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Conflict Resolution and United States History

War, Wilson and Women

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Objectives

Examine the proximate and underlying causes of World War I in 1914.

Explain why the United States government took a position of neutrality toward the war in Europe from 1914 through early 1917.

Compare the views of peace advocates, liberal internationalists, isolationists and militant interventionists as well as President Woodrow Wilson and American public opinion in general, as these all evolved between 1914 and 1917.

Analyze the reasons behind President Woodrow Wilson's decision in early 1917 to ask Congress for armed neutrality and, subsequently, a declaration for war against Imperial Germany in April 1917.

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War in Europe, 1914-1915

Imperial rivalries between the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies and the Russian tsarist regime exploded after a Serbian nationalist group assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in July 1914.

When Austria, with Germany’s backing, sought to subjugate and incorporate Serbia, Russia defended its client state and began mobilizing for war, alerting it ally, France.

Following its long-standing military plans, Germany moved rapidly in both the east and west, invading Belgium to encircle and defeat the French army, in spite of Germany’s neutrality treaty with Belgium

With Germany’s troops headed towards the English Channel, Britain, long-threatened by the growing German navy, joined France and Russia in the war against the Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.)

Instead of the quick. Decisive war that had been expected, the armies bogged down into an extensive series of trenches that became known as the Western Front.

Behind the protective trenches, the Germany army occupied the industrial areas of eastern Belgium and northeastern France.

Britain, with the world’s largest navy and merchant marine, instituted a naval blockade of Germany. Germany tried to blockade Britain but had difficulty because of the British navy’s command of the seas.

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The U.S. Stays Neutral

• When the war began in 1914, President Wilson proclaimed the United State neutral.

• He did so because this was traditional U.S. policy toward Europe and he feared that overt U.S. partisanship might tear American society apart.

• Many Americans of German or Austro-Hungarian background supported the Central Powers, as did many Scandinavian Americans, Catholic Irish Americans and American Jews from Russia.

• Probably a bare majority of American supported the Allies (France, Britain and Russia) because of ethnic and cultural ties, as well as British propaganda and the fact that Germany had invaded other countries.

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U.S. Supplies French and British War Efforts

• American merchants sold the Allies food, cotton, manufactured goods and materials for arms and munitions.

• They were willing to trade with the Central Powers, too, but the British blockade cut off seaborne supplies to Germany and Austro-Hungary.

• The Allied war trade helped pull the U.S. economy out of the recession into which it was heading in 1914.

• By 1915, the Allies needed loans from the U.S. to continue to purchase materials.

• Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan rejected the Allies request to sell their war bonds to US investors as a violation of neutrality, but Washington did not object to U.S. banks providing credit for the Allies to continue their purchases.

• Pres. Wilson was angered by British seizure of American goods headed for Germany but agreed to post-war adjudication of the British Navy’s infractions of international law.

• However, he took a different position towards Germany which used submarines (U-boats) to torpedo enemy commercial ships without warning. Wilson announced that the U.S. would view any loss of American lives or ships from German U-boats as “an indefensible violation of neutral rights” and would hold Germany to “strict accountability.” The president also declined to prohibit U.S> citizens from traveling into the war zone on British ships, asserting that American as neutral had the right to travel in international waters.

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In early 1915, German submarines sank a number of British merchant ships and a couple of small English Channel passenger liners (with the loss of three American lives), but there was little U.S. reaction until May 7, 1915, when a German U-boat torpedoed a giant British passenger liner, the Lusitania, off the Irish coast, killing nearly 1,200 men, women, and children, including about 128 U.S. citizens.

Few people believed the luxury oceanliner would be a target and the shock caused by the sinking of the Lusitania and the drowning of many of its passengers triggered horror and revulsion among most Americans.

The horror of the Lusitania led Americans to focus on the evolving relationship of the United States to the widening scope of the European war.

Sinking of the Lusitania, Hearst International New Service, May 1915

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Pacifists and Peace Advocates

• With rapid industrialization between the end of the Civil War and 1890, 10 million immigrants arrived on the shores of the U.S.

• The Immigration Act of 1891 moved the burden of processing new immigrants from the states to the federal government and authorized the construction of an immigration facility at Ellis Island.

• Between 1890 and 1914, 15 million new immigrants arrived in the U.S., mostly from eastern and southern Europe. This was the height of immigration to the U.S.

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U.S. Delegation to the International Congress of Women,

1915

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Pacifists and Peace Advocates Positions and Interests

Positions:• The United States should avoid being drawn militarily into the war.• The United States should avoid increasing its military spending.• The United States has a moral responsibility to help end the slaughter in Europe, but

that it should do so by nonviolent means such as mediation under its own good offices or through a group of neutral nations.

• War is caused by economic and strategic rivalries, arms races, and traditional masculinized, European power politics.

• Socialists argued that workers should refuse to participate as soldiers, sailors or workers in war, which benefits capitalists, and their united refusals would prevent such wars.

