The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution forbidding the manufacture, sale, transportation, import, and export of “intoxicating liquors” was ratified, instituting Prohibition nationwide. The amendment was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.
American troops experienced their first combat of World War I in the trenches of France.
Demoralized and cornered by the Meuse-Argonne offensive, Germany agreed to a cease fire and armistice that went into effect at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918.
American marines earned a victory for the French at the Battle of Belleau Wood. In twenty days of fighting, US forces suffered record casualties—9,777 by the battle’s end.
American forces took part in the forty-seven-day Meuse-Argonne offensive. The Allies advanced through the Argonne Forest and pushed the German line back until, cornered and with no hope for success, the Germans agreed to cease fire and an armistice on November 11.
The new Bolshevik Russian government agreed to an armistice with Germany.
In the case of Schenck v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the right to free speech can be limited during wartime if it creates a “clear and present danger”: “When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.”
A German U-boat sank the British passenger ship Arabic, killing forty-four people, including two Americans. The attack, coupled with the sinking of the Lusitania, created a diplomatic crisis between Germany and the United States that was somewhat defused when Germany issued the Arabic Pledge, renouncing its unannounced attacks on passenger ships.
Germany, seeking to avoid war with the United States, issued the Sussex Pledge, promising to suspend its surprise attacks on merchant vessels.
Wilson released a decoded telegram from German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann to Mexico. Zimmermann proposed that, if the US entered the war, Mexico go to war with the US as a German ally. Zimmermann promised that if Mexico allied with Germany, Germany would provide “financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”