Norman Thomas joins the American Socialist Party …
Years: 1918 - 1918
Norman Thomas joins the American Socialist Party in 1918.
Lord Milner directs the British war effort as secretary of war in 1918.
In 1918, British women over thirty win the right to vote.
By 1918, all states in the US have passed compulsory education laws.
Henry Ford is narrowly defeated in his 1918 run for Senator on the Democratic ticket.
The US Congress passes the Sedition Act of 1918.
The United States aids France and Britain in defeating Germany in 1918.
The Central Powers agree to an armistice in 1918.
The belligerents have deployed some 66 million poison gas artillery shells during the Great War.
The Invention Secrecy Act ends in 1918.
Wilson sends Hoover back to Europe to direct the American Relief Administration, an agency created to relieve the suffering in war-ravaged Europe.
Bronislaw Malinowski develops functionalist anthropology in opposition to evolutionist anthropology.
Dada’s anti-art nihilism, exemplified in the works of Alsatian painter and poet Jean Arp, Romanian poet Tristan Tzara and Marcel Duchamp, is a disgusted response to the carnage of war.
An anti-Art Nouveau movement in architecture produces simple rectangular forms.
The de Stijl Group, led by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, uses right angles, straight lines and primary hues in their art and architecture.
Paul Robeson, the son of a former slave, graduates with Phi Beta Kappa honors from Rutgers University, where he twice receives All-American football awards.
Moray obtains post-war employment as a fireman on a railroad.
During the war years, the Wobblies have organized blacks, metal miners, lumberjacks, dockworkers, and agricultural laborers in the face of harsh countermeasures by employers, including the deportation of Arizona strikers into the desert; the abduction and lynching of IWW organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana; the 1915 conviction and execution of folk-song-writer and IWW organizer Joe Hill in Salt Lake City on circumstantial evidence; and the US Department of Justice’s 1917 arrest and prosecution of over 200 IWW leaders for interfering with the war effort and for spreading antiwar propaganda.
Debs, a vociferous opponent of all war except the international battle for socialism, has been outspoken in his opposition to the prosecutionsx made under the Espionage Act of 1917.
In 1918, he is tried and convicted for violating the Espionage Act, for which he receives a ten-year sentence and the loss of his citizenship.
Wilson calls on voters to re-elect a Democratic Congress in 1918 as a vote of confidence.
Republicans capture both houses of Congress.
Berger, who served a Congressional term from 1911 to 1913, is reelected in 1918 but denied a seat because of his conviction for sedition for opposing US participation in the Great War.
Under Wilson’s Selective Service Act, 2.8 million American men have been drafted into the military.
21.3 percent of those reporting fopr induction have been rejected because of handicaps.
Wilson appoints House head of US preparations for the planned Paris Peace Conference.
Baruch is named a US delegate and an economic advisor to the Conference.
The great flu epidemic of 1918 kills 20 million people over the world and an estimated 675,000 in the United States.
The epidemic may have been caused by a type A virus, possibly the swine flu virus.
Some attribute the epidemic to widespread use of vaccines; a minority opinion connects it to wartime use of poison gases.
The Surgeon General of the United States, in 1918, issues a report stating that tuberculosis is the leading cause for discharge of men from the Armed Forces.
Karl T. Compton is assigned in 1918 to the US Embassy in Paris.
(Compton will later serve as a special advisor on Atomic Development and will later advise Truman to drop the two atomic bombs on Japan.
Compton will also become a director of the Ford Foundation, Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute and the Royal Society of London.)