Interests:• Pacifists saw war as anachronistic and destructive, an impediment to improved

standards of living and progressive communities.• Women peace activists wanted to avoid war because they wanted to protect women

and families from death, disability, and deprivation that war brought.• Peace advocates also feared that progressive social reforms that they supported

would be curtailed by war. They opposed increases in military spending because they believed that it would contribute to war and would direct resources away from social improvements,

• Socialists believed that workers unfairly bore the costs of war. • Labor union feared that gains labor had made might be lost in war.

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Liberal Internationalists

• The shock of the continuing slaughter in the European war by countries considered “the most civilized” led many progressive reformers to seek an alternative to the old secret diplomacy that they believed had, along with power politics, arms races, imperialism, and international anarchy and aggression, produced the current catastrophe.

• A "new diplomacy" was advocated by those who emerged as "liberal internationalists."

• Some had been members of the peace movement but most had been domestic "liberals" or "progressives" who had not previously given much thought to war.

• The "new diplomacy" that they began advocating in 1915 included open diplomacy, arms reduction, freer trade, self-determination of peoples, and a community or league of nations to provide a forum for resolving conflicts without war.

• Although there was great fluidity, liberal internationalists tended to advocate a just and lasting peace to the current war based on relinquishing conquests, rather than a vindictive victory.

• They encouraged a mediated end to the current war and the establishment of a postwar league of nations.

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Liberal InternationalistsPositions and Interests

Positions:• The United States should avoid being drawn militarily into the war.• The United States should not build up its military.• Both sides in the war had rapacious war aims designed to expand their empires. However,

Germany had been the initial aggressor, and it actions, such as torpedoing ships without warning, were more horrendous violations of international law than the actions of the Allies.

• The United States or a group of neutrals should mediate among the belligerents and bring the war to an end with a compromise peace (status quo ante bellum).

• Advocated arms reduction, open trade, increased public participation in diplomacy, and international mechanisms for arbitration, a world court, and a league of nations.

Interests:• Feared that war and a new emphasis on military buildup would impede domestic social

reforms that these progressive reformers advocated.• Feared that intervention might tear apart America’s multi-ethnic society whose sympathies

towards the warring powers were divided.• If the United States should decide to intervene militarily, it should aid the Allies because

U.S. interests were more threatened by Germany.

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Isolationists

• The most widespread attitude about international affairs in 1915 was traditional American isolationism—the highly nationalistic view that the United States was superior to the nations of the Old World and should stand aloof from the incessant turmoil of decadent, monarchical Europe.

• But the United States never really isolated itself from the world; it was always willing to trade or proselytize. Rather than “isolationism,” the view that the nation should avoid entangling alliances and retain freedom to act when and where it pleased might more accurately be called “unilateralism”.

• Isolationist wings existed in the Republican and Democratic parties. Spokesmen included Democrat Williams Jennings Bryan from Nebraska, Sen. Robert M. La Follette (Rep.-WI), and Rep. Claude Kitchin (Dem.-NC).

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Isolationists Positions and Interests

Positions:• The U.S. does not have any real interests in becoming involved in the war in Europe.• Opposed increased military spending.• Big business, big finance and the big city press were interested in supporting Britain

for their own profits; but it would be the common people who would do the fighting and dying.

Interests:• American security was not threatened.• The war is not worth the lives of American youth. Young farmers and common people

would pay for the war with their lives and by an increased national debt.• The common people would be hurt by escalating prices that would accompany

increased government spending for war.• A military build up would only benefit munitions makers, big business and finance in

the industrialized areas of the North.• Feared that the country was being pushed towards war and military mobilization by

big business, big finance, the munitions makers, the military and the big city press.• Feared that farmers and the working classes would be exploited under defense

mobilization and war and hurt by escalating inflation caused by military expansion• Ethnic groups that were sympathetic to the Central Powers or opposed to one or

more of the Allies disliked the idea of fighting against their kind.• Feared that repression might accompany a U.S. declaration of war.

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Conservative Internationalists

• Conservative internationalists sought limited means to maintain international stability rather than bold initiatives to improve conditions for peoples around the world. During the war, most of them came to support the Allies.

• Others came to support the idea of a postwar League to Enforce Peace.

• Whereas liberal internationalists and the peace movement sought a kind of world parliament composed of all nations and emphasized mediation and negotiation rather than power and the threat of military action, conservative internationalists emphasized realism, "hardheaded" thinking and power politics, and collective security to maintain existing power relationships.

• In June 1915, more than 100 conservative internationalists, led by former Republican President William Howard Taft and Hamilton Holt, editor of the Independent magazine, founded the League to Enforce Peace, which advocated U.S. participation in a postwar league of nations, whose members could be required to bring economic and military force against states that made war without submitting their disputes to a tribunal for resolution.

• Most conservative internationalists favored U.S. economic and political support for an Allied victory as in American interests.

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Conservative Internationalists Positions and Interests

Positions:• The U.S. should help the Allies defeat Germany even if that meant U.S.

military intervention.• The U.S. should build up its military power.• The U.S. should link its power to that of nations with comparable ideals and

interests, such as Britain and France.• Advocated legal mechanisms such as arbitration or a world court as

alternatives to violence to resolve disputes between nations in the postwar period.

