American entry into World War I: Difference between revisions
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The '''United States' entry into World War I''' came in April 1917, after two and a half years of efforts by President [[Woodrow Wilson]] to keep the United States [[Neutrality (international relations)|neutral]] during [[World War I]]. Americans had no idea that war was imminent in Europe in the summer of 1914, and tens of thousands of tourists were caught by surprise. The U.S. government, under Wilson's firm control, called for neutrality "in thought and deed".<ref>Attributed afterwards. See: {{cite news |title=Ten Years After |url=http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19240728&id=IR1iAAAAIBAJ&sjid=zXUNAAAAIBAJ&pg=1204,1219605 |newspaper=Lawrence Journal World |date=July 28, 1924 |accessdate=July 24, 2012}} |
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Original quote, "be neutral in fact as well as in name ... be impartial in thought as well as in action". See: {{cite news |title=The American People and the Great War |url=http://archive.org/stream/independen79v80newy#page/n306/mode/1up |newspaper=The Independent |date=August 31, 1914 |accessdate=July 24, 2012}} and [http://www.academicamerican.com/progressive/docs/WWNeutral1914.htm Message to Senate]</ref> Apart from an [[Anglophile]] element supporting the British, American public opinion went along with neutrality at first. The sentiment for neutrality was strong among [[Irish Americans]], [[German Americans]] and [[Swedish Americans]],<ref>{{cite book|author=Jeanette Keith|title=Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War|year=2004|publisher=U. of North Carolina Press|pages=1–5|isbn=978-0-8078-7589-6}}</ref> as well as among church leaders and women. However, the citizenry increasingly came to see the [[German Empire]] as the villain after news of [[The Rape of Belgium|atrocities in Belgium]] in 1914, and the [[Sinking of the RMS Lusitania|sinking of the passenger liner RMS ''Lusitania'']] in 1915 in defiance of [[Law of the Sea|international law]]. Wilson made all the key decisions and kept the economy on a peacetime basis, while allowing large-scale loans to [[British Empire|Britain]] and [[French Third Republic|France]]. To preclude making any military threat Wilson made only minimal preparations for war and kept the army on its small peacetime basis despite increasing demands for preparedness. However, he did enlarge the [[US Navy]]. |
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At the beginning of 1917 Germany decided to resume [[U-boat Campaign (World War I)#1917: Resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare|all-out submarine warfare]] on every commercial ship headed toward Britain, realizing that this decision would almost certainly mean war with the United States. Germany also offered a military alliance to Mexico in the [[Zimmermann Telegram]]. Publication of that offer outraged Americans just as German [[U-boat]]s (submarines) started sinking American ships in the North Atlantic. Wilson asked Congress for "a [[war to end all wars]]" that would "make the world safe for democracy", and Congress voted to [[United States declaration of war on Germany (1917)|declare war on Germany on April 6, 1917]].<ref>{{cite book |first=Arthur S. |last=Link |title=Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 |year=1972 |location=New York |publisher=Harper & Row |pages=252–282 |isbn= }}</ref> On December 7, 1917, the US declared war on the [[Austro-Hungarian Empire]].<ref name="AHS1"/><ref name="ElseaWeed">{{cite web|url=http://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL31133.pdf|title=Declarations of War and Authorizations for the Use of Military Force: Historical Background and Legal Implications|author1=Jennifer K. Elsea|author2=Matthew C. Weed|date=April 18, 2014|accessdate=July 21, 2014|page=9}}</ref> |
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==Submarines and blockades== |
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A critical indirect strategy used by both sides was the [[blockade]]. The British [[Royal Navy]] successfully stopped the shipment of most war supplies and food to Germany. Neutral American ships that tried to trade with Germany were seized or turned back. The strangulation came about very slowly, because Germany and the [[Central Powers]] (its allies) controlled extensive farmlands and raw materials. However, it was eventually successful because Germany and [[Austria-Hungary]] had taken so many farmers into their armies. By 1918, German cities were on the verge of starvation; the front-lineŕpp soldiers were on short rations and were running out of essential supplies.<ref>Eric W. Osborne, ''Britain's economic blockade of Germany, 1914–1919'' (2004)</ref> |
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Germany also considered a blockade. "England wants to starve us", said Admiral [[Alfred von Tirpitz]], the man who built the German fleet and who remained a key advisor to the [[Wilhelm II, German Emperor|Kaiser Wilhelm II]]. "We can play the same game. We can bottle her up and destroy every ship that endeavors to break the blockade".<ref>Ernest May, ''The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917'' (1959) p. 115 quote from Dec 1914.</ref> Unable to challenge the more powerful Royal Navy on the surface, Tirpitz wanted to scare off merchant and passenger ships en route to Britain. He reasoned that since the island of being the depended on imports of food, raw materials, and manufactured goods, scaring off a substantial number of the ships would effectively undercut its long-term ability to maintain an army on the [[Western Front (World War I)|Western Front]]. While Germany had only nine long-range [[U-boat]]s at the start of the war, it had ample shipyard capacity to build the hundreds needed. However, the United States demanded that Germany respect the international agreements upon "[[freedom of the seas]]", which protected neutral American ships on the high seas from seizure or sinking by either belligerent. Furthermore, Americans insisted that the drowning of innocent civilians was barbaric and grounds for a declaration of war. The British frequently violated America's neutral rights by seizing ships.<ref>C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, ''A history of the Great War, 1914–1918'' (2007) p. 191</ref> Wilson's top advisor, Colonel [[Edward M. House]] commented that, "The British have gone as far as they possibly could in violating neutral rights, though they have done it in the most courteous way".<ref>Edward House, ''The intimate papers of Colonel House: Vol 2'' (1928) p. 73</ref> When Wilson protested British violations of American neutrality, the British backed down. |
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German submarines, however, torpedoed ships without warning, and some sailors and passengers drowned. Berlin explained that submarines were so vulnerable that they dared not surface near merchant ships that might be carrying guns and which were too small to rescue submarine crews. Britain armed most of its merchant ships with medium calibre guns that could sink a submarine, making above-water attacks too risky. In February 1915, the United States warned Germany about misuse of submarines. On April 22, the German Imperial Embassy warned US-Citizens from boarding vessels to Great Britain which would have to face German attack. On May 7, Germany torpedoed the British passenger liner [[Sinking of the RMS Lusitania|''RMS Lusitania'', sinking her]]. This act of aggression caused the loss of 1,198 civilian lives, including 128 Americans. The sinking of a large, unarmed passenger ship, combined with the previous atrocity stories from Belgium, shocked Americans and turned public opinion hostile to Germany, although not yet to the point of war. Wilson issued a warning to Germany that it would face "strict accountability" if it sank more neutral U.S. passenger ships.<ref name=http://www.firstworldwar.com/wilsonwarning>{{Cite web |
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| last = Duffy |
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| first = Michael |
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| title = U.S. 'Strict Accountability' Warning to Germany, 10 February 1915 |
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| date = August 22, 2009 |
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| url = http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/wilsonwarningfeb1915.htm |
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| accessdate = January 30, 2011 |
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| postscript = <!-- Bot inserted parameter. Either remove it; or change its value to "." for the cite to end in a ".", as necessary. -->{{inconsistent citations}}}}</ref> Berlin acquiesced, ordering its submarines to avoid passenger ships. |
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By January 1917, however, [[Paul von Hindenburg|Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg]] and [[Erich Ludendorff|General Erich Ludendorff]] decided that an unrestricted submarine blockade was the only way to break the stalemate on the Western Front. They demanded that Kaiser Wilhelm order unrestricted submarine warfare be resumed. Germany knew this decision meant war with the United States, but they gambled that they could win before America's potential strength could be mobilized.<ref>Spencer Tucker, ''The Great War, 1914–18'' (1997) p. 133</ref> However, they overestimated how many ships they could sink and thus the extent Britain would be weakened. Finally, they did not foresee that convoys could and would be used to defeat their efforts. They believed that the United States was so weak militarily that it could not be a factor on the Western Front for more than a year – a mistake that would ultimately prove to be fatal to their war. The civilian government in Berlin objected, but the Kaiser sided with his military.<ref>Ernest May, ''The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917'' (1959) p. 414</ref> |
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==Elites== |
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National intellectual elites split into three distinct groups. |
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First, there were the anti-war people ("pacifists" loosely defined), who wanted to keep America out at all costs, and rejected as equally immoral the British and German Empires. The leaders included Secretary of State [[William Jennings Bryan]] (a three-time Democratic nominee for president), Republican Senator [[Robert M. La Follette, Sr.]], social worker and humanitarian [[Jane Addams]] (a Progressive), and industrialist [[Henry Ford]] (a Democrat). |
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Secondly, the "liberal internationalists" reluctantly supported armed force to create a collective security system. They included President [[Woodrow Wilson]] and former president [[William Howard Taft]]. |
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Finally, the "Atlanticists" sought a security relationship with Britain; they were led by former President [[Theodore Roosevelt]], Major General [[Leonard Wood]], and Republican Senators [[Elihu Root]] and [[Henry Cabot Lodge]].<ref>Ross A. Kennedy, ''The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America's Strategy for Peace and Security'' (Kent State University Press, 2009)</ref><ref name="Cuff 1970 291–306">{{cite journal|last=Cuff|first=Robert D.|title=The Steel Industry and Price-Fixing during World War I|journal=The Business History review|date=Autumn 1970|volume=44|series=3|pages=291–306|doi=10.2307/3112615|first2=Melvin I.|last2=Urofsky|issue=3}}</ref> |
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==Business considerations== |
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The beginning of war in Europe coincided with the end of the Recession of 1913–1914 in America. Exports to belligerent nations rose rapidly over the first four years of the War from $824.8 million in 1913 to $2.25 billion in 1917.<ref>{{cite web|last=Krakow|first=Ira|title=World War I - The Most Unpopular War In Our History|url=http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/WWI/parallelsToIraq.htm|accessdate=March 20, 2013}}</ref> Loans from American financial institutions to the Allied nations in Europe also increased dramatically over the same period.<ref name="Horn 2000 85–112">{{cite journal|last=Horn|first=Martin|title=A Private Bank at War: J.P. Morgan &Co. and France, 1914–1918|journal=Business History Review|date=Spring 2000|volume=74|series=1|pages=85–112|doi=10.2307/3116353}}</ref> Economic activity towards the end of this period boomed as government resources aided the production of the private sector. Between 1914 and 1917, industrial production increased 32% and GNP increased by almost 20%.<ref>{{cite web|last=Global Financial Data|title=Industrial Output 1909–1930|url=https://www.globalfinancialdata.com/platform/Mainform.aspx|accessdate=March 20, 2013}}</ref> The improvements to industrial production in the United States outlasted the war. The capital build-up that had allowed American companies to supply belligerents and the American army resulted in a greater long-run rate of production even after the war had ended in 1918.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Kendrick|first=John W.|title=Productivity Trends in the United States|journal=National Bureau of Economic Research|year=1961|pages=1–50}}</ref> |
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In 1913, [[J. P. Morgan, Jr.]] took over the [[House of Morgan]], an American-based investment bank consisting of separate banking operations in New York, London, and Paris, after the death of his father, [[J. Pierpont Morgan]].<ref name="Horn 2000 85–112"/> The House of Morgan offered assistance in the wartime financing of Britain and France from the earliest stages of the war in 1914 through America's entrance in 1917. J.P. Morgan & Co., the House of Morgan's bank in New York, was designated as the primary financial agent to the British government in 1914.<ref name="Horn 2000 85–112"/> The same bank would later take a similar role in France and would offer extensive financial assistance to both warring nations. J.P. Morgan &Co. became the primary issuer of loans to the French government by raising money from American investors.<ref name="Horn 2000 85–112"/> Morgan, Harjes, the House of Morgan's French affiliated bank, controlled the majority of the wartime financial dealings between the House of Morgan and the French government after primary issuances of debt in American markets.<ref name="Horn 2000 85–112"/> Relations between the House of Morgan and the French government became tense as the war raged on with no end in sight.<ref name="Horn 2000 85–112"/> France's ability to borrow from other sources diminished, leading to greater lending rates and a depressing of the value of the Franc. After the war, in 1918, J.P. Morgan & Co. continued to aid the French government financially through monetary stabilization and debt relief.<ref name="Horn 2000 85–112"/> |
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Because America was still a declared neutral state, the financial dealings of American banks in Europe caused a great deal of contention between Wall Street and the U.S. government. Secretary of State [[William Jennings Bryan]] strictly opposed financial support of warring nations and wanted to ban loans to the belligerents in August 1914.<ref name="Horn 2000 85–112"/> He told President Wilson that "refusal to loan to any belligerent would naturally tend to hasten a conclusion of the war." Wilson at first agreed, but then reversed himself when France argued that if it was legal to buy American goods then it was legal to take out credits on the purchase.<ref>{{cite book|author=H. W. Brands|title=Woodrow Wilson: The American Presidents Series: The 28th President, 1913-1921|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=IRgge_bZ47EC&pg=PA55|year=2003|publisher=Henry Holt |pages=55–56}}</ref> |
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J.P. Morgan issued loans to France including one in March 1915 and another in October 1915, the latter amounting to US$500,000,000.<ref name="Horn 2000 85–112"/> Although the stance of the U.S. government was that ending such aid could hasten the end of the war and save millions of lives, little was done to insure adherence to the ban on loans.<ref name="Horn 2000 85–112"/> |
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The American steel industry had faced difficulties and declining profits during the Recession of 1913–1914.<ref name="Cuff 1970 291–306"/> As war began in Europe, however, the increased demand for tools of war began a period of heightened productivity that alleviated many U.S. industrial companies from the low-growth environment of the recession. [[Bethlehem Steel]] took particular advantage of the increased demand for armaments abroad. Prior to American entrance into the War, these companies benefitted from unrestricted commerce with sovereign customers abroad. After President Wilson issued his declaration of war, the companies were subjected to price controls created by the U.S. Trade Commission in order to insure that the U.S. military would have access to the necessary armaments.<ref name="Cuff 1970 291–306"/> |
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By the end of the war in 1918, Bethlehem Steel had produced 65,000 pounds of forged military products and 70 million pounds of armor plate, 1.1 billion pounds of steel for shells, and 20.1 million rounds of artillery ammunition for Britain and France.<ref name="Metz 2006 10–15">{{cite journal|last=Metz|first=Lance E.|title=The Rise and Fall of An Industrial Giant|journal=Pennsylvania Legacies|date=November 2006|volume=6|issue=2|pages=10–15}}</ref> Bethlehem Steel took advantage of the domestic armaments market and produced 60% of the American weaponry and 40% of the artillery shells used in the War.<ref name="Metz 2006 10–15"/> Even with price controls and a lower profit margin on manufactured goods, the profits resulting from wartime sales expanded the company into the third largest manufacturing company in the country. Bethlehem Steel became the primary arms supplier for the United States and other allied powers again in 1939.<ref name="Metz 2006 10–15"/> |
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==Public opinion== |
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A cosmopolitan group of upper and upper-middle class businessmen based in the largest cities took the lead in promoting military preparedness and in defining how far America could be pushed around before it would fight back. Many public figures hated war—Secretary of State [[William Jennings Bryan]] was the most prominent, and he resigned when he thought Wilson had become too bellicose.<ref> |
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Charles Chatfield, ''For peace and justice: pacifism in America, 1914–1941'' (1973) ch 1</ref> [[Grassroots]] opposition to American entry came especially from German and Irish elements. |
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===Parties=== |
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A surprising factor in the development of American public opinion was how little the political parties became involved. Wilson and the Democrats in 1916 campaigned on the slogan "He kept us out of war!", saying a Republican victory would mean war with both Mexico and Germany. His position probably was critical in winning the Western states.<ref>John Milton Cooper, Jr., ''Woodrow Wilson'' (2009) pp 341–2, 352, 360</ref> [[Charles Evans Hughes]], the GOP candidate, insisted on downplaying the war issue.<ref>Merlo J. Pusey, ''Charles Evans Hughes'' (1951) vol 1 p 356</ref> |
