- The American Revolution and the early federal republic
- The transformation of American society, 1865–1900
- Imperialism, the Progressive era, and the rise to world power, 1896–1920
The United States enters the Great War
Wilson’s most passionate desire, aside from avoiding belligerency, was to bring an end to the war through his personal mediation. He sent Colonel House to Europe in early 1915 to explore the possibilities of peace and again early in 1916 to press for a plan of Anglo-American cooperation for peace. The British refused to cooperate, and the president, more than ever eager to avoid a final confrontation with Germany on the submarine issue, decided to press forward with independent mediation. He was by this time also angered by the intensification of British blockade practices and convinced that both sides were fighting for world domination and spoils. On December 18, 1916, Wilson asked the belligerents to state the terms upon which they would be willing to make peace. Soon afterward, in secret, high-level negotiations, he appealed to Britain and Germany to hold an early peace conference under his leadership.
Break with Germany
Chances for peace were blasted by a decision of the German leaders, made at an imperial conference on January 9, 1917, to inaugurate an all-out submarine war against all commerce, neutral as well as belligerent. The Germans knew that such a campaign would bring the United States into the war, but they were confident that their augmented submarine fleet could starve Britain into submission before the United States could mobilize and participate effectively.
The announcement of the new submarine blockade in January left the president no alternative but to break diplomatic relations with Germany, which he did on February 3. At the same time, and in subsequent addresses, the president made it clear that he would accept unrestricted submarine warfare against belligerent merchantmen and would act only if American ships were sunk. In early March he put arms on American ships in the hope that this would deter submarine attacks. The Germans began to sink American ships indiscriminately in mid-March, and on April 2 Wilson asked Congress to recognize that a state of war existed between the United States and the German Empire. Congress approved the war resolution quickly, and Wilson signed it on April 6. (For U.S. military involvement in World War I, see the article World War I.)
Mobilization
Generally speaking, the efforts at mobilization went through two stages. During the first, lasting roughly from April to December 1917, the administration relied mainly on voluntary and cooperative efforts. During the second stage, after December 1917, the government moved rapidly to establish complete control over every important phase of economic life. Railroads were nationalized; a war industries board established ironclad controls over industry; food and fuel were strictly rationed; an emergency-fleet corporation began construction of a vast merchant fleet; and a war labour board used coercive measures to prevent strikes. Opposition to the war was sternly suppressed under the Espionage Act of 1917. At the same time, the Committee on Public Information, headed by the progressive journalist George Creel, mobilized publicists, scholars, and others in a vast prowar propaganda effort. By the spring of 1918, the American people and their economy had been harnessed for total war (a near miracle, considering the lack of preparedness only a year before).
America’s role in the war
The American military contribution, while small compared to that of the Allies during the entire war, was in two respects decisive in the outcome. The U.S. Navy, fully prepared at the outset, provided the ships that helped the British overcome the submarine threat by the autumn of 1917. The U.S. Army, some 4,000,000 men strong, was raised mainly by conscription under the Selective Service Act of 1917; the American Expeditionary Force of more than 1,200,000 men under General Pershing reached France by September 1918, and this huge infusion of manpower tipped the balance on the Western Front and helped to end the war in November 1918, a year earlier than military planners had anticipated.
Wilson’s vision of a new world order
In one of the most ambitious rhetorical efforts in modern history, President Wilson attempted to rally the people of the world in a movement for a peace settlement that would remove the causes of future wars and establish machinery to maintain peace. In an address to the Senate on January 22, 1917, he called for a “peace without victory” to be enforced by a league of nations that the United States would join and strongly support. He reiterated this program in his war message, adding that the United States wanted above all else to “make the world safe for democracy.” And when he failed to persuade the British and French leaders to join him in issuing a common statement of war aims, he went to Congress on January 8, 1918, to make, in his Fourteen Points address, his definitive avowal to the American people and the world.