Interests:• Wanted to protect U.S. interests at home and abroad but with power, not

just hopes for ideal solutions.• Economically motivated by profits from trade with the Allies.• Interested in protecting their interests by having a stable and predictable

international climate American business. Saw war as disrupting trade and hurting business.

• Wanted international cooperation and open markets for American goods and investments.

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Militant Interventionists

• Even the staunchest supporters of the Allied cause were reluctant to advocate U.S. military intervention in the war in 1915.

• The loudest pro-Allied voice was that of former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. In statements to the press only a few days after the sinking of the Lusitania, Roosevelt declared that German submarine warfare and the sinking of the great passenger liner was an act of “pure piracy” and “wholesale murder.” The former president urged the government to seize all German ships, including merchant ships in American ports and to hold them as a guarantee for satisfaction of claims; to forbid all commerce with Germany and to encourage commerce of every kind (including weapons and munitions) with the Allies.

• Roosevelt’s friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, also favored maximum possible aid to the Allies, but recognized the public opposition to intervention and spoke in more measured tones in his partisan criticism of the timidity of the Democratic president for not taking a stronger stand against Germany.

• Munitions makers, such as Du Pont, and financiers, such as Morgan, were making huge profits from their assistance to the Allies and they wanted to protect their significant investments.

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Militant Interventionists Positions and Interests

Positions:• The U.S. should intervene on the side of the Allies.• The U.S. should build a stronger Navy and modernize its Army.• Big business and finance stressed the rectitude of the Allied cause. They were

generally careful not to appear as "warmongers," encouraging U.S. military intervention at this stage, but they emphasized the need to build American ground and naval forces.

Interests:• Roosevelt had political, personal, strategic, economic and moral interests in

supporting U.S. entry into World War I. After leaving the White House in 1913, he longed for a third term as president and despised Wilson for his “mollycoddling” foreign policy. Roosevelt thought that strategically the interests of the U.S. were linked with Great Britain. He saw the U.S. as leading the world in alliance with the declining British power against aggressive, newly industrializing nations like Germany and Japan.

• Lodge, speaking for the Republican Old Guard nationalists as well as the New England manufacturers and shippers and mid-sized manufacturing and financial interests, was most concerned with U.S. defense rather than extensive international commitments—with the German threat to commerce and possible postwar German economic and military intervention in the Western Hemisphere. As a Republican, he also saw the political advantage of showing Wilson as weak on defense.

• Du Pont and Morgan were interested in continuing the profits from their trade and investments with the Allies. Du Pont had family ties to France; Morgan to England.

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Directions for the Mock Mediation

The Setting:It is May 1915. The European nations have been at war for ten months. The sinking of the Lusitania has caused a crisis in relations between the United States and Germany. In interviews, publications, letters to members of Congress and to the president, American have expressed conflicting views: go to war, stay neutral, increase aid to the Allies.

At a hypothetical meeting with President Wilson, representatives from various groups concerned about U.S. foreign policy will try to influence Wilson’s decision about how the U.S. should respond to the sinking of the Lustrania and the role of the U.S. regarding the continuing war in Europe. The representatives are essentially lobbyist, explaining their views to the President. President Wilson will seek to find common ground. The goal is to agree on the best policy for the United States to pursue regarding the war in Europe.

Divide into groups of 13-15:1. Jane Addams, pacifist and member of Women’s Peace Party2. Carrie Chapman Catt, liberal internationalist and suffragist3. Crystal Eastmen, socialist, suffragist and members of Women’s Peace Party4. Senator Robert La Follette, isolationist5. Rep. Claude Kitchin, isolationist6. President Woodrow Wilson, liberal internationalist7. Walter Lippmann, liberal internationalist8. William Howard Taft, conservative internationalist9. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, conservative internationalist10. Pierre S. Du Pont. conservative internationalist11. John Pierpont Morgan, Jr., militant interventionist12. Theodore Roosevelt. militant interventionist13.-15. Observer/recorder/reporter(s)

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Jane AddamsJane Addams was a pacifist, suffragist and social reformer. She was born in 1860 into a comfortable middle class family in Illinois. Her father was an abolitionist sympathizer. While touring a settlement house in the London slums, she decided to replicate the facility in America. In 1889, she and a friend opened Hull House in the immigrant slums of Chicago. Addams became one of the founders of modern social work. In 1898, she joined the Anti-Imperialist League. In Democracy and Social Ethics, Addams wrote in 1902 that popular support for war would gradually disappear once the larger society developed the type of collective social morality and efforts for community betterment that she saw working with diverse ethnic groups through Hull House. She also believed that women were less physically aggressive and warlike than men and, therefore, particularly suited to be peacemakers. Her antiwar activity was centered on social reforms. A progressive Republican, she was more concerned about international peace than women’s suffrage, and supported Wilson's progressive reforms and anti-war, anti-military stance. In 1915, Addams helped found the Woman’s Peace Party, which became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919, with Addams as its first president. Addams opposed war for religious, personal, and progressive reasons. She was one of the most well-known and highly regarded women in the world. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She died in 1935.