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The Socialist party talked peace. Socialist rhetoric declared the European conflict to be "an imperialist war".<ref>Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States" (2005) p.361</ref> It won 2% of the 1916 vote for [[Eugene V. Debs]], blamed the war on capitalism and pledged total opposition. "A [[bayonet]]", its propaganda said, "was a weapon with a worker at each end". When war began, however, about half the Socialists, typified by Congressman [[Meyer London]], supported the decision and sided with the pro-Allied efforts. The rest, led by Debs, remained ideological and die-hard opponents.<ref>Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, ''It didn't happen here: why socialism failed in the United States'' (2001) p 184</ref> Many socialists came under investigation from the [[Espionage Act of 1917]] and many suspected of treason were arrested, including Debs. This would only increase the Socialist's anti-war groups in size and bolster resentment toward the American bureaucracy.<ref>Howard Zinn, ''A People's History of the United States''(2005) p.365</ref> |
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===Workers, farmers, and African Americans=== |
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The working class was relatively quiet, and tended to divide along ethnic lines. At the beginning of the war, neither working men nor farmers took a large interest in the efforts for defense or war preparation.<ref>Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States"(2005) p.364</ref>[[Samuel Gompers]], head of the AFL, denounced the war in 1914 as "unnatural, unjustified, and unholy", but by 1916 he was supporting Wilson's limited preparedness program, against the objections of Socialist union activists. In 1916 the labor unions supported Wilson on domestic issues and ignored the war question.<ref>Joseph A. McCartin, ''Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921'' (1998) pp 34, 57</ref> |
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The war at first disrupted the cotton market; Britain blockaded shipments to Germany, and prices fell from 11 cents a pound to only 4 cents. By 1916, however, the British decided to bolster the price to 10 cents to avoid losing Southern support. The cotton growers seem to have moved from neutrality to intervention at about the same pace as the rest of the nation.<ref>{{cite journal |first=James L., Jr. |last=McCorkle |title=Mississippi from Neutrality to War (1914–1917) |journal=Journal of Mississippi History |year=1981 |volume=43 |issue=2 |pages=85–125 |doi= |jstor= }}</ref><ref>Arthur S. Link, ''Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era'' (1954) pp 169–72</ref> Midwestern farmers generally opposed the war, especially those of German and Scandinavian descent. The Midwest became the stronghold of isolationism; other remote rural areas also saw no need for war.<ref>Christopher C. Gibbs, ''The great silent majority: Missouri's resistance to World War I'' (1988)</ref><ref>John C. Crighton, ''Missouri and the World War, 1914–1917: a study in public opinion'' (1947)</ref><ref>Edwin Costrell, ''How Maine viewed the war, 1914–1917'' (1940)</ref> |
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The African-American community, which lived mostly in the pro-war South, did not take a strong position one way or the other. A month after congress declared war, [[W. E. B. Du Bois]] called on African-Americans to "fight shoulder to shoulder with the world to gain a world where war shall be no more".<ref>Panikos Panayi, "Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America, and Australia During the Two World War"(1992) p.170</ref> Once war began and black men were drafted, they worked to achieve equality.<ref>Mark Ellis, "America's Black Press, 1914–18," ''History Today,'' Sept 1991, Vol. 41, Issue 9</ref> Many had hoped the community's help in the war efforts abroad would earn civil rights at home. When such civil liberties were still not granted, many African-Americans grew tired of waiting for recognition of their rights as American citizens.<ref>Panikos Panayi, "Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America, and Australia During the Two World Wars" (1992) p.171</ref> |
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===Religious=== |
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Many different religious denominations{{Who|date=December 2014}} loudly denounced the war at first: it was God's punishment for sin. Their moralism was aggressively focused on banishing evils (like saloons) from the face of the earth through [[Prohibition]], and if they could be shown that German militarism was a similar evil, they would throw enormous weight. Wilson, the intensely religious son of a prominent theologian, knew exactly how to harness that moralism in his attacks on the "[[Huns]]" who threatened civilization, and his calls for an almost religious crusade on behalf of peace.<ref>Samuel S. Hill, Charles H. Lippy, and Charles Reagan Wilson, ''Encyclopedia of religion in the South'' (2005) p. 297</ref> |
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===South=== |
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There was a strong antiwar element in the white South and border states. In rural Missouri for example, distrust of powerful Eastern influences focused on the risk that Wall Street would lead America into war.<ref>Christopher C. Gibbs, ''Great Silent Majority: Missouri's Resistance to World War I'' (1988)</ref> Across the South poor white farmers warned each other that "a rich man's war meant a poor man's fight," and they wanted nothing of it.<ref>{{cite book|author=Jeanette Keith|title=Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South During the First World War|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=_3FDr7kE7d4C&pg=PA85|year=2004|publisher=U. of North Carolina Press|page=85}}</ref> Congressman James Hay, Democrat of Virginia was the powerful chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs. He repeatedly blocked prewar efforts to modernize and enlarge the army. Preparednesss was not needed because Americans were already safe, he insisted in January 1915: |
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:Isolated as we are, safe in our vastness, protected by a great navy, and possessed of an army sufficient for any emergency that may arise, we may disregard the lamentations and predictions of the militarists.<ref>George C. Herring, "James Hay and the Preparedness Controversy, 1915-1916." ''Journal of Southern History'' (1964) 30#4 pp. 383-404 quote p 386 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2204278 in JSTOR]</ref> |
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===German Americans=== |
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[[German Americans]] by this time usually had only weak ties to Germany; however, they were fearful of negative treatment they might receive if the United States entered the war (such mistreatment was already happening to German-descent citizens in Canada and Australia). Almost none called for intervening on Germany's side, instead calling for neutrality and speaking of the superiority of German culture. As more nations were drawn into the conflict, however, the English-languages press increasingly supporting Britain, while the German-American media called for neutrality while also defending Germany's position. Chicago's Germans worked to secure a complete embargo on all arms shipments to Europe. In 1916 large crowds in Chicago's Germania celebrated the Kaiser's birthday, something they had not done before the war.<ref>Leslie V. Tischauser, ''The Burden of Ethnicity: The German Question in Chicago, 1914-1941'' (Garland, 1990) pp 21-23</ref> German Americans in early 1917 still called for neutrality but proclaimed that if a war came they would be loyal to the United States. By this point they had been excluded almost entirely from national discourse on the subject.<ref>Frederick C. Luebke, ''Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I'' (1974) pp 200-207</ref> Once war started they were harassed in so many ways that historian Carl Wittke noted in 1936, it was "one of the most difficult and humiliating experiences suffered by an ethnic group in American history."<ref>Carl Wittke, ''German-Americans and the World War (with Special Emphasis on Ohio's |
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German-Language Press)'' (Columbus, Ohio, 1936), p. 209</ref> German-American Socialists in [[Milwaukee, Wisconsin]] actively campaigned against entry into the war.<ref>http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/tp-037/?action=more_essay</ref> |
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===Churches and women=== |
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[[File:Come on in America.jpg|alt=|thumb|''Come on in, America, the Blood's Fine!'' (1917) by M.A. Kempf.]] |
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Leaders of most religious groups (except the Episcopalians) tended to pacifism, as did leaders of the woman's movement. A concerted effort was made by anti-war leaders, including [[Jane Addams]], [[Oswald Garrison Villard]], [[David Starr Jordan]], [[Henry Ford]], [[Lillian Wald]], and [[Carrie Chapman Catt]]. Their goal was to convince Wilson to mediate an end of the war by bringing the belligerents to the conference table. Wilson indeed made an energetic, sustained and serious effort to do so, and kept his administration neutral, but he was repeatedly rebuffed by Britain and Germany.<ref>{{cite journal |first=David S. |last=Patterson |title=Woodrow Wilson and the Mediation Movement 1914–1917 |journal=[[The Historian (journal)|The Historian]] |year=1971 |volume=33 |issue=4 |pages=535–556 |doi=10.1111/j.1540-6563.1971.tb01164.x }}</ref> Finally in 1917 Wilson convinced some of them that to be truly anti-war they needed to support what Wilson promised would be "a war to end all wars".<ref>{{cite journal |last=Piper |first=John F., Jr. |title=The American Churches in World War I |journal=Journal of the American Academy of Religion |volume=38 |issue=2 |year=1970 |pages=147–155 |jstor=1461171 |doi=10.1093/jaarel/XXXVIII.2.147 }}</ref> |
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Once war was declared, the more liberal denominations, which had endorsed the [[Social Gospel]], called for a war for righteousness that would help uplift all mankind. The theme—an aspect of [[American exceptionalism]]—was that God had chosen America as his tool to bring redemption to the world.<ref>{{cite book |first=Richard M. |last=Gamble |title=The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation |year=2003 |location=Wilmington |publisher=ISI Books |isbn=1-932236-16-3 }}</ref> |
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American Catholic bishops maintained a general silence toward the issue of intervention. Millions of Catholics lived in both warring camps, and Catholic Americans tended to split on ethnic lines in their opinions toward American involvement in the war. At the time, heavily Catholic towns and cities in the East and Midwest often contained multiple parishes, each serving a single ethnic group, such as Irish, German, Italian, Polish, or English. American Catholics of Irish and German descent opposed intervention most strongly. Pope [[Benedict XV]] made several attempts to negotiate a peace. All of his efforts were rebuffed by both the Allies and the Germans, and throughout the war the Vatican maintained a policy of strict neutrality. |
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[[Jewish American]] sympathies likewise broke along ethnic lines, though at the turn of the century, Germany and Austria were considered among the most tolerant of continental European countries, while the tsarist regime in Russia was notorious for its anti-Semitic policies. As historian Joseph Rappaport claimed through his study of Yiddish press during the war, "The pro-Germanism of America's immigrant Jews was an inevitable consequence of their Russophobia".<ref>Joseph Rappaport, ''Jewish Immigrants and World War I: A Study of Yiddish Attitudes''(1951), p. 78</ref> The [[Balfour Declaration]] of 1917, in which the British government promised to help establish a Jewish homeland in [[Palestine]], as well as the fall of the tsarist regime in 1917 and Wilson's promise of self-determination, helped swing Jewish-Americans into the pro-Allied camp. |
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===Irish-Americans=== |
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The most effective domestic opponents of the war were Irish-American Catholics. They had little interest in the continent, but were adamant against helping the [[United Kingdom]] because it refused to allow independence for Ireland. |
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John Redmond and the [[Irish Parliamentary Party]] (IPP) declared that Irish Volunteers should support America's pro-Allied war efforts first, earning the party severe backlash from the Irish American community. The attacks insisted it was not the time to support Britain in its attempt to "strengthen and expand her empire".<ref>Malcolm Campbell, ''Ireland's New Worlds'', (2008), p. 164</ref> The attacks on the IPP and pro-Allied press showed a firm belief that a German victory would hasten the achievement of Irish independence. Yet rather than proposing intervention on behalf of the Germans, Irish American leaders and organizations focused on demanding American [[Neutrality (international relations)|neutrality]]. But the increased contact between militant Irish nationalists and German agents in the United States only fueled concerns of where the primary loyalties of Irish Americans lay.<ref>Malcolm Campbell, ''Ireland's New Worlds'', (2008), p. 174</ref> Nevertheless, close to 1,000 Irish-Americans died fighting with the U.S. armed forces in WWI. <ref>Smolenyak, Megan. {{cite news|url=http://issuu.com/irishamerica/docs/ia.april_may_2015 |title=How Many Irish-Born Died in Service to the U.S. in WWI? |work=Irish America |accessdate=April 13, 2015}}</ref> |
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The [[Easter Rising]] in Dublin in April 1916 was crushed within a week and its leaders [[Execution by firing squad|executed by firing squad]]. The mainstream American press treated the uprising as foolish and misguided, and theorized it was largely inspired by the Germans. Overall public opinion remained faithfully pro-British.<ref>Malcolm Campbell, ''Ireland's New Worlds'', (2008), p. 170</ref> |
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Irish-Americans dominated the Democratic party in many large cities so Wilson had to take account of their views. They did not prevent him from being hostile to Germany, but they did force him to keep his distance from Britain. Indeed, Irish-American pressure influenced the United States into not accepting Britain's war aims as its own and define its own objectives, primarily [[self-determination]]. The Irish-American community thought they had Wilson's promise to promote Irish independence in exchange for their support of his war policies, but after the war they were bitterly disappointed by his refusal to support them in 1919.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Leary |first=William M., Jr. |title=Woodrow Wilson, Irish Americans, and the Election of 1916 |journal=[[Journal of American History]] |volume=54 |issue=1 |year=1967 |pages=57–72 |jstor=1900319 |doi=10.2307/1900319 }}</ref> Wilson saw the Irish situation purely as an internal UK matter and did not perceive the dispute and the unrest in Ireland as comparable to the plight of the various nationalities in Europe as a fall-out from World War I.<ref>Kennedy, Billy. "Woodrow Wilson". Ulstervirginia.com. http://www.ulstervirginia.com/woodrowwilson.asp. Retrieved November 10, 2011.</ref> |
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===Pro-Allied immigrants=== |
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Some British immigrants worked actively for intervention. London-born [[Samuel Insull]], Chicago's leading industrialist, for example, enthusiastically provided money, propaganda, and means for volunteers to enter the British or Canadian armies. After the United States' entry, Insull directed the Illinois State Council of Defense, with responsibility for organizing the state's mobilization.<ref>{{cite book |first=Forrest |last=McDonald |title=Insull: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Utility Tycoon |year=2004 |location=Washington |publisher=Beard Books |pages=162–187 |isbn=1-58798-243-9 }}</ref> |
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Immigrants from eastern Europe usually cared more about politics in their homeland than politics in the U.S. Spokesmen for Slavic immigrants hoped that an Allied victory would bring independence for their homelands.<ref>{{cite book |first=Joseph |last=O'Grady |title=The Immigrants' Influence on Wilson's Peace Policies |year=1967 |location=Lexington |publisher=University of Kentucky Press |isbn= }}</ref> Large numbers of Hungarian immigrants who were liberal and nationalist in sentiment, and sought an independent Hungary, separate from the Austro-Hungarian Empire lobbied in favor of the war and allied themselves with the Atlanticist or Anglophile portion of the population. This community was largely pro-British and anti-German in sentiment.<ref>The Hungarian-Americans by Steven Béla Várdy; Twayne Publishers, 1985 page 87–99</ref><ref>Christopher M. Sterba, ''Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants During the First World War'',(2003) p. 31–32</ref><ref>Michael T. Urbanski, "Money, War, and Recruiting an Army: The Activities of Connecticut Polonia During World War I," ''Connecticut History'' (2007) 46#1 pp 45-69.</ref> Albanian-Americans in communities such as Boston also campaigned for entry into the war and were overwhelmingly pro-British and anti-German, as well as hopeful the war would lead to an independent Albania which would be free from the Ottoman Empire.<ref>The Albanian-American Odyssey: A Pilot Study of the Albanian Community of Boston, Massachusetts Front Cover Dennis L. Nagi AMS Press, Jan 1, 1989, page 33-35</ref> |
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[[Polish people|Polish]], [[Slovaks|Slovak]], and [[History of the Czech Lands|Czech]] immigrants were enthusiastically pro-war and generally pro-British. These communities hoped for liberation from [[Austria-Hungary|Austro-Hungarian]] rule in their homelands. Similarly, [[Greece during World War I|Greek]], [[Armenian resistance during the Armenian Genocide|Armenian]], [[Ottoman Syria|Syrian]], and [[History of Lebanon|Lebanese]] immigrants dreamed of liberation from the [[Ottoman Empire]] with an Allied victory. |
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===Ford's pacifism=== |
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[[File:IDidntRaiseMyBoyToBeASoldierCoverMorton.jpeg|thumb|right|The song "[[I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier]]" was a hit in 1915, expressing popular{{fact|date=November 2014}} pacifist sentiment.]] |
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[[Henry Ford]] hurt the pacifist cause by sponsoring a private peace mission that accomplished nothing. The German agent in charge of propaganda left his briefcase on the train, where an alert Secret Service agent snatched it up. Wilson let the newspapers publish the contents, which indicated a systematic effort by Berlin to subsidize friendly newspapers and block British purchases of war materials. Berlin's top espionage agent, debonnaire [[Franz von Rintelen|Franz Rintelen von Kleist]] was spending millions to finance sabotage in Canada, stir up trouble between the United States and Mexico and to incite labor strikes. The British were engaged in propaganda too, though not illegal espionage. But they did not get caught.<ref>H.C. Peterson, ''Propaganda for war: The campaign against American neutrality, 1914-1917'' (1968)</ref> Germany took the blame as Americans grew ever more worried about the vulnerability of a free society to subversion. Indeed, one of the main fears Americans of all stations had in 1916–1919 was that spies and saboteurs were everywhere. This sentiment played a major role in arousing fear of Germany, and suspicions regarding everyone of German descent who could not "prove" 100% loyalty.<ref>Link 3:556ff</ref> |
