching of the German language and some restaurants refused to serve frankfurters, sauerkraut, or hamburgers, instead serving “liberty dogs with liberty cabbage” and “liberty sandwiches.” Symphonies refused to perform music written by German composers. The hatred of Germans grew so widespread that, at one point, at a circus, audience members cheered when, in an act gone horribly wrong, a Russian bear mauled a German animal trainer (whose ethnicity was more a part of the act than reality).
Figure 23.10 Creel’s propaganda campaign embodied a strongly anti-German message. The depiction of Germans as brutal apes, stepping on the nation’s shores with their crude weapon of “Kultur” (culture), stood in marked contrast to the idealized rendition of the nation’s virtue as a fair beauty whose clothes had been ripped off her.
In addition to its propaganda campaign, the U.S. government also tried to secure broad support for the war effort with repressive legislation. The Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 prohibited individual trade with an enemy nation and banned the use of the postal service for disseminating any literature deemed treasonous by the postmaster general. That same year, the Espionage Act prohibited giving aid to the enemy by spying, or espionage, as well as any public comments that opposed the American war effort. Under this act, the government could impose fines and imprisonment of up to twenty years. The Sedition Act, passed in 1918, prohibited any criticism or disloyal language against the federal government and its policies, the U.S. Constitution, the military uniform, or the American flag. More than two thousand persons were charged with violating these laws, and many received prison sentences of up to twenty years. Immigrants faced deportation as punishment for their dissent. Not since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 had the federal government so infringed on the freedom of speech of loyal American citizens.
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For a sense of the response and pushback that antiwar sentiments incited, read this newspaper article (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/15antiDraft) from 1917, discussing the dissemination of 100,000 antidraft flyers by the No Conscription League.
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