How Woodrow Wilson’s War Speech to Congress Changed Him – and the Nation

A group of activists calling themselves the Emergency Peace Federation visited White House on February 28, 1917, to plead with their longtime ally, President Woodrow Wilson. Think of his predecessors George Washington and John Adams, they told him. surely Wilson could find a way to protect american transportation without joining Europe ’ s war .
If they had met with him four months sooner, they would have encountered a different man. He had run on peace, after all, winning re-election in November 1916 on the motto “ He kept us out of war. ” Most Americans had little interest in sending soldiers into the stalemate thrashing that had ravaged the landscapes of Belgium and France since 1914. Wilson, a careful, deliberative erstwhile professor, had even tried to convince England and Germany to end World War I through statesmanship throughout 1916. On January 22, speaking before the U.S. Senate, he had proposed a negotiate colony to the European war, a “ peace without victory. ”
What the peace delegating didn ’ t fully realize was that Wilson, watch in a series of events, was turning from a peace advocate to a wartime president. And that agonizing lurch, which took place over barely 70 days in 1917, would transform the United States from an disjunct, neutral state to a universe power .
“ The President ’ s mood was stern, ” recalled Federation member and renowned social actor Jane Addams, “ far from the scholar ’ second detachment. ” Earlier that calendar month, Germany had adopted unexclusive submarine war : Its U-boats would attack any ship approaching Britain, France, and Italy, including neutral american ships. The peace deputation hoped to bolster Wilson ’ s diplomatic instincts and to press him to respond without joining the war. William I. Hull, a former student of Wilson ’ south and a Quaker pacifist, tried to convince Wilson that he, like the presidents who came before him, could protect american shipping through negotiation.

But when Hull suggested that Wilson try to appeal directly to the german people, not their government, Wilson stopped him .
“ Dr. Hull, ” Wilson said, “ if you knew what I know at the show moment, and what you will see reported in tomorrow dawn ’ s newspapers, you would not ask me to attempt far passive dealings with the Germans. ”
then Wilson told his visitors about the Zimmermann Telegram .
“ U.S. BARES WAR PLOT, ” read the Chicago Tribune ’ s headline the adjacent day, March 1, 1917. “ GERMANY SEEKS AN ALLIANCE AGAINST US ; ASKS JAPAN AND MEXICO TO JOIN HER, ” announced the New York Times. german foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann ’ south decoded telegram, which Wilson ’ randomness administration had leaked to the Associated Press, instructed the german ambassador in Mexico to propose an alliance. If the U.S. declared war over Germany ’ mho unrestricted submarine war, Zimmermann offered to “ make war in concert ” with Mexico in rally for “ generous fiscal support and an understanding on our share that Mexico is to reconquer the baffled territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona ” ( ceded under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the mexican-american War closely 70 years earlier ) .
Until the double shocks of unrestricted submarine war and the Zimmermann Telegram, Wilson had sincerely intended to keep the United States out of World War I. But equitable 70 days late, on April 2, 1917, he asked Congress to declare war on Germany. Wilson ’ s agonized decisiveness over that period permanently changed America ’ s kinship with the earth : He forsook George Washington ‘s 124-year common law of american disinterest in european wars. His exalted justifications for that decision helped launch a hundred of american military alliances and interventions around the ball .
In his January manner of speaking, Wilson had laid out the ideal international principles that would late guide him after the war. permanent wave peace, he argued, required governments built on the accept of the governed, exemption of the seas, arms control and an external league of Peace ( which late became the League of Nations ). He argued that both sides in the war—the Allies, including England and France, and the Central Powers, including Germany—should accept what he called a “ peace without victory. ” The option, he argued, was a irregular “ peace forced upon the failure, a winner ’ mho terms imposed upon the vanquished. ” That, Wilson warned, would leave “ a bite, a resentment, a bitter memory ” and build the peace on “ quicksand. ”
But nine days late, at 4 post meridiem on January 31, the german ambassador in Washington informed the U.S. State Department that his state would begin unrestricted bomber warfare—which threatened American commerce and lives on the Atlantic Ocean—at midnight. “ The President was sad and depressed, ” wrote Wilson ’ s adviser Edward House in his diary the next day. “ [ He ] said he felt as if the world had suddenly reversed itself ; that after going from east to west, it had begun to go from west to east and that he could not get his balance. ”
Wilson cut off diplomatic relations with Germany, but refused to believe war was inevitable. “ We do not desire any hostile conflict with the imperial german Government, ” he told Congress on February 3. “ We are the sincere friends of the german people and seriously desire to remain at peace with the Government which speaks for them. We shall not believe that they are hostile to us unless and until we are obliged to believe it. ”
Though most Americans weren ’ t tidal bore to fight, Wilson ’ randomness critics raged at his inaction. “ I don ’ thymine believe Wilson will go to war unless Germany literally kicks him into it, ” former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had failed in his bid to re-take the White House in 1912, wrote to U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge .
then, on February 23, came the “ kick. ” That sidereal day, the british government delivered a copy of the Zimmermann Telegram to Walter Hines Pace, the american ambassador in London. It was the espionage coup of the war. Britain ’ s office of naval intelligence had intercepted and partially decoded it in January, and a british spy ’ south contact in a Mexican telegraph function had stolen another replicate on February 10. pace stayed up all night drafting a message to Wilson about the telegram and its origins. When Zimmermann ’ randomness message arrived from London at the State Department in D.C. on Saturday night, February 24, Acting Secretary of State Frank L. Polk took it directly to the White House. Wilson, Polk recalled later, showed “ much indignation. ”
Four days belated, when Wilson met with the peace activists, he revealed that his thoughts about how to bring about a durable peace had changed. He told them, according to Addams ’ remembrance in her memoir, that “ as head of a nation participating in the war, the President of the United States would have a seat at the Peace Table, but that if he remains the representative of a achromatic area he could at best only ‘ call through a snap in the door. ’ ”
The telegram inflamed american public opinion and turned the state toward war. Yet even then, the deliberative Wilson was not quite ready. His second inaugural address, delivered March 5, asked Americans to abandon isolationism. “ We are provincial nobelium retentive, ” he declared. “ The tragic events of the 30 months of full of life agitation through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the global. There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes as a nation are involved whether we would have it so or not. ” Today, Wilson ’ south address reads like a prelude to war—but at the time, pacifists like Addams heard it as a good continuation of his concentrate on statesmanship.