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==Preparedness movement== |
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{{main|Preparedness Movement}} |
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By 1915, Americans were paying much more attention to the war. The sinking of the ''Lusitania'' had a strong effect on public opinion because of the deaths of American civilians. That year, a strong "Preparedness" movement emerged.<ref>George C. Herring, "James Hay and the Preparedness Controversy, 1915-1916." ''Journal of Southern History'' (1964) 30#4 pp. 383-404 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2204278 in JSTOR]</ref> Proponents argued that the United States needed to immediately build up strong naval and land forces for defensive purposes; an unspoken assumption was that America would fight sooner or later. General [[Leonard Wood]] (still on active duty after serving a term as Chief of Staff of the Army), former president [[Theodore Roosevelt]], and former secretaries of war [[Elihu Root]] and [[Henry Stimson]] were the driving forces behind Preparedness, along with many of the nation's most prominent bankers, industrialists, lawyers and scions of prominent families. Indeed there emerged an "Atlanticist" foreign policy establishment, a group of influential Americans drawn primarily from upper-class lawyers, bankers, academics, and politicians of the Northeast, committed to a strand of Anglophile internationalism. Representative was [[Paul D. Cravath]], one of New York's foremost corporation lawyers. For Cravath, in his mid-fifties when the war began, the conflict served as an epiphany, sparking an interest in international affairs that dominated his remaining career. Fiercely Anglophile, he strongly supported American intervention in the war and hoped that close Anglo-American cooperation would be the guiding principle of postwar international organization.<ref>{{cite journal |first=Priscilla |last=Roberts |title=Paul D. Cravath, the First World War, and the Anglophile Internationalist Tradition |journal=Australian Journal of Politics and History |year=2005 |volume=51 |issue=2 |pages=194–215 |doi=10.1111/j.1467-8497.2005.00370.x }}</ref> |
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[[File:The Battle Cry of Peace.jpg|thumb|right|350px| The advertisement of ''[[The Battle Cry of Peace]]'' film]] |
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The Preparedness movement had a "realistic" philosophy of world affairs—they believed that economic strength and military muscle were more decisive than idealistic crusades focused on causes like democracy and national self-determination. Emphasizing over and over the weak state of national defenses, they showed that America's 100,000-man Army even augmented by the 112,000 National Guardsmen, was outnumbered 20 to one by Germany's army, which was drawn from a smaller population. Reform to them meant UMT or "universal military training". They proposed a national service program under which the 600,000 men who turned 18 every year would be required to spend six months in military training, and afterwards be assigned to reserve units. The small regular army would primarily be a training agency. |
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Antimilitarists complained the plan would make America resemble Germany (which required two years' active duty). Advocates retorted that military "service" was an essential duty of citizenship, and that without the commonality provided by such service the nation would splinter into antagonistic ethnic groups. One spokesman promised that UMT would become "a real [[melting pot]], under which the fire is hot enough to fuse the elements into one common mass of Americanism". Furthermore, they promised, the discipline and training would make for a better paid work force. Hostility to military service was strong at the time, and the program failed to win approval. In World War II, when Stimson as Secretary of War proposed a similar program of universal peacetime service, he was defeated.<ref>Chambers 93; Weigley Army 345</ref> |
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Underscoring its commitment, the Preparedness movement set up and funded [[Plattsburg Movement|its own summer training camps]] at [[Plattsburgh, New York|Plattsburgh]], New York, and other sites, where 40,000 college alumni became physically fit, learned to march and shoot, and ultimately provided the cadre of a wartime officer corps.<ref>Very few young men from wealthy or prominent families considered a career in the Army or Navy then or at any time in American history. The highest social background of cadets, exemplified by George Patton, West Point 1909, and Lucius Clay, 1918, was oldest son of a locally prominent family.</ref> Suggestions by labor unions that talented working-class youth be invited to Plattsburgh were ignored. The Preparedness movement was distant not only from the working classes but also from the middle-class leadership of most of small-town America. It had had little use for the National Guard, which it saw as politicized, localistic, poorly armed, ill trained, too inclined to idealistic crusading (as against [[Spanish–American War|Spain in 1898]]), and too lacking in understanding of world affairs. The National Guard on the other hand was securely rooted in state and local politics, with representation from a very broad cross section of American society. The Guard was one of the nation's few institutions that (in some northern states) accepted blacks on an equal footing. |
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The Democratic party saw the Preparedness movement as a threat. Roosevelt, Root and Wood were prospective Republican presidential candidates. More subtly, the Democrats were rooted in localism that appreciated the National Guard, and the voters were hostile to the rich and powerful in the first place. Working with the Democrats who controlled Congress, Wilson was able to sidetrack the Preparedness forces. Army and Navy leaders were forced to testify before Congress to the effect that the nation's military was in excellent shape. |
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In fact neither the Army nor Navy was in shape for war. The Navy had fine ships but Wilson had been using them to threaten Mexico, and the fleet's readiness had suffered. The crews of the ''[[USS Texas (BB-35)|Texas]]'' and the ''[[USS New York (BB-34)|New York]]'', the two newest and largest battleships, had never fired a gun, and the morale of the sailors was low. The Army and Navy air forces were tiny in size. Despite the flood of new weapons systems unveiled in the war in Europe, the Army was paying scant attention. For example, it was making no studies of trench warfare, poison gas or tanks, and was unfamiliar with the rapid evolution of air tactics. The Democrats in Congress tried to cut the military budget in 1915. The Preparedness movement effectively exploited the surge of outrage over the ''Lusitania'' in May 1915, forcing the Democrats to promise some improvements to the military and naval forces. Wilson, less fearful of the Navy. embraced a long-term building program designed to make the fleet the equal of the Royal Navy by the mid-1920s. "Realism" was at work here; the admirals were Mahanians and they therefore wanted a surface fleet of heavy battleships second to none—that is, equal to Britain. The facts of submarine warfare (which necessitated destroyers, not battleships) and the possibilities of imminent war with Germany (or with Britain, for that matter), were simply ignored. |
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Wilson's program for the army touched off a firestorm.<ref>Link, Woodrow Wilson pp 179ff</ref> Secretary of War [[Lindley Garrison]] adopted many of the proposals of the Preparedness leaders, especially their emphasis on a large federal reserves and abandonment of the National Guard. Garrison's proposals not only outraged the localistic politicians of both parties, they also offended a strongly held belief shared by the liberal wing of the Progressive movement. They felt that warfare always had a hidden economic motivation. Specifically, they warned the chief warmongers were New York bankers (like [[J. P. Morgan]]) with millions at risk, profiteering munition makers (like [[Bethlehem Steel]], which made armor, and [[DuPont]], which made powder) and unspecified industrialists searching for global markets to control. Antiwar critics blasted them. These special interests were too powerful, especially, Senator LaFollette noted, in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. The only road to peace was disarmament, reiterated Bryan. |
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Garrison's plan unleashed the fiercest battle in peacetime history over the relationship of military planning to national goals. In peacetime, War Department arsenals and Navy yards manufactured nearly all munitions that lacked civilian uses, including warships, artillery, naval guns, and shells. Items available on the civilian market, such as food, horses, saddles, wagons, and uniforms were always purchased from civilian contractors. Armor plate (and after 1918, airplanes) were exceptions that have caused unremitting controversy for a century. After World War II, the arsenals and Navy yards were much less important than giant civilian aircraft and electronic firms, which became the second half of the "[[military-industrial complex]]" Peace leaders like [[Jane Addams]] of [[Hull House]] and [[David Starr Jordan]] of Stanford redoubled their efforts, and now turned their voices against the President because he was "sowing the seeds of militarism, raising up a military and naval caste". Many ministers, professors, farm spokesmen and labor union leaders joined in, with powerful support from a band of four dozen southern Democrats in Congress who took control of the House Military Affairs Committee. Wilson, in deep trouble, took his cause to the people in a major speaking tour in early 1916, a warmup for his reelection campaign that fall. Wilson seems to have won over the middle classes, but had little impact on the largely ethnic working classes and the deeply isolationist farmers. Congress still refused to budge, so Wilson replaced Garrison as Secretary of War with [[Newton Baker]], the Democratic mayor of [[Cleveland]] and an outspoken opponent of preparedness. (Garrison's kept quiet, but felt Wilson was "a man of high ideals but no principles".) The upshot was a compromise passed in May 1916, as the war raged on and Berlin was debating whether America was so weak it could be ignored. The Army was to double in size to 11,300 officers and 208,000 men, with no reserves, and a National Guard that would be enlarged in five years to 440,000 men. Summer camps on the Plattsburg model were authorized for new officers, and the government was given $20 million to build a nitrate plant of its own. Preparedness supporters were downcast, the antiwar people were jubilant. America would now be too weak to go to war. Colonel Robert L. Bullard privately complained that "Both sides [Britain and Germany] treat us with scorn and contempt; our fool, smug conceit of superiority has been exploded in our faces and deservedly." The House gutted the naval plans as well, defeating a "big navy" plan by 189 to 183, and scuttling the battleships. The [[battle of Jutland]] (May 31/June 1, 1916) was used by the navalists to argue for the primacy of seapower; they then took control in the Senate, broke the House coalition, and authorized a rapid three-year buildup of all classes of warships. A new weapons system, naval aviation, received $3.5 million, and the government was authorized to build its own armor-plate factory. The very weakness of American military power encouraged Berlin to start its unrestricted submarine attacks in 1917. It knew this meant war with America, but it could discount the immediate risk because the U.S. Army was negligible and the new warships would not be at sea until 1919 by which time the war would be over, with Germany victorious. The notion that armaments led to war was turned on its head: refusal to arm in 1916 led to war in 1917. |
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===Size of military=== |
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Americans felt an increasing need for a military that could command respect; as one editor put it, "The best thing about a large army and a strong navy is that they make it so much easier to say just what we want to say in our diplomatic correspondence." Berlin thus far had backed down and apologized when Washington was angry, thus boosting American self-confidence. America's rights and America's honor increasingly came into focus. The slogan "Peace" gave way to "Peace with Honor". The Army remained unpopular, however. A recruiter in Indianapolis noted that, "The people here do not take the right attitude towards army life as a career, and if a man joins from here he often tries to go out on the quiet". The Preparedness movement used its easy access to the mass media to demonstrate that the War Department had no plans, no equipment, little training, no reserves, a laughable [[National Guard (United States)|National Guard]], and a wholly inadequate organization for war. Motion pictures like ''[[The Birth of a Nation]]'' (1915) and ''[[The Battle Cry of Peace]]'' (1915) depicted invasions of the American homeland that demanded action.<ref>Herring, "James Hay and the Preparedness Controversy, 1915-1916," p 383</ref> |
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===Navy=== |
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{{main|History of the United States Navy#Preparing for war 1914-1917}} |
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The readiness and capability of the U.S. Navy was a matter of controversy. The press at the time reported that the only thing the military was ready for was an enemy fleet attempting to seize New York harbor—at a time when the German battle fleet was penned up by the Royal Navy. The Navy Secretary [[Josephus Daniels]] was a journalist with pacifist leanings.<ref name="Paolo Coletta 1980">Paolo Coletta, '' American Secretaries of the Navy'' (1980) 2:526-41</ref> He had built up the educational resources of the Navy and made its [[Naval War College]] in [[Newport, Rhode Island]] an essential experience for would-be admirals. However, he alienated the officer corps with his moralistic reforms, including no wine in the officers' mess, no hazing at the Naval Academy, and more chaplains and YMCAs. |
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Daniels, as a newspaperman, knew the value of publicity. In 1915 he set up the Naval Consulting Board headed by [[Thomas Edison]] to obtain the advice and expertise of leading scientists, engineers, and industrialists. It popularized technology, naval expansion, and military preparedness, and was well covered in the media.<ref>Theodore A. Thelander, "Josephus Daniels and the Publicity Campaign for Naval and Industrial Preparedness before World War I," ''North Carolina Historical Review'' (1966) 43#3 pp 316-332</ref> But according to Coletta he ignored the nation's strategic needs, and disdaining the advice of its experts, Daniels suspended meetings of the Joint Army and Navy Board for two years because it was giving unwelcome advice, chopped in half the General Board's recommendations for new ships, reduced the authority of officers in the Navy yards where ships were built and repaired, and ignored the administrative chaos in his department. [[Bradley Fiske]], one of the most innovative admirals in American naval history, in 1914 was Daniels' top aide; he recommended a reorganization that would prepare for war, but Daniels refused. Instead he replaced Fiske in 1915 and brought in for the new post of Chief of Naval Operations an unknown captain, [[William S. Benson|William Benson]]. Chosen for his compliance, Benson proved a wily bureaucrat who was more interested in preparing for an eventual showdown with Britain than an immediate one with Germany. Benson told Sims he "would as soon fight the British as the Germans". Proposals to send observers to Europe were blocked, leaving the Navy in the dark about the success of the German submarine campaign. Admiral William Sims charged after the war that in April 1917, only ten percent of the Navy's warships were fully manned; the rest lacked 43% of their seamen. Light antisubmarine ships were few in number, as if Daniels had been unaware of the German submarine menace that had been the focus of foreign policy for two years. The Navy's only warfighting plan, the "Black Plan" assumed the Royal Navy did not exist and that German battleships were moving freely about the Atlantic and the Caribbean and threatening the Panama Canal. Daniels' tenure would have been even less successful save for the energetic efforts of Assistant Secretary [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]], who effectively ran the Department.<ref name="Paolo Coletta 1980"/> His most recent biographer concludes that, "it is true that Daniels had not prepared the navy for the war it would have to fight."<ref>{{cite book|author=Lee A. Craig|title=Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=qfVEGsArAGUC&pg=PA364|year=2013|publisher=U. North Carolina Press|pages=364–65}}</ref> |
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==Decision for war== |
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[[File:Hurting their feelings cph.3b32242.jpg|thumb|"Hurting Their Feelings": Political cartoon from November 9, 1915, shows the British lion and [[John Bull]] reading a newspaper about American war protests and crying, while American ships and cargo appear in the harbor behind them]] |
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By 1916 a new factor was emerging—a sense of national self-interest and American nationalism. The unbelievable casualty figures in Europe were sobering—two vast battles caused over one million casualties each. Clearly this war would be a decisive episode in the history of the world. Every American effort to find a peaceful solution was frustrated. |
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===Decision making=== |
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Kendrick Clements claims bureaucratic decision-making was one of the main sources pushing the United States to declaring war with the Germans and aligning with the Allies. He cites the State Department's demand that Germany's submarines obey outdated, 18th century sailing laws as one of the first missteps by the United States bureaucracy regarding the war. By doing so, the United States had essential given Germany the choice of whether or not the U.S. would enter the war. [[William Jennings Bryan|Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan]] spent most of the fall of 1914 out of contact with the State Department, leaving the more conservative [[Robert Lansing]] with the ability to shape American foreign policy at the time. One of these decisions was made in response to the British protesting that the Germans were using U.S. radio towers to send messages to their warships. Germany argued that usage of the towers was necessary to allow efficient contact between the U.S. and Germany, due to the British cutting the [[Transatlantic telegraph cable|transatlantic cables]]. Lansing responded by requiring both sides to give the U.S. Navy copies of the messages they sent over the towers. The French and British were still able to use the cables, forcing Germany to be the only belligerent required to provide the U.S. with their messages. This and other seemingly small decisions made by Lansing during this time would eventually stack up, shifting American support towards the Allies.<ref>Kendrick A. Clements, "Woodrow Wilson and World War I." ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'' (2004) 34#1 pp: 62-82.</ref> |