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Carrie Chapman CattCarrie Chapman Catt was more of a liberal internationalist than a pacifist. She placed suffrage for women above pacifism and ultimately contributed to a split among women in the suffrage/peace movements. Born in 1859 in Wisconsin Chapman Catt grew up in Iowa and was strongly influenced by the pioneering/frontier atmosphere. After graduating from Iowa State College, she became a high school administrator. In 1885, she married Leo Chapman and joined him on his newspaper, but he died within a year. She pursued journalism, lecturing, and professional suffrage organizing. In 1890, she married George Catt, a successful civil engineer. They signed an agreement giving Chapman Catt four months a year for suffrage work. She became involved in the leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900 and devoted most of the next 20 years to the organization, serving as its president in 1917. In order to try to win the vote for women, she pledged suffrage support for Wilson’s decision to enter the war. The suffragists in the Woman’s Peace Party lambasted Chapman Catt, claiming that she had no right to speak for all suffragists. Although the war split the suffrage forces in terms of the peace issue, it did not weaken the suffrage campaign. After the war, Chapman Catt organized the League for Women Voters and also a peace organization. She died in 1947.

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Crystal EastmanCrystal Eastman, a socialist member of the radical wing of the Women's Peace Party, was born in 1881 in Massachusetts to two ordained Congregational ministers, both reformers and supporters of women’s suffrage. She graduated from Vassar College and received an M.A. in sociology at Columbia University and a law degree at New York University. As a labor lawyer, Eastman studied the effects of industrialism on urban workers and helped secure passage of New York State’s first Workers’ Compensation law. During her brief marriage to Wallace Benedict, Eastman became involved with the Wisconsin woman’s suffrage campaign in 1915-16. After their divorce, Eastman married Walter Fuller, an English artist. They lived in Greenwich Village and became active in the artistic community. A dynamic individual and effective organizer with a strong sense of social justice, Eastman was an active socialist, pacifist, feminist, and suffragist. During World War I, she was the guiding light of the New York City branch of the Woman’s Peace Party. Much of her work centered around organizing for peace and for women’s suffrage and writing articles for The Masses, and its successor, the Liberator, both edited by her brother, Max Eastman. Both Eastmans believed that the solution to the world’s problems was a socialist economic system that guaranteed women’s equality and social justice across racial and class lines. The Eastmans appealed to the working classes and sought to mobilize them. Many older members of the Woman’s Peace Party, such as Jane Addams, thought Eastman was too radical. In 1921, Eastman moved to England with her husband and two children, continuing to work for peace and women’s rights. Ill and homesick after the death of her husband, Eastman returned to the U.S. in 1927 and died a year later.

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Senator Robert La FolletteSenator Robert M. La Follette (R-WI), an isolationist and anti-imperialist, was one of the leaders of the progressive reform movement. Born to farmers in Wisconsin in 1855, La Follette graduated from the University of Wisconsin and became a lawyer. Politically ambitious, he rose rapidly from district attorney, to Congressman, to governor of Wisconsin in 1900 and U.S. Senator in 1906. “Fighting Bob” established a model progressive reform program in the state. He led the insurgent progressive Republican Senators in battling eastern corporate interests, machine politics, and the Party’s conservative Old Guard. The National Progressive Republican League was founded in 1911 as a vehicle for La Follette’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. However, when the Republican convention of 1912 nominated incumbent William H. Taft, the progressives bolted, formed their own Progressive Party and nominated the irrepressible ex-President Theodore Roosevelt instead of La Follette. The Republican split resulted in the election of the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. In the Senate, the outspoken La Follette continued to represent the agrarian progressives and urban reformers as well as the sizable isolationist German and Scandinavian ethnic groups in Wisconsin and antiwar groups. He called Wilson’s liberal internationalism a sham and argued for embargoing arms to Europe and nationalizing the manufacture of munitions. In 1915, La Follette opposed U.S. aid to the Allies and was against increasing the U.S. military. In 1917, he opposed arming American merchant ships and U.S. entry into the war (he was one of six Senators to vote against the war resolution). La Follette later opposed both the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. He continued in the U.S. Senate, advocating reform measures, until his death in 1925.

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Rep. Claude Kitchin

Representative Claude Kitchin (D-NC) was an isolationist. Born in North Carolina in 1869, the son of a powerful political campaigner and member of Congress, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1890. In 1900, he was elected to Congress as a Democrat from North Carolina, where he served until his death in 1923.

A Jeffersonian/Jacksonian Democrat who followed the lead of William Jennings Bryan, he opposed big business and Wall Street. Kitchin became House Majority Leader in 1915, and although generally a supporter of the Wilson administration, he was opposed to military expansion programs and favored continued neutrality.

