Tennessee National Guardsmen, many of whom probably still considered themselves state militiamen, made no secret of their homesickness and general dissatisfaction when they arrived in the Southwest. The initial call-up included almost 2,000 Tennesseans, but subsequent enlistments increased the numbers in the mobilization camp at Nashville by another thousand. Shortly after the enactment of this legislation, with revolutionary upheaval in Mexico and chaos along the border, President Wilson ordered the National Guard into federal service. It specified that the state units, designated as the National Guard, would pass under complete federal control in time of war or grave public emergency as determined by the commander-in-chief. The National Defense Act of 1916, which was intended to prepare the nation’s military forces for the possibility of involvement in World War I, represented the capstone for those who had actively sought the integration of the militia into the regular army. government officially established an organized militia that could be called into the service as a part of the regular army.īetween 19, other congressional legislation tied the state units even more securely to the federal government. With the passage of the Dick Act on January 21, 1903, the U.S. Congress, between 19, routinely approved appropriations for the militia, providing federal money to outfit units of citizen soldiers. Although the militia could be called up to keep the peace at the local level or to resist a foreign invasion, it was not until after the Spanish-American War that the militia had a permanent place in the federal military. The creation of the National Guard, which swallowed up the old state militia units, represents a case in point. Violations of American neutrality, sympathy for Britain and France, based largely on strong cultural and historic ties, the diplomatic blunderings of the Germans, and economic considerations congealed, and President Woodrow Wilson, a pacifist at heart, led his country into the first global war of the twentieth century.ĭuring the Progressive era, as local and regional economies gave way to the national and international organizational structure of corporate America, a pronounced alteration in federal-state relations occurred. The principal European nations had been engaged in military conflict since 1914, but the United States managed to avoid direct involvement until 1917. Tennesseans shifted their attention from politics and prohibition to foreign affairs and distant battlegrounds. The faraway assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the chain of events it set in motion, culminating with World War I, eventually reached into the rural communities and remote villages of the Volunteer State. By 1917, however, ominous developments overseas could no longer be ignored. Correcting the ills of an American society struggling to make the transition from a rural past to an urban future, Tennesseans as well as other Americans concentrated on domestic issues while international relations commanded less attention. This was Progressivism at high tide, but the philosophy that shaped it and the ideas that undergirded it spilled over at either end of its loosely established chronological boundaries. Embracing reformism at home and imperialism abroad, Americans of this era, on the domestic front and in foreign affairs, set the nation’s future course. During the interlude marked by the end of the depression of the 1890s and the entry of the United States into the First World War in 1917, Tennesseans as well as other Americans entered the twentieth century.
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