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===Zimmermann Telegram=== |
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{{main|Zimmermann Telegram}} |
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Once Germany had decided on [[unrestricted submarine warfare]] in January 1917, and knew it would be attacking all American ships in the North Atlantic, it tried to line up new allies, especially Mexico. [[Arthur Zimmermann]], the German foreign minister, sent the [[Zimmermann Telegram]] to Mexico on January 16, 1917. He invited the smaller, much weaker country with bad relations with the U.S. to join in a war against the United States. Germany promised to pay for Mexico's costs and to help it recover the [[Mexican Cession|Northwestern territories]] it had lost to the U.S. in 1848. British intelligence intercepted and decoded the telegram and gave it to Wilson. He gave it to the press on February 28. The telegram was hypothetical and probably not decisive in shifting public opinion. However anger grew as the Germans began sinking American ships, even as isolationists in the Senate launched a filibuster to block legislation for arming American merchant ships to defend themselves.<ref>Cooper, ''Woodrow Wilson'' (2011) p 378-79</ref><ref>Thomas Boghardt, ''The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America's Entry into World War I'' (2012) [http://www.amazon.com/Zimmermann-Telegram-Intelligence-Diplomacy-Americas/dp/1612511481/ Excerpt and text search], summarized in Thomas Boghardt's ''The Zimmermann Telegram: Diplomacy, Intelligence and The American Entry into World War I'' (2003) [http://web.archive.org/web/20060902235946/http://cges.georgetown.edu/docs/Docs_Working_Papers_Page/Working_Paper_Boghardt_6-04.pdf online]</ref> |
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===Sinking American merchant ships=== |
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In early 1917 Berlin forced the issue. The decision to try to sink every ship on the high seas was the immediate cause of American entry into the war. Five American merchant ships went down in March. Outraged public opinion now overwhelmingly supported Wilson when he asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917.<ref>Justus D. Doenecke, ''Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America's Entry into World War I'' (2011) ch 10</ref> |
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==Public opinion, moralism, and national interest== |
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Historians such as [[Ernest May (historian)|Ernest R. May]] have approached the process of American entry into the war as a study in how public opinion changed radically in three years' time. In 1914 most Americans called for neutrality, seeing the war a dreadful mistake and were determined to stay out. By 1917 the same public felt just as strongly that going to war was both necessary and wise. Military leaders had little to say during this debate, and military considerations were seldom raised. The decisive questions dealt with morality and visions of the future. The prevailing attitude was that America possessed a superior moral position as the only great nation devoted to the principles of freedom and democracy. By staying aloof from the squabbles of reactionary empires, it could preserve those ideals—sooner or later the rest of the world would come to appreciate and adopt them. In 1917 this very long-run program faced the severe danger that in the short run powerful forces adverse to democracy and freedom would triumph. Strong support for moralism came from religious leaders, women (led by [[Jane Addams]]), and from public figures like long-time Democratic leader [[William Jennings Bryan]], the Secretary of State from 1913 to 1916. The most important moralist of all was President Woodrow Wilson—the man who dominated decision making so totally that the war has been labelled "Wilson's War".<ref name="Ernest R. May 1966">{{cite book |first=Ernest R. |last=May |title=The World War and American isolation, 1914–1917 |year=1966 }}</ref> |
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In 1917 Wilson won the support of most of the moralists by proclaiming "a war to make the world safe for democracy." If they truly believed in their ideals, he explained, now was the time to fight. The question then became whether Americans would fight for what they deeply believed in, and the answer turned out to be a resounding "Yes".<ref>{{cite book |first=Thomas J. |last=Knock |title=To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order |year=1995 }}</ref> |
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Antiwar activists at the time and in the 1930s, alleged that beneath the veneer of moralism and idealism there must have been ulterior motives. Some suggested a conspiracy on the part of New York City bankers holding $3 billion of war loans to the Allies, or steel and chemical firms selling munitions to the Allies.<ref>{{cite journal |first=Harold C. |last=Syrett |title=The Business Press and American Neutrality, 1914–1917 |journal=Mississippi Valley Historical Review |year=1945 |volume=32 |issue=2 |pages=215–230 |jstor=1898209 |doi=10.2307/1898209 }}</ref> Despite lack of any evidence for this theory, the interpretation was popular among left-wing Progressives (led by Senator [[Robert M. La Follette, Sr.|Robert LaFollette]] of Wisconsin) and among the "agrarian" wing of the Democratic party—including the chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee of the House. He strenuously opposed war, but when it came he rewrote the tax laws to make sure the rich paid the most. (In the 1930s [[Neutrality Acts of 1930s|neutrality laws]] were passed to prevent financial entanglements from dragging the nation into a war.) In 1915, Bryan thought that Wilson's pro-British sentiments had distorted his policies, so he became the first Secretary of State ever to resign in protest.<ref>Robert W. Cherny, ''A righteous cause: the life of William Jennings Bryan'' (1994) p 144</ref> |
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The problem with these explanations is that business supported neutrality.<ref>Syrett, "The Business Press and American Neutrality, 1914–1917,"</ref> The pro-war element was animated not by profit but by disgust with what Germany actually did, especially in Belgium, and the threat it represented to American ideals. Antiwar spokesmen did not claim that Germany was innocent, and pro-German scripts were poorly received.<ref>{{cite journal |first=Felice A. |last=Bonadio |title=The Failure of German Propaganda in the United States, 1914–1917 |journal=Mid America |year=1959 |volume=41 |issue=1 |pages=40–57 |jstor= }}</ref> Belgium kept the public's sympathy as the Germans executed civilians,<ref>The German army executed over 6,500 French and Belgian civilians between August and November 1914, usually in near-random large-scale shootings of civilians ordered by junior German officers. {{cite book |first=John |last=Horne |first2=Alan |last2=Kramer |title=German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial |location=New Haven |publisher=Yale U.P. |year=2001 |isbn=0-300-08975-9 }}</ref> and English nurse [[Edith Cavell]]. American engineer [[Herbert Hoover]] led a private relief effort that won wide support. Compounding [[Rape of Belgium|the Belgium atrocities]] were new weapons that Americans found repugnant, like [[chemical weapons in World War I|poison gas]] and the aerial bombardment of innocent civilians as [[German strategic bombing during World War I|Zeppelins dropped bombs on London]].<ref name="Ernest R. May 1966"/> |
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[[Randolph Bourne]] criticized the moralist philosophy claiming it was a justification by American intellectual and power elites, like President Wilson, for going to war unnecessarily. He argues that the push for war started with the Preparedness movement, fueled by big business. While big business would not push much further than Preparedness, benefitting the most from neutrality, the movement would eventually evolve into a war-cry, led by war-hawk intellectuals under the guise of moralism. Bourne believes elites knew full well what going to war would entail and the price in American lives it would cost. If American elites could portray the United States' role in the war as noble, they could convince the generally isolationist American public war would be acceptable.<ref>Bourne, Randolph. "The War and the Intellectuals." N.p.: n.p., n.d. 133-46. Print.</ref> |
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Above all, American attitudes towards Germany focused on the U-boats (submarines), which sank the ''[[RMS Lusitania|Lusitania]]'' in 1915 and other passenger ships "without warning".<ref>[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F7081FFC385C13738DDDA10894DD405B858DF1D3 DISASTER BEARS OUT EMBASSY'S WARNING; German Advertisement Practically Foretold Lusitania's Fate on Day She Sailed. AND IS REPEATED TODAY Passengers Also Said to Have Received Telegrams -- Shipping Men Heard of Threats.]</ref><ref>[http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/Lusitaniapapers.html Germany, U-Boats and the Lusitania]</ref><ref>[http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/lusitania.htm The Lusitania]</ref> That appeared to Americans as an unacceptable challenge to America's rights as a neutral country, and as an unforgivable affront to humanity. After repeated diplomatic protests, Germany agreed to stop. But in 1917 the Germany military leadership decided that "military necessity" dictated the unrestricted use of their submarines. The Kaiser's advisors felt America was enormously powerful economically but too weak militarily to make a difference. |
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==Declaration of war== |
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===Germany=== |
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<!-- [[April 6, 1917]] redirects here --> |
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On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked a special [[joint session of Congress]] to declare war on the [[German Empire]], stating, "We have no selfish ends to serve".<ref> for detailed coverage of the speech see [http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0402.html#article NY Times main headline, April 2, 1917, ''President Calls for War Declaration, Stronger Navy, New Army of 500,000 Men, Full Cooperation With Germany's Foes'']</ref> To make the conflict seem like a better idea, he painted the conflict idealistically, stating that the war would "make the world safe for democracy" and later that it would be a "war to end war". The United States had a moral responsibility to enter the war, Wilson proclaimed, to make the world safe for democracy. The future of the world was being determined on the battlefield, and American national interest demanded a voice. Wilson's definition of the situation won wide acclaim, and, indeed, has shaped America's role in world and military affairs ever since. Wilson believed that if the Central Powers won, the consequences would be bad for the United States. Germany would have dominated the continent and perhaps would gain control of the seas as well. Latin America could well have fallen under Berlin's control. The dream of spreading democracy, liberalism, and independence would have been shattered. On the other hand, if the Allies had won without help, there was a danger they would carve up the world without regard to American commercial interests. They were already planning to use government subsidies, tariff walls, and controlled markets to counter the competition posed by American businessmen. The solution was a third route, a "peace without victory", according to Wilson.<ref>John Milton Cooper, Jr., ''Woodrow Wilson: A Biography'' (2011) pp 383-89</ref> |
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On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war. In the Senate, the resolution passed 82 to 6, with Senators [[Harry Lane]], [[William J. Stone]], [[James Vardaman]], [[Asle Gronna]], [[Robert M. La Follette, Sr.]], and [[George W. Norris]] voting against it. In the House, the declaration passed 373 to 50, with [[Claude Kitchin]], a senior Democrat, notably opposing it. Another opponent was [[Jeannette Rankin]], who alone voted against entry into both World War I and [[World War II]]. Nearly all of the opposition came from the West and the Midwest.<ref>{{cite book|author=Simon Newton Dexter North|title=The American Year Book: A Record of Events and Progress|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=2Y4cAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA10|year=1918|publisher=Thomas Nelson & Sons|pages=10–11|author2=and others|displayauthors=1}}</ref> |
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===Austria-Hungary=== |
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The [[United States Senate]], in a 74 to 0 vote, declared war on [[Austria-Hungary]] on December 7, 1917, citing Austria-Hungary's severing of diplomatic relations with the United States, its use of unrestricted submarine warfare and [[Triple Alliance (1882)|its alliance]] with Germany.<ref name="AHS1">[https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/image/HJRes169_WWI_Austria-Hungary.htm H.J.Res.169: Declaration of War with Austria-Hungary, WWI], United States Senate</ref> The declaration passed in the [[United States House of Representatives]] by a vote of 365 to 1.<ref name="ElseaWeed"/> |
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==See also== |
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{{Portal|World War I}} |
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*[[Causes of World War I]] |
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*[[United States in World War I]] |
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*[[United States declaration of war on Germany (1917)]] |
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*[[United States home front during World War I]] |
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*[[United States campaigns in World War I]] |
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==Footnotes== |
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{{reflist|30em}} |
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==Bibliography== |
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[[File:WWIHunNatlArchives.jpg|thumb|right|After war was declared war bond posters demonized Germany]] |
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{{refbegin}} |
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* Ambrosius, Lloyd E. "Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush: Historical Comparisons of Ends and Means in Their Foreign Policies," ''Diplomatic History'', 30 (June 2006), 509–43. |
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* Arnett, Alex Mathews. ''Claude Kitchin and the Wilson War Policies.'' 1937. {{OCLC|1278853}}Kitchen was an antiwar Democrat in the House |
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* Bassett, John Spencer. ''Our War with Germany: A History'' (1919) [http://books.google.com/books?id=76UTAAAAIAAJ&printsec=toc&dq=intitle:war+date:1919-1921&num=30&as_brr=1&sig=4Vx3GGygya6F24ozaNJyLzMI694#PPP10,M1 online edition] |
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* *Brands, H.W. ''Theodore Roosevelt'' (2001){{OCLC|50431515}}, full biography [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98669157 online edition] |
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* Clements, Kendrick A. "Woodrow Wilson and World War I," ''Presidential Studies Quarterly'' 34:1 (2004). pp 62+. [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5006516101 online edition] |
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* Clifford, J. Garry. ''Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburgh Training Camp Movement, 1913–1920'' (1972) |
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* Costrell, Edwin. ''How Maine viewed the war, 1914–1917,'' (1940){{OCLC|475605726}} |
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* Crighton, John C. ''Missouri and the World War, 1914–1917: a study in public opinion'' (University of Missouri, 1947) {{OCLC|831309569}} |
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* Coffman, Edward M. ''The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I'' (1998) ISBN 0-8131-0955-8 {{OCLC|38842092}} |
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* Cummins, Cedric Clisten. ''Indiana public opinion and the World War, 1914–1917,'' (1945) |
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* Davis, Allen F. ''American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams.'' (Oxford University Press, 1973) ISBN 0-19-501694-7 {{OCLC|714527}} |
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* Doenecke, Justus D. ''Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America's Entry into World War I'' (2011) 433 pages; comprehensive history [http://www.questia.com/library/120079509/nothing-less-than-war-a-new-history-of-america-s online] |
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* Early, Frances H. ''A World without War: How U.S. Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I.'' (Syracuse University Press, 1997) ISBN 0-8156-2764-5 {{OCLC|36800616}} |
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* Esposito, David M. ''The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: American War Aims in World War I. '' (Praeger, 1996) 159pp [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=14266596# online edition] ISBN 0-275-95493-5 {{OCLC|33244422}} |
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* Finnegan, John P. ''Against the Specter of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917.'' (1975). ISBN 0-8371-7376-0 {{OCLC|983933}} |
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* Floyd, M. Ryan (2013). ''Abandoning American Neutrality: Woodrow Wilson and the Beginning of the Great War, August 1914-December 1915.'' New York: Palgrave Macmillan. |
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* Gibbs, Christopher C. ''The Great Silent Majority: Missouri's Resistance to World War I'' (1988) ISBN 0-8262-0683-2 {{OCLC|17676727}} |
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* Grubbs, Frank L. ''The Struggle for Labor Loyalty: Gompers, the A. F. of L., and the Pacifists, 1917–1920.'' (1968).{{OCLC|640024383}} |
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* Herman, Sondra. ''Eleven Against War: Studies in American Internationalist Thought, 1898–1921.'' 1969.{{OCLC|23333}} |
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* Higham, Robin and Dennis E. Showalter, eds. ''Researching World War I: A Handbook'' (2003) ISBN 0-313-28850-X {{OCLC|51922814}}, 475pp; highly detailed historiography, [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=107066504 online edition] |
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* Hodgson, Godfrey. ''Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House.'' 2006. ISBN 0-300-09269-5 {{OCLC|61864854}} 335pp |
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* Kazal, Russell A. ''Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity.'' 2004. 390 pp. |