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President Woodrow WilsonPresident Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States, 1913-1921. He was a liberal internationalist. Wilson was born the son of a Presbyterian minister in Staunton, Virginia in 1856. He grew up in Georgia and South Carolina during Reconstruction and was educated at Princeton and John Hopkins, where he earned a doctorate in history and government. He taught at Bryn Mawr and Princeton and was president of Princeton from 1902-1910, when he was elected governor of New Jersey. A member of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, Wilson became president in 1912 when the Republican Party split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. Entering office with a domestic reform program, Wilson was soon confronted with the European war. For most of the first year of the war, Wilson and Secretary of State Bryan tried to keep the United States truly neutral and avoid increasing military spending. With Bryan's resignation in mid-1915 and attacks by the reunited Republican Party during the approaching presidential election of 1916 for lack of "preparedness," Wilson tried to follow a middle course and endorsed significant military and naval expansion and extracted a pledge from Germany in 1916 to stop sinking ships without warning. But Wilson recognized that his strict definition of neutral rights and essentially a prohibition of the submarine blockade turned the decision about United States participation in the war over to the Germans. Consequently, after his re-election in 1916 on a program of continued peace, prosperity and reform, Wilson sought both to mediate an end to the war before the United States was drawn into it and to enunciate the principles of liberal internationalism as a goal for the postwar order. In 1917 when the Germans began sinking American ships, Wilson took the United States into the war to guarantee neutral rights, preserve American trade and prosperity, and to have a seat at the peace table. But postwar disillusionment with the Peace Treaty of Versailles, together with a resurgence of isolationism, partisan politics and the breakdown of Wilson’s health, led to the defeat of the treaty in the Senate and the failure of the United States to join the League of Nations. Wilson never fully regained his health. He died in 1924.

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Walter LippmanWalter Lippmann was a commentator and editor of the New Republic, an influential public opinion magazine which led many liberal internationalists to support collective security, aid to the Allies, and eventually intervention against Germany. Lippmann was born in New York City in 1889 into a wealthy family of German ancestry. He traveled yearly to Europe, attended private schools in New York City, and graduated from Harvard. At age 23, Lippmann wrote A Preface to Politics (1912), a progressive’s call to action, followed by Drift and Mastery (1914), which called for a scientifically managed society run by a public-minded elite. Herbert Croly made Lippmann a co-editor of the New Republic, which soon moved from impartiality to differential neutrality. Although cautioning against London’s ever tightening blockade, the editors were always personally pro-British (as was the magazine’s financial backer, Willard Straight, a banker at J.P. Morgan & Co., who helped make Morgan the purchasing agent for the Allies.) The Lusitania crisis ended any pretense of neutrality. In 1916, the New Republic called for limited naval and commercial war. When Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, the magazine urged discussion of “the terms and conditions of our entry into war." In 1917-1919, Lippmann joined the government as an advisor and helped draft the territorial provisions of Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.” Although he personally wanted to support the League of Nations, the other editors convinced him to join them in vigorously opposing the treaty and the League from a liberal position, a decision he later regretted. Lippmann left the magazine in 1921 and became an editor and widely syndicated and respected newspaper columnist until he retired in 1967. He died in 1974.

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William Howard TaftWilliam Howard Taft, a former president and a speaker for moderate Republicans, was a conservative internationalist and an advocate of collective security. Taft was born in Ohio in 1857. His father was attorney general and secretary of war under President Grant. Taft graduated from Yale University and Cincinnati Law School. In 1887, he was appointed superior court judge in Ohio. President Harrison named Taft as solicitor general in 1890 and a year later he was appointed to the federal circuit court. After serving as president of the Commission governing the Philippines acquired under President McKinley, Taft was appointed as secretary of war in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Taft became president in 1908. Believing that Roosevelt's domestic reforms had created instability, he sought to consolidate them. He tried to move away from Roosevelt's military threats and interventions and pursued U.S. interests through economic intervention, "dollar diplomacy." Responding to conservative business and peace interests, Taft tried unsuccessfully to have a series of bilateral treaties requiring arbitration of disputes approved by the Senate. After losing to Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election, Taft became a professor of constitutional law at Yale. In 1916 Taft became a leader in the movement for a postwar League to Enforce Peace, and by 1917, he was a strong advocate for U.S. entry into the war. He served as joint chairman of the National War Labor Board in 1917-18. He endorsed the peace treaty and the League of Nations in 1919. Taft served as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1921 to 1930. He died a month after retirement.

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Senator Henry Cabot LodgeSenator Henry Cabot Lodge was a conservative internationalist. Born in 1850 to one of the oldest Boston Brahmin families, Lodge obtained a law degree and a degree in political science from Harvard University and published several notable historical works, including biographies of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and Daniel Webster. He was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1879. Beginning in 1886, he served 37 years as a conservative Republican in the U.S. Congress and Senate. He had a hand in framing several important measures, including the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, the Pure Food and Drug Law, and several tariff measures. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1898, he helped lead the Congress to war with Spain when President McKinley and the business community supported it. Like his good friend, Theodore Roosevelt, Lodge supported a large and modern navy and an active role in the world to protect American economic interests. However, Lodge disliked Roosevelt's moralizing, reformism and adventurism almost as much as he distrusted Wilson's lofty liberal international idealism. He favored U.S. entry into World War I and the imposition of harsh terms for Germany after the war. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when the Republicans regained control of the Senate in 1919, Lodge, along with isolationists, helped block Wilson's Treaty of Versailles and U.S. membership in the League of Nations. He died in 1924.

