It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments . . . To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.
—from President Woodrow Wilson’s April 2, 1917 address to Congress, proposing entry into WWI
In Woodrow Wilson, biographer John Milton Cooper Jr. describes the president’s call to arms as not only his greatest speech but, in its combination of idealism and solemnity, “the greatest presidential speech since Lincoln’s second inaugural address.” After “an uproar of cheers and rebel yells, and the waving of little flags,” followed by landslide votes in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, America entered WWI a hundred years ago this week — on April 6, 1917.
Wilson had been reelected the previous year on a neutrality platform; among those factors that caused his turnaround on WWI, says G. J. Meyer in The World Remade, was his fear that if the U.S. played no role in the war it would have no role in the postwar settlement, jeopardizing the president’s hopes for establishing the League of Nations. Another, connected factor was vanity:
If the United States not only went to war but became the nation that broke the stalemate, that made victory possible, Wilson might well find himself at the head of the table. It was not an ideal solution, but from his perspective it was infinitely preferable to being excluded. It would impose on him the responsibility — in no way unwelcome — to stop the Allies from imposing a kind of peace that could never be more than unstable and short-lived. This was a quintessentially Wilsonian aspiration, at once noble and egotistical. It accorded perfectly with his sense of his own great destiny.
The nation also had a quick change of heart, says Michael S. Neiberg in The Path to War, and in no time the refrain of non-interventionism, prevalent since the days of Washington and Jefferson, was drowned out by George M. Cohan’s “Over There” — the song written just a day after war was declared, and quickly more of a hit than “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” had been just two years earlier. Neiberg’s examination of this turnaround is an attempt “to fill in the gap in America’s collective amnesia” about the war, and to weigh the public’s appetite for the era of international responsibility and entanglement “whose impact we are still feeling”:
Contrary to what many have written or assumed, Americans were neither the unwilling dupes of propaganda, the blind followers of a messianic president, or naïve puppets of a millionaire class. Rather, I argue, they chose to fight, even if they did so because they thought they had run out of viable alternatives . . . Their country would emerge from the war and the peace it produced a far different place.
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Sig Nordal 