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* Kennedy, David M. ''Over Here: The First World War and American Society'' (1982), covers politics & economics & society [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=106147343 online edition] |
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* Kennedy, Ross A. "Preparedness," in Ross A. Kennedy ed., ''A Companion to Woodrow Wilson'' (2013) pp: 270-86 |
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* Koistinen, Paul. ''Mobilizing for Modern War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865–1919'' (1997) |
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* Knock, Thomas J. ''To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order'' (1995) |
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* Link, Arthur S. ''Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917'' (1972) standard political history of the era |
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* Link, Arthur S. ''Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality: 1914–1915'' (1960); ''Wilson: Confusions and Crises: 1915–1916'' (1964); ''Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace: 1916–1917'' (1965), the last volume of standard biography [http://www.historyebook.org/ all 3 volumes are online at ACLS e-books] |
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* Link, Arthur S. ''Wilson the Diplomatist: A Look at His Major Foreign Policies'' (1957) [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9422144 online edition] |
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* Link, Arthur S. ''Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, 1913–1921'' (1982) [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=104472422 online edition] |
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* Link, Arthur S. ''Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace'' (1979) [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=111418063 online edition] |
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* Livermore, Seward W. ''Politics Is Adjourned: Woodrow Wilson and the War Congress, 1916–1918.'' 1966. |
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* Luebke, Frederick C. ''Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I.'' 1974. |
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* McCallum, Jack. ''Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism'' (2005) |
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* McDonald, Forrest. ''Insull: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Utility Tycoon'' (2004) |
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* May, Ernest R. ''The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917'' (1959) [http://www.historyebook.org/ online at ACLS e-books], highly influential study |
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* Nash, George H. ''Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914–1917'' (Life of Herbert Hoover, Vol. 2) (1988) |
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* O'Toole, Patricia. ''When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House.'' (2005). 494 pp. |
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* Perkins, Bradford. ''The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914'' (1968) |
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* Peterson, H. C. ''Propaganda for War: The Campaign Against American Neutrality, 1914–1917.'' 1968. |
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* Rothwell, V. H. ''British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914–1918.'' (1971). |
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* Safford, Jeffrey J. ''Wilsonian Maritime Diplomacy, 1913–1921.'' (1978). |
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* Smith, Daniel. ''The Great Departure: The United States and World War I, 1914–1920'' (1965) |
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* Sterba, Christopher M. ''Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War.'' 2003. 288 pp. [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=103564691 online edition] |
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* Tucker, Robert W. ''Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914–1917,'' (2007). 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8139-2629-2 |
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* Unger, Nancy C. ''Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer'' (2000) |
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* Venzon, Anne ed. ''The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia'' (1995) |
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* Ward, Robert D. "The Origin and Activities of the National Security League, 1914–1919." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1960): 51–65. [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0161-391X(196006)47%3A1%3C51%3ATOAAOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q online at JSTOR] |
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* Witcover, Jules. ''Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America'' (1989) |
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===Historiography=== |
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* Doenecke, Justus D. "Neutrality Policy and the Decision for War." in Ross Kennedy ed., ''A Companion to Woodrow Wilson'' (2013) pp: 243-69 [http://books.google.com/books?id=TytaiSLySTsC&pg=PT285 Online]; covers the historiography |
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{{refend}} |
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==Primary sources== |
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* [http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/pw.html ''The Papers of Woodrow Wilson''] edited by [[Arthur S. Link]] complete in 69 vol, at major academic libraries. Annotated edition of all of WW's letters, speeches and writings plus many letters written to him |
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* [http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/whwar10h.htm Wilson, Woodrow. ''Why We Are at War'' (1917)] six war messages to Congress, Jan- April 1917 |
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==External links== |
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* [http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0402.html#article NY Times main headline, April 2, 1917, ''President Calls for War Declaration, Stronger Navy, New Army of 500,000 Men, Full Cooperation With Germany's Foes''] |
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* [http://www.millercenter.virginia.edu/index.php/academic/americanpresident/wilson Extensive essay on Woodrow Wilson and shorter essays on each member of his cabinet and First Lady from the Miller Center of Public Affairs] |
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* [http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_Wilson%27s_War_Address President Wilson's War Address] |
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* [http://maps.omniatlas.com/europe/19170406/ Map of Europe] at the time of the US declaration of war on Germany at omniatlas.com |
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{{Woodrow Wilson}} |
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{{DEFAULTSORT:American Entry Into World War I}} |
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[[Category:United States in World War I]] |
Revision as of 22:03, 7 May 2015
The United States' entry into World War I came in April 1917, after two and a half years of efforts by President Woodrow Wilson to keep the United States neutral during World War I. Americans had no idea that war was imminent in Europe in the summer of 1914, and tens of thousands of tourists were caught by surprise. The U.S. government, under Wilson's firm control, called for neutrality "in thought and deed".[1] Apart from an Anglophile element supporting the British, American public opinion went along with neutrality at first. The sentiment for neutrality was strong among Irish Americans, German Americans and Swedish Americans,[2] as well as among church leaders and women. However, the citizenry increasingly came to see the German Empire as the villain after news of atrocities in Belgium in 1914, and the sinking of the passenger liner RMS Lusitania in 1915 in defiance of international law. Wilson made all the key decisions and kept the economy on a peacetime basis, while allowing large-scale loans to Britain and France. To preclude making any military threat Wilson made only minimal preparations for war and kept the army on its small peacetime basis despite increasing demands for preparedness. However, he did enlarge the US Navy.
At the beginning of 1917 Germany decided to resume all-out submarine warfare on every commercial ship headed toward Britain, realizing that this decision would almost certainly mean war with the United States. Germany also offered a military alliance to Mexico in the Zimmermann Telegram. Publication of that offer outraged Americans just as German U-boats (submarines) started sinking American ships in the North Atlantic. Wilson asked Congress for "a war to end all wars" that would "make the world safe for democracy", and Congress voted to declare war on Germany on April 6, 1917.[3] On December 7, 1917, the US declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[4][5]
Submarines and blockades
A critical indirect strategy used by both sides was the blockade. The British Royal Navy successfully stopped the shipment of most war supplies and food to Germany. Neutral American ships that tried to trade with Germany were seized or turned back. The strangulation came about very slowly, because Germany and the Central Powers (its allies) controlled extensive farmlands and raw materials. However, it was eventually successful because Germany and Austria-Hungary had taken so many farmers into their armies. By 1918, German cities were on the verge of starvation; the front-lineŕpp soldiers were on short rations and were running out of essential supplies.[6]
Germany also considered a blockade. "England wants to starve us", said Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the man who built the German fleet and who remained a key advisor to the Kaiser Wilhelm II. "We can play the same game. We can bottle her up and destroy every ship that endeavors to break the blockade".[7] Unable to challenge the more powerful Royal Navy on the surface, Tirpitz wanted to scare off merchant and passenger ships en route to Britain. He reasoned that since the island of being the depended on imports of food, raw materials, and manufactured goods, scaring off a substantial number of the ships would effectively undercut its long-term ability to maintain an army on the Western Front. While Germany had only nine long-range U-boats at the start of the war, it had ample shipyard capacity to build the hundreds needed. However, the United States demanded that Germany respect the international agreements upon "freedom of the seas", which protected neutral American ships on the high seas from seizure or sinking by either belligerent. Furthermore, Americans insisted that the drowning of innocent civilians was barbaric and grounds for a declaration of war. The British frequently violated America's neutral rights by seizing ships.[8] Wilson's top advisor, Colonel Edward M. House commented that, "The British have gone as far as they possibly could in violating neutral rights, though they have done it in the most courteous way".[9] When Wilson protested British violations of American neutrality, the British backed down.
German submarines, however, torpedoed ships without warning, and some sailors and passengers drowned. Berlin explained that submarines were so vulnerable that they dared not surface near merchant ships that might be carrying guns and which were too small to rescue submarine crews. Britain armed most of its merchant ships with medium calibre guns that could sink a submarine, making above-water attacks too risky. In February 1915, the United States warned Germany about misuse of submarines. On April 22, the German Imperial Embassy warned US-Citizens from boarding vessels to Great Britain which would have to face German attack. On May 7, Germany torpedoed the British passenger liner RMS Lusitania, sinking her. This act of aggression caused the loss of 1,198 civilian lives, including 128 Americans. The sinking of a large, unarmed passenger ship, combined with the previous atrocity stories from Belgium, shocked Americans and turned public opinion hostile to Germany, although not yet to the point of war. Wilson issued a warning to Germany that it would face "strict accountability" if it sank more neutral U.S. passenger ships.[10] Berlin acquiesced, ordering its submarines to avoid passenger ships.
By January 1917, however, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff decided that an unrestricted submarine blockade was the only way to break the stalemate on the Western Front. They demanded that Kaiser Wilhelm order unrestricted submarine warfare be resumed. Germany knew this decision meant war with the United States, but they gambled that they could win before America's potential strength could be mobilized.[11] However, they overestimated how many ships they could sink and thus the extent Britain would be weakened. Finally, they did not foresee that convoys could and would be used to defeat their efforts. They believed that the United States was so weak militarily that it could not be a factor on the Western Front for more than a year – a mistake that would ultimately prove to be fatal to their war. The civilian government in Berlin objected, but the Kaiser sided with his military.[12]
Elites
National intellectual elites split into three distinct groups.
First, there were the anti-war people ("pacifists" loosely defined), who wanted to keep America out at all costs, and rejected as equally immoral the British and German Empires. The leaders included Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan (a three-time Democratic nominee for president), Republican Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr., social worker and humanitarian Jane Addams (a Progressive), and industrialist Henry Ford (a Democrat).
Secondly, the "liberal internationalists" reluctantly supported armed force to create a collective security system. They included President Woodrow Wilson and former president William Howard Taft.
Finally, the "Atlanticists" sought a security relationship with Britain; they were led by former President Theodore Roosevelt, Major General Leonard Wood, and Republican Senators Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge.[13][14]
Business considerations
The beginning of war in Europe coincided with the end of the Recession of 1913–1914 in America. Exports to belligerent nations rose rapidly over the first four years of the War from $824.8 million in 1913 to $2.25 billion in 1917.[15] Loans from American financial institutions to the Allied nations in Europe also increased dramatically over the same period.[16] Economic activity towards the end of this period boomed as government resources aided the production of the private sector. Between 1914 and 1917, industrial production increased 32% and GNP increased by almost 20%.[17] The improvements to industrial production in the United States outlasted the war. The capital build-up that had allowed American companies to supply belligerents and the American army resulted in a greater long-run rate of production even after the war had ended in 1918.[18]
In 1913, J. P. Morgan, Jr. took over the House of Morgan, an American-based investment bank consisting of separate banking operations in New York, London, and Paris, after the death of his father, J. Pierpont Morgan.[16] The House of Morgan offered assistance in the wartime financing of Britain and France from the earliest stages of the war in 1914 through America's entrance in 1917. J.P. Morgan & Co., the House of Morgan's bank in New York, was designated as the primary financial agent to the British government in 1914.[16] The same bank would later take a similar role in France and would offer extensive financial assistance to both warring nations. J.P. Morgan &Co. became the primary issuer of loans to the French government by raising money from American investors.[16] Morgan, Harjes, the House of Morgan's French affiliated bank, controlled the majority of the wartime financial dealings between the House of Morgan and the French government after primary issuances of debt in American markets.[16] Relations between the House of Morgan and the French government became tense as the war raged on with no end in sight.[16] France's ability to borrow from other sources diminished, leading to greater lending rates and a depressing of the value of the Franc. After the war, in 1918, J.P. Morgan & Co. continued to aid the French government financially through monetary stabilization and debt relief.[16]
Because America was still a declared neutral state, the financial dealings of American banks in Europe caused a great deal of contention between Wall Street and the U.S. government. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan strictly opposed financial support of warring nations and wanted to ban loans to the belligerents in August 1914.[16] He told President Wilson that "refusal to loan to any belligerent would naturally tend to hasten a conclusion of the war." Wilson at first agreed, but then reversed himself when France argued that if it was legal to buy American goods then it was legal to take out credits on the purchase.[19]
J.P. Morgan issued loans to France including one in March 1915 and another in October 1915, the latter amounting to US$500,000,000.[16] Although the stance of the U.S. government was that ending such aid could hasten the end of the war and save millions of lives, little was done to insure adherence to the ban on loans.[16]
The American steel industry had faced difficulties and declining profits during the Recession of 1913–1914.[14] As war began in Europe, however, the increased demand for tools of war began a period of heightened productivity that alleviated many U.S. industrial companies from the low-growth environment of the recession. Bethlehem Steel took particular advantage of the increased demand for armaments abroad. Prior to American entrance into the War, these companies benefitted from unrestricted commerce with sovereign customers abroad. After President Wilson issued his declaration of war, the companies were subjected to price controls created by the U.S. Trade Commission in order to insure that the U.S. military would have access to the necessary armaments.[14]
By the end of the war in 1918, Bethlehem Steel had produced 65,000 pounds of forged military products and 70 million pounds of armor plate, 1.1 billion pounds of steel for shells, and 20.1 million rounds of artillery ammunition for Britain and France.[20] Bethlehem Steel took advantage of the domestic armaments market and produced 60% of the American weaponry and 40% of the artillery shells used in the War.[20] Even with price controls and a lower profit margin on manufactured goods, the profits resulting from wartime sales expanded the company into the third largest manufacturing company in the country. Bethlehem Steel became the primary arms supplier for the United States and other allied powers again in 1939.[20]
Public opinion
A cosmopolitan group of upper and upper-middle class businessmen based in the largest cities took the lead in promoting military preparedness and in defining how far America could be pushed around before it would fight back. Many public figures hated war—Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was the most prominent, and he resigned when he thought Wilson had become too bellicose.[21] Grassroots opposition to American entry came especially from German and Irish elements.