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Pierre S. Du PontPierre S. Du Pont was a conservative internationalist in 1915 and a militant internationalist by 1917. Born in Delaware of French ancestry in 1870, the great grandson of E.I. Du Pont who had founded a highly profitable gunpowder manufacturing business. In 1890, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, in 1902, he joined two cousins in purchasing E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co., formerly a family partnership which had become a Delaware corporation in 1899, consolidating nearly 100 companies. He served as chairman of the finance committee and president of the corporation from 1915 to 1919. From 1919 until 1940 he served as chairman of the board. With orders flowing in from Europe and later the United States during the First World War, the capacity of the Du Pont powder plants increased from 12 million to more than 300 million pounds of gunpowder per year. Profits soared particularly during 1914-1916 before the Democratic Congress adopted excess profits taxes on defense industries in 1917-18. Du Pont supported U.S. economic assistance to the Allies, naval support, and ultimately, U.S. military intervention. After the war, the company used its profits and its confiscated German patents to diversify into various chemicals and developed lacquers, new plastics, cellophane, improved rayon, synthetic rubber, nylon and other new materials, and explosives became a minor interest. Pierre Du Pont’s principal hobby was horticulture. He personally supervised and planned the construction of gardens and conservatories at his estate, Longwood, which has become world famous. Du Pont died in 1954, leaving no children.

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J. Pierpont MorganJohn Pierpont (“Jack”) Morgan, Jr., was, as head of J.P. Morgan & Company, one of the most influential bankers in America. He was born in 1867, the son of J. Pierpont Morgan, who through his banking house, his English financial connections and his respected stature, dominated American finance from the late nineteenth century until his death in 1913 . The investment banking “House of Morgan” had been founded by “Jack” Morgan’s paternal grandfather, Junius S. Morgan as a merchant banking house in London. J.P. Morgan had headed the American bank on Wall Street and became a financial giant, consolidating and controlling first competing railroads and then manufacturing corporations such as United States Steel. Young Jack Morgan graduated from Harvard University, and worked in various positions in the House of Morgan until he became resident partner of the company in 1898. New York was challenging London as the world’s banking center, and J.P. Morgan & Co. was involved in enormous investments in both the developed and developing world. After his father’s death in 1913, Jack took full control of the “House of Morgan” on both sides of the Atlantic. At the beginning of the European war, J.P. Morgan & Co. became the official purchasing agent in America for the British government. It soon also extended its services to France. The company systematized the purchasing of war supplies by the Allies in the United States, extended substantial credits so that they could be purchased, and subsequently, in a syndicate with other major banks, floated billions of dollars in loans from American investors to the Allied governments. A conservative internationalist, Morgan supported Great Britain and American aid to it. He became a militant interventionist. Although one of the most influential individuals in the American economy, Jack Morgan lacked the domineering personal aura of his father. Morgan died in 1943.

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Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt, a militant interventionist, was a former president of the United States and leader of the progressive/interventionist wing of the Republican Party. Roosevelt was born to a wealthy, Old Dutch family in New York in 1858 (a distant, older cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt). He was a reform-minded New York commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy and then vice-president under William McKinley, upon whose assassination he became president. He had gained popularity during the war with Spain in 1898 as the founder of a volunteer cavalry regiment, the Rough Riders. Known for his exuberant personality, energetic commitment to strong government action and national greatness as well as his sense of moral leadership and effective use of the new mass media, Roosevelt gained a reputation as president as a reformer for his antitrust actions and his support for government regulation. When William Howard Taft was nominated for re-election in 1912, Roosevelt bolted the Republican Party and took the new Progressive Party nomination away from Robert La Follette. The split in the Republican Party led to the election of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson and a Democratic Congress. Roosevelt personally detested Wilson, whom he considered a coward as well as a rival. After the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, Roosevelt advocated that only unconditional surrender was acceptable. “I do not believe that the firm assertion of our rights means war, but, in any event, it is well to remember there are things worse than war. Let us as a nation understand that peace is worth having only when it is the hand-maiden of international righteousness and of national self-respect.” During the 1916 presidential campaign, he advocated taking a strong stand against German aggression, even if it meant war. His warlike stand paradoxically helped to re-elect Wilson. Roosevelt pushed for U.S. intervention as soon as Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 and sought complete defeat and Allied occupation of Germany. President Wilson refused Roosevelt's plea to lead a volunteer unit to France. Roosevelt died of a stroke in 1919.

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The Roles

The participants should try to find an agreement consistent with their interests.

The mediator should follow the steps in mediation, esp. restating, questioning and reframing, and help the participants come to an agreement.

The observer/recorder/reporter does not participate in the mediation but rather observes, records what happened and reports on the process and the results.

