![]() During the war, the federal government successfully mobilised the nation’s manufacturing and agricultural sectors, inducted millions of men into the army, crafted an effective propaganda campaign to win over public opinion and implemented a convoy system to transport troops and goods relatively safely across the Atlantic. In resuming unrestricted submarine warfare, Germany wagered that the United States could not mobilise its economy or military in time to make a decisive difference along the Western Front. Rather than replacing monarchies with communism, Wilson envisioned a post-war world where capitalism and democracy thrived. Wilson did not create the Fourteen Points in a vacuum, he was responding to the alternative vision that the 1917 Bolshevik Russian Revolution had offered. He framed the war as an altruistic campaign to spread the American way of life by making the world “safe for democracy.” In January 1918 Wilson took his ideas one step further in the Fourteen Points, a document that championed disarmament, self-determination, free trade and a League of Nations to handle international disputes. America, he declared, had “no quarrel with the German people,” only with their autocratic government. Wilson also urged Americans to have faith that victory would usher in a more peaceful and just world. The crimes laid at Germany’s footstep included sabotage and spying within the United States, resumed unrestricted submarine warfare that put American shipping and lives at risk and the Zimmermann Telegram (a half-hearted German attempt to entice Mexico into attacking America’s southwest border). Without a clear attack against the United States to galvanize the public, Wilson argued that the nation had to defend itself from increasing German aggression. ![]() Therefore, when Wilson decided on Apto ask Congress for a declaration of war, a significant segment of the population still needed convincing. Yet opposition to entering the war remained strong in rural areas where traditional distrust of Wall Street created suspicions of a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” German Americans and Irish Americans also opposed entering the war, believing an Allied victory would only strengthen the British Empire. ![]() The evolving naval war also impacted the United States, most famously when 128 Americans perished after a German submarine torpedoed the British passenger ship Lusitania in 1915.īy 1917 most Americans favoured the Allied side. Americans donated widely to help civilians caught up in the maelstrom of war, while banks lent freely to the Allies so they could purchase food, raw materials and munitions in the United States. Thousands of Americans either volunteered to fight in foreign armies or travelled overseas to work in humanitarian relief campaigns. Not all Americans heeded the president’s request. Aware that the nation’s population included many first- and second-generation immigrants from both the Central Powers and the Allied nations, Wilson worried that bitter divisions over the war might rip the country apart. When the European war began in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson announced that the United States would remain neutral. United States of America and the First World War ![]()
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