Parties
A surprising factor in the development of American public opinion was how little the political parties became involved. Wilson and the Democrats in 1916 campaigned on the slogan "He kept us out of war!", saying a Republican victory would mean war with both Mexico and Germany. His position probably was critical in winning the Western states.[22] Charles Evans Hughes, the GOP candidate, insisted on downplaying the war issue.[23]
The Socialist party talked peace. Socialist rhetoric declared the European conflict to be "an imperialist war".[24] It won 2% of the 1916 vote for Eugene V. Debs, blamed the war on capitalism and pledged total opposition. "A bayonet", its propaganda said, "was a weapon with a worker at each end". When war began, however, about half the Socialists, typified by Congressman Meyer London, supported the decision and sided with the pro-Allied efforts. The rest, led by Debs, remained ideological and die-hard opponents.[25] Many socialists came under investigation from the Espionage Act of 1917 and many suspected of treason were arrested, including Debs. This would only increase the Socialist's anti-war groups in size and bolster resentment toward the American bureaucracy.[26]
Workers, farmers, and African Americans
The working class was relatively quiet, and tended to divide along ethnic lines. At the beginning of the war, neither working men nor farmers took a large interest in the efforts for defense or war preparation.[27]Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, denounced the war in 1914 as "unnatural, unjustified, and unholy", but by 1916 he was supporting Wilson's limited preparedness program, against the objections of Socialist union activists. In 1916 the labor unions supported Wilson on domestic issues and ignored the war question.[28]
The war at first disrupted the cotton market; Britain blockaded shipments to Germany, and prices fell from 11 cents a pound to only 4 cents. By 1916, however, the British decided to bolster the price to 10 cents to avoid losing Southern support. The cotton growers seem to have moved from neutrality to intervention at about the same pace as the rest of the nation.[29][30] Midwestern farmers generally opposed the war, especially those of German and Scandinavian descent. The Midwest became the stronghold of isolationism; other remote rural areas also saw no need for war.[31][32][33]
The African-American community, which lived mostly in the pro-war South, did not take a strong position one way or the other. A month after congress declared war, W. E. B. Du Bois called on African-Americans to "fight shoulder to shoulder with the world to gain a world where war shall be no more".[34] Once war began and black men were drafted, they worked to achieve equality.[35] Many had hoped the community's help in the war efforts abroad would earn civil rights at home. When such civil liberties were still not granted, many African-Americans grew tired of waiting for recognition of their rights as American citizens.[36]
Religious
Many different religious denominations[who?] loudly denounced the war at first: it was God's punishment for sin. Their moralism was aggressively focused on banishing evils (like saloons) from the face of the earth through Prohibition, and if they could be shown that German militarism was a similar evil, they would throw enormous weight. Wilson, the intensely religious son of a prominent theologian, knew exactly how to harness that moralism in his attacks on the "Huns" who threatened civilization, and his calls for an almost religious crusade on behalf of peace.[37]
South
There was a strong antiwar element in the white South and border states. In rural Missouri for example, distrust of powerful Eastern influences focused on the risk that Wall Street would lead America into war.[38] Across the South poor white farmers warned each other that "a rich man's war meant a poor man's fight," and they wanted nothing of it.[39] Congressman James Hay, Democrat of Virginia was the powerful chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs. He repeatedly blocked prewar efforts to modernize and enlarge the army. Preparednesss was not needed because Americans were already safe, he insisted in January 1915:
- Isolated as we are, safe in our vastness, protected by a great navy, and possessed of an army sufficient for any emergency that may arise, we may disregard the lamentations and predictions of the militarists.[40]
German Americans
German Americans by this time usually had only weak ties to Germany; however, they were fearful of negative treatment they might receive if the United States entered the war (such mistreatment was already happening to German-descent citizens in Canada and Australia). Almost none called for intervening on Germany's side, instead calling for neutrality and speaking of the superiority of German culture. As more nations were drawn into the conflict, however, the English-languages press increasingly supporting Britain, while the German-American media called for neutrality while also defending Germany's position. Chicago's Germans worked to secure a complete embargo on all arms shipments to Europe. In 1916 large crowds in Chicago's Germania celebrated the Kaiser's birthday, something they had not done before the war.[41] German Americans in early 1917 still called for neutrality but proclaimed that if a war came they would be loyal to the United States. By this point they had been excluded almost entirely from national discourse on the subject.[42] Once war started they were harassed in so many ways that historian Carl Wittke noted in 1936, it was "one of the most difficult and humiliating experiences suffered by an ethnic group in American history."[43] German-American Socialists in Milwaukee, Wisconsin actively campaigned against entry into the war.[44]
Churches and women
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/Come_on_in_America.jpg/220px-Come_on_in_America.jpg)
Leaders of most religious groups (except the Episcopalians) tended to pacifism, as did leaders of the woman's movement. A concerted effort was made by anti-war leaders, including Jane Addams, Oswald Garrison Villard, David Starr Jordan, Henry Ford, Lillian Wald, and Carrie Chapman Catt. Their goal was to convince Wilson to mediate an end of the war by bringing the belligerents to the conference table. Wilson indeed made an energetic, sustained and serious effort to do so, and kept his administration neutral, but he was repeatedly rebuffed by Britain and Germany.[45] Finally in 1917 Wilson convinced some of them that to be truly anti-war they needed to support what Wilson promised would be "a war to end all wars".[46]
Once war was declared, the more liberal denominations, which had endorsed the Social Gospel, called for a war for righteousness that would help uplift all mankind. The theme—an aspect of American exceptionalism—was that God had chosen America as his tool to bring redemption to the world.[47]
American Catholic bishops maintained a general silence toward the issue of intervention. Millions of Catholics lived in both warring camps, and Catholic Americans tended to split on ethnic lines in their opinions toward American involvement in the war. At the time, heavily Catholic towns and cities in the East and Midwest often contained multiple parishes, each serving a single ethnic group, such as Irish, German, Italian, Polish, or English. American Catholics of Irish and German descent opposed intervention most strongly. Pope Benedict XV made several attempts to negotiate a peace. All of his efforts were rebuffed by both the Allies and the Germans, and throughout the war the Vatican maintained a policy of strict neutrality.
Jewish American sympathies likewise broke along ethnic lines, though at the turn of the century, Germany and Austria were considered among the most tolerant of continental European countries, while the tsarist regime in Russia was notorious for its anti-Semitic policies. As historian Joseph Rappaport claimed through his study of Yiddish press during the war, "The pro-Germanism of America's immigrant Jews was an inevitable consequence of their Russophobia".[48] The Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government promised to help establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, as well as the fall of the tsarist regime in 1917 and Wilson's promise of self-determination, helped swing Jewish-Americans into the pro-Allied camp.
Irish-Americans
The most effective domestic opponents of the war were Irish-American Catholics. They had little interest in the continent, but were adamant against helping the United Kingdom because it refused to allow independence for Ireland. John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) declared that Irish Volunteers should support America's pro-Allied war efforts first, earning the party severe backlash from the Irish American community. The attacks insisted it was not the time to support Britain in its attempt to "strengthen and expand her empire".[49] The attacks on the IPP and pro-Allied press showed a firm belief that a German victory would hasten the achievement of Irish independence. Yet rather than proposing intervention on behalf of the Germans, Irish American leaders and organizations focused on demanding American neutrality. But the increased contact between militant Irish nationalists and German agents in the United States only fueled concerns of where the primary loyalties of Irish Americans lay.[50] Nevertheless, close to 1,000 Irish-Americans died fighting with the U.S. armed forces in WWI. [51]
The Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916 was crushed within a week and its leaders executed by firing squad. The mainstream American press treated the uprising as foolish and misguided, and theorized it was largely inspired by the Germans. Overall public opinion remained faithfully pro-British.[52]
Irish-Americans dominated the Democratic party in many large cities so Wilson had to take account of their views. They did not prevent him from being hostile to Germany, but they did force him to keep his distance from Britain. Indeed, Irish-American pressure influenced the United States into not accepting Britain's war aims as its own and define its own objectives, primarily self-determination. The Irish-American community thought they had Wilson's promise to promote Irish independence in exchange for their support of his war policies, but after the war they were bitterly disappointed by his refusal to support them in 1919.[53] Wilson saw the Irish situation purely as an internal UK matter and did not perceive the dispute and the unrest in Ireland as comparable to the plight of the various nationalities in Europe as a fall-out from World War I.[54]
Pro-Allied immigrants
Some British immigrants worked actively for intervention. London-born Samuel Insull, Chicago's leading industrialist, for example, enthusiastically provided money, propaganda, and means for volunteers to enter the British or Canadian armies. After the United States' entry, Insull directed the Illinois State Council of Defense, with responsibility for organizing the state's mobilization.[55]
Immigrants from eastern Europe usually cared more about politics in their homeland than politics in the U.S. Spokesmen for Slavic immigrants hoped that an Allied victory would bring independence for their homelands.[56] Large numbers of Hungarian immigrants who were liberal and nationalist in sentiment, and sought an independent Hungary, separate from the Austro-Hungarian Empire lobbied in favor of the war and allied themselves with the Atlanticist or Anglophile portion of the population. This community was largely pro-British and anti-German in sentiment.[57][58][59] Albanian-Americans in communities such as Boston also campaigned for entry into the war and were overwhelmingly pro-British and anti-German, as well as hopeful the war would lead to an independent Albania which would be free from the Ottoman Empire.[60] Polish, Slovak, and Czech immigrants were enthusiastically pro-war and generally pro-British. These communities hoped for liberation from Austro-Hungarian rule in their homelands. Similarly, Greek, Armenian, Syrian, and Lebanese immigrants dreamed of liberation from the Ottoman Empire with an Allied victory.
Ford's pacifism
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Henry Ford hurt the pacifist cause by sponsoring a private peace mission that accomplished nothing. The German agent in charge of propaganda left his briefcase on the train, where an alert Secret Service agent snatched it up. Wilson let the newspapers publish the contents, which indicated a systematic effort by Berlin to subsidize friendly newspapers and block British purchases of war materials. Berlin's top espionage agent, debonnaire Franz Rintelen von Kleist was spending millions to finance sabotage in Canada, stir up trouble between the United States and Mexico and to incite labor strikes. The British were engaged in propaganda too, though not illegal espionage. But they did not get caught.[61] Germany took the blame as Americans grew ever more worried about the vulnerability of a free society to subversion. Indeed, one of the main fears Americans of all stations had in 1916–1919 was that spies and saboteurs were everywhere. This sentiment played a major role in arousing fear of Germany, and suspicions regarding everyone of German descent who could not "prove" 100% loyalty.[62]
Preparedness movement
By 1915, Americans were paying much more attention to the war. The sinking of the Lusitania had a strong effect on public opinion because of the deaths of American civilians. That year, a strong "Preparedness" movement emerged.[63] Proponents argued that the United States needed to immediately build up strong naval and land forces for defensive purposes; an unspoken assumption was that America would fight sooner or later. General Leonard Wood (still on active duty after serving a term as Chief of Staff of the Army), former president Theodore Roosevelt, and former secretaries of war Elihu Root and Henry Stimson were the driving forces behind Preparedness, along with many of the nation's most prominent bankers, industrialists, lawyers and scions of prominent families. Indeed there emerged an "Atlanticist" foreign policy establishment, a group of influential Americans drawn primarily from upper-class lawyers, bankers, academics, and politicians of the Northeast, committed to a strand of Anglophile internationalism. Representative was Paul D. Cravath, one of New York's foremost corporation lawyers. For Cravath, in his mid-fifties when the war began, the conflict served as an epiphany, sparking an interest in international affairs that dominated his remaining career. Fiercely Anglophile, he strongly supported American intervention in the war and hoped that close Anglo-American cooperation would be the guiding principle of postwar international organization.[64]
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The Preparedness movement had a "realistic" philosophy of world affairs—they believed that economic strength and military muscle were more decisive than idealistic crusades focused on causes like democracy and national self-determination. Emphasizing over and over the weak state of national defenses, they showed that America's 100,000-man Army even augmented by the 112,000 National Guardsmen, was outnumbered 20 to one by Germany's army, which was drawn from a smaller population. Reform to them meant UMT or "universal military training". They proposed a national service program under which the 600,000 men who turned 18 every year would be required to spend six months in military training, and afterwards be assigned to reserve units. The small regular army would primarily be a training agency.
Antimilitarists complained the plan would make America resemble Germany (which required two years' active duty). Advocates retorted that military "service" was an essential duty of citizenship, and that without the commonality provided by such service the nation would splinter into antagonistic ethnic groups. One spokesman promised that UMT would become "a real melting pot, under which the fire is hot enough to fuse the elements into one common mass of Americanism". Furthermore, they promised, the discipline and training would make for a better paid work force. Hostility to military service was strong at the time, and the program failed to win approval. In World War II, when Stimson as Secretary of War proposed a similar program of universal peacetime service, he was defeated.[65]
Underscoring its commitment, the Preparedness movement set up and funded its own summer training camps at Plattsburgh, New York, and other sites, where 40,000 college alumni became physically fit, learned to march and shoot, and ultimately provided the cadre of a wartime officer corps.[66] Suggestions by labor unions that talented working-class youth be invited to Plattsburgh were ignored. The Preparedness movement was distant not only from the working classes but also from the middle-class leadership of most of small-town America. It had had little use for the National Guard, which it saw as politicized, localistic, poorly armed, ill trained, too inclined to idealistic crusading (as against Spain in 1898), and too lacking in understanding of world affairs. The National Guard on the other hand was securely rooted in state and local politics, with representation from a very broad cross section of American society. The Guard was one of the nation's few institutions that (in some northern states) accepted blacks on an equal footing.
The Democratic party saw the Preparedness movement as a threat. Roosevelt, Root and Wood were prospective Republican presidential candidates. More subtly, the Democrats were rooted in localism that appreciated the National Guard, and the voters were hostile to the rich and powerful in the first place. Working with the Democrats who controlled Congress, Wilson was able to sidetrack the Preparedness forces. Army and Navy leaders were forced to testify before Congress to the effect that the nation's military was in excellent shape.
In fact neither the Army nor Navy was in shape for war. The Navy had fine ships but Wilson had been using them to threaten Mexico, and the fleet's readiness had suffered. The crews of the Texas and the New York, the two newest and largest battleships, had never fired a gun, and the morale of the sailors was low. The Army and Navy air forces were tiny in size. Despite the flood of new weapons systems unveiled in the war in Europe, the Army was paying scant attention. For example, it was making no studies of trench warfare, poison gas or tanks, and was unfamiliar with the rapid evolution of air tactics. The Democrats in Congress tried to cut the military budget in 1915. The Preparedness movement effectively exploited the surge of outrage over the Lusitania in May 1915, forcing the Democrats to promise some improvements to the military and naval forces. Wilson, less fearful of the Navy. embraced a long-term building program designed to make the fleet the equal of the Royal Navy by the mid-1920s. "Realism" was at work here; the admirals were Mahanians and they therefore wanted a surface fleet of heavy battleships second to none—that is, equal to Britain. The facts of submarine warfare (which necessitated destroyers, not battleships) and the possibilities of imminent war with Germany (or with Britain, for that matter), were simply ignored.