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Steps in Mediation

1. Discuss the rules—no triggers2. Each party presents facts, feelings and issues

from his or her perspective3. Actively listen—indicate that you heard and

understood4. Brainstorm alternative solutions5. Evaluate alternative solutions6. Agree on solution7. Agree on what to do if conflict recurs8. Write down the agreement9. Preserve the relationship

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Debriefing

The Process To what extent did the parties use active listening skills? To what extent did the parties brainstorm and evaluate possible

alternatives? To what extent were the parties able to articulate their interests? To what extent did rhetoric get in the way of pursuing the parties

interests?

The Results Were the parties able to reach a mutually acceptable solution? Why or why not? To what extent were the roles played with historical accuracy?

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What Really Happened? The 1916 Election

• The Democrats campaigned for Wilson’s re-election in 1916 with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”

• Although the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, former progressive governor of New York and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, did not advocate going to war, he was hurt by the bellicose, interventionist speeches of former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.

• The confused international situation, the general prosperity, Wilson’s progressive reforms and, most importantly, the peace issue helped the Democrats to retain control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

• After his re-election in November 1916, Wilson made a major effort to mediate an end to the war and solicited the warring powers to call a peace conference.

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Wilson’s Dilemma

Following the German government's announcement that effective February 1, 1917 it would institute unrestricted submarine warfare, with the prospect that U-boats would now begin torpedoing and sinking American as well as other merchant ships in the waters off the British Isles, President Wilson had to decide how the Unites States government should respond.

A major public debate, both in the print media and in public meetings, ensued.

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Mock Negotiation, February 1917

Divide into groups of three (two negotiators and an observer/recorder/reporter):

1. Jane Addams and Theodore Roosevelt2. Carrie Chapman Catt and Pierre DuPont3. Crystal Eastman and John P. Morgan, Jr. 4. Senator Robert La Follette and William Howard Taft5. Rep. Claude Kitchin and Walter Lippmann

The negotiators:• Should explain his or her position, interests and reasons. • Try to use active listening skills.• Pairs of negotiators should try to agree upon a course of action.

The observer/recorder/reporters:• Do not take part in the negotiations• Observe, record and report on the process and the results

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What really happened?

• When Germany announced that it would use unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral as well as belligerent ships, interventionists such as former Pres. Roosevelt urged that the U.S. immediately declare war and join the Allies.

• The New Republic recommended breaking diplomatic relations, seizing German ships in US. ports, mobilizing the Navy, create an antisubmarine force and arming American merchant ships.

• Former Secretary of State Bryan urged the government to warn U.S. citizens not to travel on belligerent’s ships, to prohibit American ships from entering the war zone, to postpone settlement of all disputes till after the war and to have a popular referendum for a declaration of war.

• Isolationists and some urban socialists (Debs and Eastman) argued that munitions makers and financiers were pushing the country towards war.

• Peace advocated recommended further negotiations.

• Wilson chose a middle path: on Feb. 3, 1917 he severed diplomatic relations with Germany but avoided mobilizing for war in order to give Germany a chance to reconsider its decision.

• On Feb. 26, 1917 he proposed armed neutrality—he asked Congress to sanction arming merchant vessels to protect American neutral rights. Isolationists, led by La Follette, blocked the request.

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What really happened?• Relations between the United States and Germany rapidly

deteriorated between February and April 1917. On February 26, news arrived in Washington that a U-boat had sunk the British liner Laconia the day before with two American women passengers among those killed.

• A delegation of peace advocates led by Jane Addams met with Wilson and congressional leaders on February 28th and urged them to avoid entering the war.

• The same day, Wilson authorized the State Department to release the Zimmermann telegram, a coded message between German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann and his ambassador in Mexico City proposing that Mexico join Germany in the war, offering generous financial support, encouraging Mexico “to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona.” (British naval intelligence had intercepted and decoded the message in January and turned it over the United States on February 24.)

• News of the German proposal inflamed editorial opinion, and for the first time, a large segment of the American press called for war.

• The House passed an armed neutrality bill, but anti-interven-tionists continued to filibuster in the Senate. On March 2, President Wilson authorized arming American merchant ships.

• Although ardent interventionists like Theodore Roosevelt belittled Wilson’s action as a timid and inadequate response, the president was, in fact, preparing a divided nation for war, if necessary.

Encoded Zimmermann Telegram, February 1917

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U.S. Declares War on Germany

• On March 18, 1917, news arrived that three additional American merchant ships had been sunk by the Germans without warning, with the loss of a dozen American crewmen.

• Wilson met with his cabinet on March 20th and with their unanimous recommendation, made his decision for war.

• On April 2, 1917, President Wilson asked Congress to declare that a state of war existed between the U.S. and Germany.

• After four days of heated debate, Congress approved the declaration of war.

German submarine in World War I

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U.S. in World War I

• During the 18 months the United States was at war (April 1917-November 1918), U.S. aid to the Allies soared. The U.S. government loaned more than $11 billion to the Allied governments (total federal expenditures in 1916 had been only $700 million).

• The U.S. helped to break the German submarine campaign and to ensure continued supplies to the Allies through its convoy system and the U.S. Navy.

