620 Chapter 23 Woodrow Wilson and the Great War
force. In 1917, after the German military leaders had
made this decision, events moved relentlessly, almost
uninfluenced by the actors who presumably con-
trolled the fate of the world:
February 3: Housatonicis torpedoed. Wilson
announces to Congress that he has severed
diplomatic relations with Germany.
February 24:Walter Hines Page, United States
ambassador to Great Britain, transmits to the
State Department an intercepted German dis-
patch (the “Zimmermann telegram”) revealing
that Germany has proposed a secret alliance
with Mexico; Mexico will receive, in the event
of war with the United States, “the lost terri-
tory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”
February 25:Cunard liner Laconiais torpedoed;
two American women perish.
February 26:Wilson asks Congress for authority
to arm American merchant ships.
March 1:Zimmermann telegram is released to
the press.
March 4:President Wilson takes oath of office,
beginning his second term.
March 9:Wilson, acting under his executive
powers, orders the arming of American
merchantmen.
March 12:Revolutionary provisional government
is established in Russia.Algonquinis torpedoed.
March 15:Czar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates.
March 16: City of Memphis,Illinois, and
Vigilanciaare torpedoed.
March 21: New York World, a leading Democratic
newspaper, calls for declaration of war on
Germany. Wilson summons Congress to con-
vene in a special session on April 2.
March 25:Wilson calls up the National Guard.
April 2:Wilson asks Congress to declare war.
Germany is guilty of “throwing to the winds
all scruples of humanity,” he says. America
must fight, not to conquer, but for “peace
and justice.... The world must be made
safe for democracy.”
April 4, 6:Congress declares war—the vote, 82–6
in the Senate, 373–50 in the House.
The bare record conceals Wilson’s agonizing
search for an honorable alternative to war. To admit
that Germany posed a threat to the United States
meant confessing that interventionists had been right
all along. To go to war meant, besides sending inno-
cent Americans to their deaths, allowing “the spirit of
ruthless brutality [to] enter into the very fibre of our
national life.”
The president’s Presbyterian conscience tortured
him. He lost sleep, appeared gray and drawn. When
someone asked him which side he hoped would win,
he answered petulantly, “Neither.” “He was resist-
ing,” Secretary of State Lansing recorded, “the irre-
sistible logic of events.” In the end Wilson could
salve his conscience only by giving intervention an
idealistic purpose: the war had become a threat to
humanity. Unless the United States threw its weight
into the balance, Western civilization itself might be
destroyed. Out of the long bloodbath must come a
new and better world. The war must be fought to
end, for all time, war itself. Thus in the name not of
vengeance and victory but of justice and humanity he
sent his people into battle.
United States Declaration of War (1917)at
http://www.myhistorylab.com
President Wilson’s War Message to
Congress (1917)atwww.myhistorylab.com
American entry into WWIat
http://www.myhistorylab.comMobilizing the Economy
America’s entry into the Great War determined its out-
come. The Allies were running out of money and sup-
plies; their troops, decimated by nearly three years in
the trenches, were exhausted, disheartened, and rebel-
lious. In February and March 1917, U-boats sent over
a million tons of Allied shipping to the bottom of the
Atlantic. The outbreak of the Russian Revolution in
March 1917, at first lifting the spirits of the Western
democracies, led to the Bolshevik takeover under
Lenin. The Russian armies collapsed; by December
1917 Russia was out of the war and the Germans were
moving masses of men and equipment from the eastern
front to France. Without the aid of the United States,
the Allies would likely have sued for peace according to
terms dictated from Berlin. Instead American men and
supplies helped contain the Germans’ last drives and
then push them back to final defeat.
It was a close thing, for the United States entered
the war little better prepared to fight than it had been
in 1898. The conversion of American industry to war
production had to be organized and carried out with-
out prearrangement. Confusion and waste resulted.
The hurriedly designed shipbuilding program was an
almost total fiasco. The gigantic Hog Island yard in
Maine, which employed at its peak over 34,000 work-
ers, completed its first vessel only after the war ended.
Airplane, tank, and artillery construction programs
developed too slowly to affect the war. The big guns
that backed up American soldiers in 1918 were made
in France and Great Britain; of the 8.8 million rounds
of artillery ammunition fired by American troops, a
mere 8,000 were manufactured in the United States.WatchtheVideoReadtheDocumentReadtheDocument