Wilson's program for the army touched off a firestorm.[67] Secretary of War Lindley Garrison adopted many of the proposals of the Preparedness leaders, especially their emphasis on a large federal reserves and abandonment of the National Guard. Garrison's proposals not only outraged the localistic politicians of both parties, they also offended a strongly held belief shared by the liberal wing of the Progressive movement. They felt that warfare always had a hidden economic motivation. Specifically, they warned the chief warmongers were New York bankers (like J. P. Morgan) with millions at risk, profiteering munition makers (like Bethlehem Steel, which made armor, and DuPont, which made powder) and unspecified industrialists searching for global markets to control. Antiwar critics blasted them. These special interests were too powerful, especially, Senator LaFollette noted, in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. The only road to peace was disarmament, reiterated Bryan.
Garrison's plan unleashed the fiercest battle in peacetime history over the relationship of military planning to national goals. In peacetime, War Department arsenals and Navy yards manufactured nearly all munitions that lacked civilian uses, including warships, artillery, naval guns, and shells. Items available on the civilian market, such as food, horses, saddles, wagons, and uniforms were always purchased from civilian contractors. Armor plate (and after 1918, airplanes) were exceptions that have caused unremitting controversy for a century. After World War II, the arsenals and Navy yards were much less important than giant civilian aircraft and electronic firms, which became the second half of the "military-industrial complex" Peace leaders like Jane Addams of Hull House and David Starr Jordan of Stanford redoubled their efforts, and now turned their voices against the President because he was "sowing the seeds of militarism, raising up a military and naval caste". Many ministers, professors, farm spokesmen and labor union leaders joined in, with powerful support from a band of four dozen southern Democrats in Congress who took control of the House Military Affairs Committee. Wilson, in deep trouble, took his cause to the people in a major speaking tour in early 1916, a warmup for his reelection campaign that fall. Wilson seems to have won over the middle classes, but had little impact on the largely ethnic working classes and the deeply isolationist farmers. Congress still refused to budge, so Wilson replaced Garrison as Secretary of War with Newton Baker, the Democratic mayor of Cleveland and an outspoken opponent of preparedness. (Garrison's kept quiet, but felt Wilson was "a man of high ideals but no principles".) The upshot was a compromise passed in May 1916, as the war raged on and Berlin was debating whether America was so weak it could be ignored. The Army was to double in size to 11,300 officers and 208,000 men, with no reserves, and a National Guard that would be enlarged in five years to 440,000 men. Summer camps on the Plattsburg model were authorized for new officers, and the government was given $20 million to build a nitrate plant of its own. Preparedness supporters were downcast, the antiwar people were jubilant. America would now be too weak to go to war. Colonel Robert L. Bullard privately complained that "Both sides [Britain and Germany] treat us with scorn and contempt; our fool, smug conceit of superiority has been exploded in our faces and deservedly." The House gutted the naval plans as well, defeating a "big navy" plan by 189 to 183, and scuttling the battleships. The battle of Jutland (May 31/June 1, 1916) was used by the navalists to argue for the primacy of seapower; they then took control in the Senate, broke the House coalition, and authorized a rapid three-year buildup of all classes of warships. A new weapons system, naval aviation, received $3.5 million, and the government was authorized to build its own armor-plate factory. The very weakness of American military power encouraged Berlin to start its unrestricted submarine attacks in 1917. It knew this meant war with America, but it could discount the immediate risk because the U.S. Army was negligible and the new warships would not be at sea until 1919 by which time the war would be over, with Germany victorious. The notion that armaments led to war was turned on its head: refusal to arm in 1916 led to war in 1917.
Size of military
Americans felt an increasing need for a military that could command respect; as one editor put it, "The best thing about a large army and a strong navy is that they make it so much easier to say just what we want to say in our diplomatic correspondence." Berlin thus far had backed down and apologized when Washington was angry, thus boosting American self-confidence. America's rights and America's honor increasingly came into focus. The slogan "Peace" gave way to "Peace with Honor". The Army remained unpopular, however. A recruiter in Indianapolis noted that, "The people here do not take the right attitude towards army life as a career, and if a man joins from here he often tries to go out on the quiet". The Preparedness movement used its easy access to the mass media to demonstrate that the War Department had no plans, no equipment, little training, no reserves, a laughable National Guard, and a wholly inadequate organization for war. Motion pictures like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Battle Cry of Peace (1915) depicted invasions of the American homeland that demanded action.[68]
Navy
The readiness and capability of the U.S. Navy was a matter of controversy. The press at the time reported that the only thing the military was ready for was an enemy fleet attempting to seize New York harbor—at a time when the German battle fleet was penned up by the Royal Navy. The Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels was a journalist with pacifist leanings.[69] He had built up the educational resources of the Navy and made its Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island an essential experience for would-be admirals. However, he alienated the officer corps with his moralistic reforms, including no wine in the officers' mess, no hazing at the Naval Academy, and more chaplains and YMCAs. Daniels, as a newspaperman, knew the value of publicity. In 1915 he set up the Naval Consulting Board headed by Thomas Edison to obtain the advice and expertise of leading scientists, engineers, and industrialists. It popularized technology, naval expansion, and military preparedness, and was well covered in the media.[70] But according to Coletta he ignored the nation's strategic needs, and disdaining the advice of its experts, Daniels suspended meetings of the Joint Army and Navy Board for two years because it was giving unwelcome advice, chopped in half the General Board's recommendations for new ships, reduced the authority of officers in the Navy yards where ships were built and repaired, and ignored the administrative chaos in his department. Bradley Fiske, one of the most innovative admirals in American naval history, in 1914 was Daniels' top aide; he recommended a reorganization that would prepare for war, but Daniels refused. Instead he replaced Fiske in 1915 and brought in for the new post of Chief of Naval Operations an unknown captain, William Benson. Chosen for his compliance, Benson proved a wily bureaucrat who was more interested in preparing for an eventual showdown with Britain than an immediate one with Germany. Benson told Sims he "would as soon fight the British as the Germans". Proposals to send observers to Europe were blocked, leaving the Navy in the dark about the success of the German submarine campaign. Admiral William Sims charged after the war that in April 1917, only ten percent of the Navy's warships were fully manned; the rest lacked 43% of their seamen. Light antisubmarine ships were few in number, as if Daniels had been unaware of the German submarine menace that had been the focus of foreign policy for two years. The Navy's only warfighting plan, the "Black Plan" assumed the Royal Navy did not exist and that German battleships were moving freely about the Atlantic and the Caribbean and threatening the Panama Canal. Daniels' tenure would have been even less successful save for the energetic efforts of Assistant Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt, who effectively ran the Department.[69] His most recent biographer concludes that, "it is true that Daniels had not prepared the navy for the war it would have to fight."[71]
Decision for war
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By 1916 a new factor was emerging—a sense of national self-interest and American nationalism. The unbelievable casualty figures in Europe were sobering—two vast battles caused over one million casualties each. Clearly this war would be a decisive episode in the history of the world. Every American effort to find a peaceful solution was frustrated.
Decision making
Kendrick Clements claims bureaucratic decision-making was one of the main sources pushing the United States to declaring war with the Germans and aligning with the Allies. He cites the State Department's demand that Germany's submarines obey outdated, 18th century sailing laws as one of the first missteps by the United States bureaucracy regarding the war. By doing so, the United States had essential given Germany the choice of whether or not the U.S. would enter the war. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan spent most of the fall of 1914 out of contact with the State Department, leaving the more conservative Robert Lansing with the ability to shape American foreign policy at the time. One of these decisions was made in response to the British protesting that the Germans were using U.S. radio towers to send messages to their warships. Germany argued that usage of the towers was necessary to allow efficient contact between the U.S. and Germany, due to the British cutting the transatlantic cables. Lansing responded by requiring both sides to give the U.S. Navy copies of the messages they sent over the towers. The French and British were still able to use the cables, forcing Germany to be the only belligerent required to provide the U.S. with their messages. This and other seemingly small decisions made by Lansing during this time would eventually stack up, shifting American support towards the Allies.[72]
Zimmermann Telegram
Once Germany had decided on unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917, and knew it would be attacking all American ships in the North Atlantic, it tried to line up new allies, especially Mexico. Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, sent the Zimmermann Telegram to Mexico on January 16, 1917. He invited the smaller, much weaker country with bad relations with the U.S. to join in a war against the United States. Germany promised to pay for Mexico's costs and to help it recover the Northwestern territories it had lost to the U.S. in 1848. British intelligence intercepted and decoded the telegram and gave it to Wilson. He gave it to the press on February 28. The telegram was hypothetical and probably not decisive in shifting public opinion. However anger grew as the Germans began sinking American ships, even as isolationists in the Senate launched a filibuster to block legislation for arming American merchant ships to defend themselves.[73][74]
Sinking American merchant ships
In early 1917 Berlin forced the issue. The decision to try to sink every ship on the high seas was the immediate cause of American entry into the war. Five American merchant ships went down in March. Outraged public opinion now overwhelmingly supported Wilson when he asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917.[75]
Public opinion, moralism, and national interest
Historians such as Ernest R. May have approached the process of American entry into the war as a study in how public opinion changed radically in three years' time. In 1914 most Americans called for neutrality, seeing the war a dreadful mistake and were determined to stay out. By 1917 the same public felt just as strongly that going to war was both necessary and wise. Military leaders had little to say during this debate, and military considerations were seldom raised. The decisive questions dealt with morality and visions of the future. The prevailing attitude was that America possessed a superior moral position as the only great nation devoted to the principles of freedom and democracy. By staying aloof from the squabbles of reactionary empires, it could preserve those ideals—sooner or later the rest of the world would come to appreciate and adopt them. In 1917 this very long-run program faced the severe danger that in the short run powerful forces adverse to democracy and freedom would triumph. Strong support for moralism came from religious leaders, women (led by Jane Addams), and from public figures like long-time Democratic leader William Jennings Bryan, the Secretary of State from 1913 to 1916. The most important moralist of all was President Woodrow Wilson—the man who dominated decision making so totally that the war has been labelled "Wilson's War".[76]
In 1917 Wilson won the support of most of the moralists by proclaiming "a war to make the world safe for democracy." If they truly believed in their ideals, he explained, now was the time to fight. The question then became whether Americans would fight for what they deeply believed in, and the answer turned out to be a resounding "Yes".[77]
Antiwar activists at the time and in the 1930s, alleged that beneath the veneer of moralism and idealism there must have been ulterior motives. Some suggested a conspiracy on the part of New York City bankers holding $3 billion of war loans to the Allies, or steel and chemical firms selling munitions to the Allies.[78] Despite lack of any evidence for this theory, the interpretation was popular among left-wing Progressives (led by Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin) and among the "agrarian" wing of the Democratic party—including the chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee of the House. He strenuously opposed war, but when it came he rewrote the tax laws to make sure the rich paid the most. (In the 1930s neutrality laws were passed to prevent financial entanglements from dragging the nation into a war.) In 1915, Bryan thought that Wilson's pro-British sentiments had distorted his policies, so he became the first Secretary of State ever to resign in protest.[79]
The problem with these explanations is that business supported neutrality.[80] The pro-war element was animated not by profit but by disgust with what Germany actually did, especially in Belgium, and the threat it represented to American ideals. Antiwar spokesmen did not claim that Germany was innocent, and pro-German scripts were poorly received.[81] Belgium kept the public's sympathy as the Germans executed civilians,[82] and English nurse Edith Cavell. American engineer Herbert Hoover led a private relief effort that won wide support. Compounding the Belgium atrocities were new weapons that Americans found repugnant, like poison gas and the aerial bombardment of innocent civilians as Zeppelins dropped bombs on London.[76]
Randolph Bourne criticized the moralist philosophy claiming it was a justification by American intellectual and power elites, like President Wilson, for going to war unnecessarily. He argues that the push for war started with the Preparedness movement, fueled by big business. While big business would not push much further than Preparedness, benefitting the most from neutrality, the movement would eventually evolve into a war-cry, led by war-hawk intellectuals under the guise of moralism. Bourne believes elites knew full well what going to war would entail and the price in American lives it would cost. If American elites could portray the United States' role in the war as noble, they could convince the generally isolationist American public war would be acceptable.[83]
Above all, American attitudes towards Germany focused on the U-boats (submarines), which sank the Lusitania in 1915 and other passenger ships "without warning".[84][85][86] That appeared to Americans as an unacceptable challenge to America's rights as a neutral country, and as an unforgivable affront to humanity. After repeated diplomatic protests, Germany agreed to stop. But in 1917 the Germany military leadership decided that "military necessity" dictated the unrestricted use of their submarines. The Kaiser's advisors felt America was enormously powerful economically but too weak militarily to make a difference.
Declaration of war
Germany
On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked a special joint session of Congress to declare war on the German Empire, stating, "We have no selfish ends to serve".[87] To make the conflict seem like a better idea, he painted the conflict idealistically, stating that the war would "make the world safe for democracy" and later that it would be a "war to end war". The United States had a moral responsibility to enter the war, Wilson proclaimed, to make the world safe for democracy. The future of the world was being determined on the battlefield, and American national interest demanded a voice. Wilson's definition of the situation won wide acclaim, and, indeed, has shaped America's role in world and military affairs ever since. Wilson believed that if the Central Powers won, the consequences would be bad for the United States. Germany would have dominated the continent and perhaps would gain control of the seas as well. Latin America could well have fallen under Berlin's control. The dream of spreading democracy, liberalism, and independence would have been shattered. On the other hand, if the Allies had won without help, there was a danger they would carve up the world without regard to American commercial interests. They were already planning to use government subsidies, tariff walls, and controlled markets to counter the competition posed by American businessmen. The solution was a third route, a "peace without victory", according to Wilson.[88]
On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war. In the Senate, the resolution passed 82 to 6, with Senators Harry Lane, William J. Stone, James Vardaman, Asle Gronna, Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and George W. Norris voting against it. In the House, the declaration passed 373 to 50, with Claude Kitchin, a senior Democrat, notably opposing it. Another opponent was Jeannette Rankin, who alone voted against entry into both World War I and World War II. Nearly all of the opposition came from the West and the Midwest.[89]
Austria-Hungary
The United States Senate, in a 74 to 0 vote, declared war on Austria-Hungary on December 7, 1917, citing Austria-Hungary's severing of diplomatic relations with the United States, its use of unrestricted submarine warfare and its alliance with Germany.[4] The declaration passed in the United States House of Representatives by a vote of 365 to 1.[5]
See also
- Causes of World War I
- United States in World War I
- United States declaration of war on Germany (1917)
- United States home front during World War I
- United States campaigns in World War I
Footnotes
- ^ Attributed afterwards. See: "Ten Years After". Lawrence Journal World. July 28, 1924. Retrieved July 24, 2012. Original quote, "be neutral in fact as well as in name ... be impartial in thought as well as in action". See: "The American People and the Great War". The Independent. August 31, 1914. Retrieved July 24, 2012. and Message to Senate
- ^ Jeanette Keith (2004). Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War. U. of North Carolina Press. pp. 1–5. ISBN 978-0-8078-7589-6.
- ^ Link, Arthur S. (1972). Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917. New York: Harper & Row. pp. 252–282.
- ^ a b H.J.Res.169: Declaration of War with Austria-Hungary, WWI, United States Senate
- ^ a b Jennifer K. Elsea; Matthew C. Weed (April 18, 2014). "Declarations of War and Authorizations for the Use of Military Force: Historical Background and Legal Implications" (PDF). p. 9. Retrieved July 21, 2014.
- ^ Eric W. Osborne, Britain's economic blockade of Germany, 1914–1919 (2004)
- ^ Ernest May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 (1959) p. 115 quote from Dec 1914.