When Wilson met with his cabinet on March 20, he was placid open. But two events the former workweek added to his calculus. german U-boats had sunk three american ships, killing 15 people. And the ongoing tumult in Russia had forced Nicholas II to abdicate the throne, ending 300 years of Romanov rule. The czar ’ south abdication had ceded baron to a ephemeral probationary government created by the russian legislature. That meant that all of the Allied nations in World War I were now democracies fighting a German-led alliance of autocratic monarchies .
The cabinet unanimously recommended war. Wilson left without announcing his plans. “ President was grave, identical deplorable ! ” wrote Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels in his diary .
Wilson likely made his decisiveness that night. On March 21, he set a date with Congress for a special school term on April 2 on “ grave matters of national policy. ” Alone, Wilson wrote his language by hand and by typewriter .
According to a fib that appears in many Wilson biographies, the president of the united states invited his ally Frank Cobb, editor program of the New York World, to the White House on the night before his manner of speaking. Wilson revealed his pain to his acquaintance. He ’ five hundred tried every alternate to war, he said, and he feared Americans would forsake tolerance and freedom in wartime. In words that echoed his speech to the Senate, Wilson said he hush feared that a military victory would prove hollow over time .
“ Germany would be beaten and sol badly beaten that there would be a determined peace, a victorious peace, ” Wilson said, according to Cobb. “ At the end of the war there will be no bystanders with sufficient power to influence the terms. There won ’ thymine be any peace standards left to work with. ” even then, Wilson said, “ If there is any option, for God ’ s sake, let ’ s take it ! ” ( Cobb ’ south report, given to two chap journalists and published after his end in 1924, is therefore dramatic that some historians think it ’ s not authentic. other historians find it credible. )
On April 2, when Wilson came to the dais at the Capitol, no one but House and possibly Wilson ’ south wife, Edith, knew what he would say. He asked Congress to “ declare the recent course of the imperial german government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States, ” and to “ formally accept the status of belligerent. ” He recounted Germany ’ s submarine attacks and called the Zimmermann Telegram testify of “ hostile purpose. ” He besides declared the german politics a “ natural enemy of liberty. ” His speech ’ s most celebrated idiom would resound through the adjacent century, through american military victories and quagmires alike : “ The world must be made safe for democracy. ”
Cheers resounded through the House bedroom. Later that week, Congress declared war, with 373-50 votes in the House and an 82-6 gross profit in the Senate .
But after the manner of speaking, binding at the White House, Wilson was somber. “ My message today was a message of death for our young men, ” Wilson said—and then broke into tears. “ How foreign it seems to applaud that. ” ( His secretary, Joseph Tumulty, recorded the president ’ mho words in his 1921 memoir. But as with Cobb ’ s dramatic anecdote, there is doubt among historians about the narrative ’ mho veracity. )
All in all, 116,516 Americans died in World War I among about nine million deaths global. ( More would die from the influenza epidemic of 1918 and pneumonia than on the battlefield. ) Wilson ’ s own administration struck blows against exemption and tolerance during the war, imprisoning anti-war activists such as socialistic Eugene Debs. And at the Versailles conference of 1919, Wilson became one of the victors dictating peace terms to Germany. His earlier fears that such a peace would not last eerily foreshadowed the conflicts that finally erupted into another world war .
Wilson ’ s exalted argument that the U.S. should fight World War I to defend majority rule has been debated always since. A different president of the united states might have justified the war on simpleton grounds of self-defense, while traditionalist isolationists would have kept America neutral by cutting its commercial ties to Great Britain. rather, Wilson ’ s sweeping doctrines promised that the United States would promote stability and exemption across the universe. Those ideas have defined american statesmanship and war for the last 100 years, from World War II and NATO to Vietnam and the Middle East. A hundred late, we ’ re silent living in Woodrow Wilson ’ second populace .

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