In his general points Wilson demanded an end to the old diplomacy that had led to wars in the past. He proposed open diplomacy instead of entangling alliances, and he called for freedom of the seas, an impartial settlement of colonial claims, general disarmament, removal of artificial trade barriers, and, most important, a league of nations to promote peace and protect the territorial integrity and independence of its members. On specific issues he demanded, among other things, the restoration of a Belgium ravaged by the Germans; sympathetic treatment of the Russians, then involved in a civil war; establishment of an independent Poland; the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France; and autonomy or self-determination for the subject peoples of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. A breathtaking pronouncement, the Fourteen Points gave new hope to millions of liberals and moderate socialists who were fighting for a new international order based upon peace and justice.
The Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty
With their armies reeling under the weight of a combined Allied and American assault, the Germans appealed to Wilson in October 1918 for an armistice based on the Fourteen Points and other presidential pronouncements. The Allies agreed to conclude peace on this basis, except that the British entered a reservation about freedom of the seas, and Wilson agreed to an Anglo-French demand that the Germans be required to make reparation for damages to civilian property.
Wilson led the U.S. delegation and a large group of experts to the peace conference, which opened in Paris in January 1919. He fought heroically for his Fourteen Points against the Allied leaders—David Lloyd George of Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy—who, under heavy pressure from their own constituencies, were determined to divide the territories of the vanquished and make Germany pay the full cost of the war. Wilson made a number of compromises that violated the spirit if not the letter of the Fourteen Points, including the imposition of an indefinitely large reparations bill upon Germany. Moreover, the Allies had intervened in the Russian Civil War against the dominant revolutionary socialist faction, the Bolsheviks, and Wilson had halfheartedly cooperated with the Allies by dispatching small numbers of troops to northern Russia, to protect military supplies against the advancing Germans, and to Siberia, mainly to keep an eye on the Japanese, who had sent a large force there. But Wilson won many more of his Fourteen Points than he lost; his greatest victories were to prevent the dismemberment of Germany in the west and further intervention in Russia and, most important, to obtain the incorporation of the Covenant of the League of Nations into the Versailles Treaty. He was confident that the League, under American leadership, would soon rectify the injustices of the treaty.
The fight over the treaty and the election of 1920
Public opinion in the United States seemed strongly in favour of quick ratification of the Versailles Treaty when the president presented that document to the Senate in July 1919. Traditional isolationist sentiment was beginning to revive, however, and a small minority of 16 senators, irreconcilably opposed to U.S. membership in the League, vowed to oppose the treaty to the bitter end. In addition, a crucial controversy developed between the president and a majority of the Republican senators, led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Lodge insisted upon adding 14 reservations to the treaty. The second reservation declared that the United States assumed no obligations under Article X of the Covenant, which guaranteed the integrity and independence of members of the League; moreover it said that the president could not use the armed forces to support the Covenant without the explicit consent of Congress.
Calling this reservation a nullification of the treaty, Wilson in September made a long speaking tour of the West to build up public support for unconditional ratification. He suffered a breakdown at the end of his tour and a serious stroke on October 2. The president’s illness, which incapacitated him for several months, increased his intransigence against the Lodge reservations; with equal stubbornness, the Massachusetts senator refused to consent to any compromise. The result was failure to obtain the necessary two-thirds majority for ratification, with or without reservations, when the Senate voted on November 19, 1919, and again on March 19, 1920.
Wilson had suggested that the ensuing presidential campaign and election should be a “great and solemn referendum” on the League. The Democratic candidate, James M. Cox of Ohio, fought hard to make it the leading issue, but the Republican candidate, Warren G. Harding of Ohio, was evasive on the subject, and a group of 31 leading Republican internationalists assured the country that Harding’s election would be the best guarantee of U.S. membership in the League of Nations. Harding swamped Cox (see U.S. presidential election of 1920), and his victory ended all hopes for U.S. membership. In his inaugural Harding announced that the United States would not be entangled in European affairs; he emphasized this determination by concluding a separate peace with Germany in 1921.
Arthur S. Link