- ^ C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, A history of the Great War, 1914–1918 (2007) p. 191
- ^ Edward House, The intimate papers of Colonel House: Vol 2 (1928) p. 73
- ^ Duffy, Michael (August 22, 2009). "U.S. 'Strict Accountability' Warning to Germany, 10 February 1915". Retrieved January 30, 2011Template:Inconsistent citations
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: postscript (link) - ^ Spencer Tucker, The Great War, 1914–18 (1997) p. 133
- ^ Ernest May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 (1959) p. 414
- ^ Ross A. Kennedy, The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America's Strategy for Peace and Security (Kent State University Press, 2009)
- ^ a b c Cuff, Robert D.; Urofsky, Melvin I. (Autumn 1970). "The Steel Industry and Price-Fixing during World War I". The Business History review. 3. 44 (3): 291–306. doi:10.2307/3112615.
- ^ Krakow, Ira. "World War I - The Most Unpopular War In Our History". Retrieved March 20, 2013.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Horn, Martin (Spring 2000). "A Private Bank at War: J.P. Morgan &Co. and France, 1914–1918". Business History Review. 1. 74: 85–112. doi:10.2307/3116353.
- ^ Global Financial Data. "Industrial Output 1909–1930". Retrieved March 20, 2013.
- ^ Kendrick, John W. (1961). "Productivity Trends in the United States". National Bureau of Economic Research: 1–50.
- ^ H. W. Brands (2003). Woodrow Wilson: The American Presidents Series: The 28th President, 1913-1921. Henry Holt. pp. 55–56.
- ^ a b c Metz, Lance E. (November 2006). "The Rise and Fall of An Industrial Giant". Pennsylvania Legacies. 6 (2): 10–15.
- ^ Charles Chatfield, For peace and justice: pacifism in America, 1914–1941 (1973) ch 1
- ^ John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson (2009) pp 341–2, 352, 360
- ^ Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes (1951) vol 1 p 356
- ^ Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States" (2005) p.361
- ^ Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It didn't happen here: why socialism failed in the United States (2001) p 184
- ^ Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States(2005) p.365
- ^ Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States"(2005) p.364
- ^ Joseph A. McCartin, Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (1998) pp 34, 57
- ^ McCorkle, James L., Jr. (1981). "Mississippi from Neutrality to War (1914–1917)". Journal of Mississippi History. 43 (2): 85–125.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (1954) pp 169–72
- ^ Christopher C. Gibbs, The great silent majority: Missouri's resistance to World War I (1988)
- ^ John C. Crighton, Missouri and the World War, 1914–1917: a study in public opinion (1947)
- ^ Edwin Costrell, How Maine viewed the war, 1914–1917 (1940)
- ^ Panikos Panayi, "Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America, and Australia During the Two World War"(1992) p.170
- ^ Mark Ellis, "America's Black Press, 1914–18," History Today, Sept 1991, Vol. 41, Issue 9
- ^ Panikos Panayi, "Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America, and Australia During the Two World Wars" (1992) p.171
- ^ Samuel S. Hill, Charles H. Lippy, and Charles Reagan Wilson, Encyclopedia of religion in the South (2005) p. 297
- ^ Christopher C. Gibbs, Great Silent Majority: Missouri's Resistance to World War I (1988)
- ^ Jeanette Keith (2004). Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South During the First World War. U. of North Carolina Press. p. 85.
- ^ George C. Herring, "James Hay and the Preparedness Controversy, 1915-1916." Journal of Southern History (1964) 30#4 pp. 383-404 quote p 386 in JSTOR
- ^ Leslie V. Tischauser, The Burden of Ethnicity: The German Question in Chicago, 1914-1941 (Garland, 1990) pp 21-23
- ^ Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (1974) pp 200-207
- ^ Carl Wittke, German-Americans and the World War (with Special Emphasis on Ohio's German-Language Press) (Columbus, Ohio, 1936), p. 209
- ^ http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/tp-037/?action=more_essay
- ^ Patterson, David S. (1971). "Woodrow Wilson and the Mediation Movement 1914–1917". The Historian. 33 (4): 535–556. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.1971.tb01164.x.
- ^ Piper, John F., Jr. (1970). "The American Churches in World War I". Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 38 (2): 147–155. doi:10.1093/jaarel/XXXVIII.2.147. JSTOR 1461171.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Gamble, Richard M. (2003). The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. Wilmington: ISI Books. ISBN 1-932236-16-3.
- ^ Joseph Rappaport, Jewish Immigrants and World War I: A Study of Yiddish Attitudes(1951), p. 78
- ^ Malcolm Campbell, Ireland's New Worlds, (2008), p. 164
- ^ Malcolm Campbell, Ireland's New Worlds, (2008), p. 174
- ^ Smolenyak, Megan. "How Many Irish-Born Died in Service to the U.S. in WWI?". Irish America. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
- ^ Malcolm Campbell, Ireland's New Worlds, (2008), p. 170
- ^ Leary, William M., Jr. (1967). "Woodrow Wilson, Irish Americans, and the Election of 1916". Journal of American History. 54 (1): 57–72. doi:10.2307/1900319. JSTOR 1900319.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Kennedy, Billy. "Woodrow Wilson". Ulstervirginia.com. http://www.ulstervirginia.com/woodrowwilson.asp. Retrieved November 10, 2011.
- ^ McDonald, Forrest (2004). Insull: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Utility Tycoon. Washington: Beard Books. pp. 162–187. ISBN 1-58798-243-9.
- ^ O'Grady, Joseph (1967). The Immigrants' Influence on Wilson's Peace Policies. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
- ^ The Hungarian-Americans by Steven Béla Várdy; Twayne Publishers, 1985 page 87–99
- ^ Christopher M. Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants During the First World War,(2003) p. 31–32
- ^ Michael T. Urbanski, "Money, War, and Recruiting an Army: The Activities of Connecticut Polonia During World War I," Connecticut History (2007) 46#1 pp 45-69.
- ^ The Albanian-American Odyssey: A Pilot Study of the Albanian Community of Boston, Massachusetts Front Cover Dennis L. Nagi AMS Press, Jan 1, 1989, page 33-35
- ^ H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for war: The campaign against American neutrality, 1914-1917 (1968)
- ^ Link 3:556ff
- ^ George C. Herring, "James Hay and the Preparedness Controversy, 1915-1916." Journal of Southern History (1964) 30#4 pp. 383-404 in JSTOR
- ^ Roberts, Priscilla (2005). "Paul D. Cravath, the First World War, and the Anglophile Internationalist Tradition". Australian Journal of Politics and History. 51 (2): 194–215. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2005.00370.x.
- ^ Chambers 93; Weigley Army 345
- ^ Very few young men from wealthy or prominent families considered a career in the Army or Navy then or at any time in American history. The highest social background of cadets, exemplified by George Patton, West Point 1909, and Lucius Clay, 1918, was oldest son of a locally prominent family.
- ^ Link, Woodrow Wilson pp 179ff
- ^ Herring, "James Hay and the Preparedness Controversy, 1915-1916," p 383
- ^ a b Paolo Coletta, American Secretaries of the Navy (1980) 2:526-41
- ^ Theodore A. Thelander, "Josephus Daniels and the Publicity Campaign for Naval and Industrial Preparedness before World War I," North Carolina Historical Review (1966) 43#3 pp 316-332
- ^ Lee A. Craig (2013). Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times. U. North Carolina Press. pp. 364–65.
- ^ Kendrick A. Clements, "Woodrow Wilson and World War I." Presidential Studies Quarterly (2004) 34#1 pp: 62-82.
- ^ Cooper, Woodrow Wilson (2011) p 378-79
- ^ Thomas Boghardt, The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America's Entry into World War I (2012) Excerpt and text search, summarized in Thomas Boghardt's The Zimmermann Telegram: Diplomacy, Intelligence and The American Entry into World War I (2003) online
- ^ Justus D. Doenecke, Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America's Entry into World War I (2011) ch 10
- ^ a b May, Ernest R. (1966). The World War and American isolation, 1914–1917.
- ^ Knock, Thomas J. (1995). To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order.
- ^ Syrett, Harold C. (1945). "The Business Press and American Neutrality, 1914–1917". Mississippi Valley Historical Review. 32 (2): 215–230. doi:10.2307/1898209. JSTOR 1898209.
- ^ Robert W. Cherny, A righteous cause: the life of William Jennings Bryan (1994) p 144
- ^ Syrett, "The Business Press and American Neutrality, 1914–1917,"
- ^ Bonadio, Felice A. (1959). "The Failure of German Propaganda in the United States, 1914–1917". Mid America. 41 (1): 40–57.
- ^ The German army executed over 6,500 French and Belgian civilians between August and November 1914, usually in near-random large-scale shootings of civilians ordered by junior German officers. Horne, John; Kramer, Alan (2001). German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial. New Haven: Yale U.P. ISBN 0-300-08975-9.
- ^ Bourne, Randolph. "The War and the Intellectuals." N.p.: n.p., n.d. 133-46. Print.
- ^ DISASTER BEARS OUT EMBASSY'S WARNING; German Advertisement Practically Foretold Lusitania's Fate on Day She Sailed. AND IS REPEATED TODAY Passengers Also Said to Have Received Telegrams -- Shipping Men Heard of Threats.
- ^ Germany, U-Boats and the Lusitania
- ^ The Lusitania
- ^ for detailed coverage of the speech see NY Times main headline, April 2, 1917, President Calls for War Declaration, Stronger Navy, New Army of 500,000 Men, Full Cooperation With Germany's Foes
- ^ John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (2011) pp 383-89
- ^ Simon Newton Dexter North; et al. (1918). The American Year Book: A Record of Events and Progress. Thomas Nelson & Sons. pp. 10–11.
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Bibliography
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/WWIHunNatlArchives.jpg)
- Ambrosius, Lloyd E. "Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush: Historical Comparisons of Ends and Means in Their Foreign Policies," Diplomatic History, 30 (June 2006), 509–43.
- Arnett, Alex Mathews. Claude Kitchin and the Wilson War Policies. 1937. OCLC 1278853Kitchen was an antiwar Democrat in the House
- Bassett, John Spencer. Our War with Germany: A History (1919) online edition
- *Brands, H.W. Theodore Roosevelt (2001)OCLC 50431515, full biography online edition
- Clements, Kendrick A. "Woodrow Wilson and World War I," Presidential Studies Quarterly 34:1 (2004). pp 62+. online edition
- Clifford, J. Garry. Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburgh Training Camp Movement, 1913–1920 (1972)
- Costrell, Edwin. How Maine viewed the war, 1914–1917, (1940)OCLC 475605726
- Crighton, John C. Missouri and the World War, 1914–1917: a study in public opinion (University of Missouri, 1947) OCLC 831309569
- Coffman, Edward M. The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (1998) ISBN 0-8131-0955-8 OCLC 38842092
- Cummins, Cedric Clisten. Indiana public opinion and the World War, 1914–1917, (1945)
- Davis, Allen F. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. (Oxford University Press, 1973) ISBN 0-19-501694-7 OCLC 714527
- Doenecke, Justus D. Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America's Entry into World War I (2011) 433 pages; comprehensive history online
- Early, Frances H. A World without War: How U.S. Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I. (Syracuse University Press, 1997) ISBN 0-8156-2764-5 OCLC 36800616
- Esposito, David M. The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: American War Aims in World War I. (Praeger, 1996) 159pp online edition ISBN 0-275-95493-5 OCLC 33244422
- Finnegan, John P. Against the Specter of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917. (1975). ISBN 0-8371-7376-0 OCLC 983933
- Floyd, M. Ryan (2013). Abandoning American Neutrality: Woodrow Wilson and the Beginning of the Great War, August 1914-December 1915. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Gibbs, Christopher C. The Great Silent Majority: Missouri's Resistance to World War I (1988) ISBN 0-8262-0683-2 OCLC 17676727
- Grubbs, Frank L. The Struggle for Labor Loyalty: Gompers, the A. F. of L., and the Pacifists, 1917–1920. (1968).OCLC 640024383
- Herman, Sondra. Eleven Against War: Studies in American Internationalist Thought, 1898–1921. 1969.OCLC 23333
- Higham, Robin and Dennis E. Showalter, eds. Researching World War I: A Handbook (2003) ISBN 0-313-28850-X OCLC 51922814, 475pp; highly detailed historiography, online edition
- Hodgson, Godfrey. Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House. 2006. ISBN 0-300-09269-5 OCLC 61864854 335pp
- Kazal, Russell A. Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. 2004. 390 pp.
- Kennedy, David M. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1982), covers politics & economics & society online edition
- Kennedy, Ross A. "Preparedness," in Ross A. Kennedy ed., A Companion to Woodrow Wilson (2013) pp: 270-86
- Koistinen, Paul. Mobilizing for Modern War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865–1919 (1997)
- Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (1995)
- Link, Arthur S. Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (1972) standard political history of the era
- Link, Arthur S. Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality: 1914–1915 (1960); Wilson: Confusions and Crises: 1915–1916 (1964); Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace: 1916–1917 (1965), the last volume of standard biography all 3 volumes are online at ACLS e-books
- Link, Arthur S. Wilson the Diplomatist: A Look at His Major Foreign Policies (1957) online edition
- Link, Arthur S. Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, 1913–1921 (1982) online edition
- Link, Arthur S. Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace (1979) online edition
- Livermore, Seward W. Politics Is Adjourned: Woodrow Wilson and the War Congress, 1916–1918. 1966.
- Luebke, Frederick C. Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I. 1974.
- McCallum, Jack. Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism (2005)
- McDonald, Forrest. Insull: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Utility Tycoon (2004)
- May, Ernest R. The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 (1959) online at ACLS e-books, highly influential study
- Nash, George H. Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914–1917 (Life of Herbert Hoover, Vol. 2) (1988)
- O'Toole, Patricia. When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House. (2005). 494 pp.
- Perkins, Bradford. The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914 (1968)
- Peterson, H. C. Propaganda for War: The Campaign Against American Neutrality, 1914–1917. 1968.
- Rothwell, V. H. British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914–1918. (1971).
- Safford, Jeffrey J. Wilsonian Maritime Diplomacy, 1913–1921. (1978).
- Smith, Daniel. The Great Departure: The United States and World War I, 1914–1920 (1965)
- Sterba, Christopher M. Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War. 2003. 288 pp. online edition
- Tucker, Robert W. Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914–1917, (2007). 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8139-2629-2
- Unger, Nancy C. Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (2000)
- Venzon, Anne ed. The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia (1995)
- Ward, Robert D. "The Origin and Activities of the National Security League, 1914–1919." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1960): 51–65. online at JSTOR
- Witcover, Jules. Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America (1989)
Historiography
- Doenecke, Justus D. "Neutrality Policy and the Decision for War." in Ross Kennedy ed., A Companion to Woodrow Wilson (2013) pp: 243-69 Online; covers the historiography
Primary sources
- The Papers of Woodrow Wilson edited by Arthur S. Link complete in 69 vol, at major academic libraries. Annotated edition of all of WW's letters, speeches and writings plus many letters written to him
- Wilson, Woodrow. Why We Are at War (1917) six war messages to Congress, Jan- April 1917
External links
- NY Times main headline, April 2, 1917, President Calls for War Declaration, Stronger Navy, New Army of 500,000 Men, Full Cooperation With Germany's Foes
- Extensive essay on Woodrow Wilson and shorter essays on each member of his cabinet and First Lady from the Miller Center of Public Affairs
- President Wilson's War Address
- Map of Europe at the time of the US declaration of war on Germany at omniatlas.com