• A temporary wartime draft raised 70 percent of the wartime American army.

• At home, American involvement in the war resulted in widespread repression rather than an extension of democracy.

• Government at all levels muzzled criticism through broad new powers against dissent, and conservatives used “100 percent Americanism” to crush or at least cripple longtime political or economic adversaries, branding them as traitors to the nation.

• Pacifists were hounded, civil libertarians and critical magazines suppressed, German Americans beaten, radical labor and farm organizations broken up, and leading dissenters, including Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, imprisoned.

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American soldiers in Argonne Forest, France, 1918

By the end of the conflict, there were more than 2 million American “doughboys” in France under General John J. Pershing.

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President Wilson’s Fourteen Points

• As the war continued, there was a growing demand, led by liberal internationalists, in America and other nations by the end of 1917 for a statement of liberal, not rapacious, imperialistic war aims by the Allies and a negotiated rather than a vengeful peace that would contain the seeds of a future war.

• Emphasizing his commitment to a liberal rather than the vindictive, repressive peace settlement desired by the Allies, Wilson put forward his “Fourteen Points” on January 8, 1918, drawing upon recommendations of liberal internationalists and the peace movement.

• Thus, he distanced himself from the Allies’ real war aims that became public when the communists seized power in Russia in October 1917 and published, from the Russian archives, the secret treaties promising to divide the empires of the Central Powers among the European Allies.

• In contrast, Wilson emphasized that the United States, which had not participated in the secret treaties, had no desire for additional territory or reparations, but fought for freedom of the seas, open diplomacy, arms reduction, equal access for all nations to trade, self-determination of peoples, and a postwar league of nations that would guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of all states, large and small.

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Armistice, November 11, 1918

• The American war effort restored Allied optimism, destroyed German morale, and played an important part in the decision of the German government to seek an end to the fighting in November 1918.

• In the fall of 1918, despite British and French desires to drive the successful Allied counteroffensive into Germany, Wilson agreed to an armistice with the civilian leaders of the new German Republic proclaimed at Weimar on November 9.

• With the armistice, the fighting ended on November 11, 1918.

• Some 50,000 American soldiers had died in the war; the other nations had lost about 9,000,000 soldiers on what was up to that time the bloodiest war in history.

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The Treaty of Versailles, 1919

• Despite Wilson’s efforts, the Treaty of Versailles largely provided a vindictive peace.

• The treaty not only required Germany to withdraw from the area it had conquered, but cost the new German Republic territory that had previously been part of Germany.

• Germany was stripped of its colonies, which were divided among the European Allies.

• The treaty forced Germany to disarm unilaterally and prohibited anything more than a small army for internal control.

• The Treaty impose severe reparations on Germany to help the Allies pay their war debts.

• Germany was required to accept sole blame for the war.

• Difficult territorial, economic and military questions were left to be negotiated in the forum of a League of Nations and World Court.

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The League of Nations • U.S. commitment to a League of Nations that would guaranteed the

postwar borders set at Versailles and pledge military action for collective security was a radical departure in American foreign policy.

• Republicans, who had gained control of Congress in 1918, attacked President Wilson for a treaty that they claimed undermined American national interests.

• Senator Lodge, now chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, delayed a vote on the treaty while criticism mounted.

• President Wilson refused to accept the Republican-sponsored reservations needed to gain 2/3 vote for Senate ratification of the treaty.

• He took his cause to the people but suffered a massive stroke that left him totally incapacitated for two months and crippled for the rest of his life.

• In 1920, Senator Warren Harding was elected president and in 1921 he signed a simply peace treaty with Germany.

• The U.S. Senate rejected American participation in the League of Nations and World Court.

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Long-term Legacy of the peace movement

• But in the immediate postwar period, the peace movement was successful in accomplishing significant disarmament through the 1920s.

• The Naval Arms Limitation Treaty of 1922 averted a burgeoning naval arm race.

• Following a resurgence of isolationism in the 1920s and 30s, liberal internationalism emerged as the dominant theme in U.S. foreign relations during World War II and for decades thereafter.

• A voice for peace has continued as an integral part of the often seemingly contradictory fabric of American society.

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Questions for Discussion

1. What were the proximate and the underlying causes of U.S. entry into World War I?

2. Was U.S. entry into the European War inevitable? If so, when and why?

3. What might have happened if the U.S. had been a truly neutral country during World War I?

4. Do you think that the United States should have entered the war? Why or why not?

5. Could the many peace organizations which existed in the United States, especially the women’s peace organizations, have succeeded in keeping the U.S. out of war in 1917 if they had all worked together, with the primary goal of maintaining peace, rather than gaining the vote or other objectives? What if women had already had the vote before World War I?

6. What if men and women, as well as pacifists, feminists and socialists, had been able to form a consensus against the war rather than being suspicious of each other?

7. How might history have been different if peace had been mediated by Wilson or by a group of neutral countries before 1917? If the U.S. had not entered World War I? If the U.S. had ratified the Treaty of Versailles and joined the League of Nations?