Woodrow Wilson and the Suppression of Civil Liberties in World War I

Author(s):  
Samuel Walker
1981 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Arthur S. Link ◽  
Paul L. Murphy

1986 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 986
Author(s):  
William J. Breen ◽  
Robert H. Ferrell
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
pp. 132-163
Author(s):  
Kyle M. Lascurettes

How do we account for the vision of international order the American delegation pursued at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, manifested most concretely in the Covenant of the League of Nations that was written by avowed liberal internationalist Woodrow Wilson? The dominant inclusive narrative of order construction in 1919 emphasizes America’s liberal institutions at home coupled with its president’s progressive ideals and sense of ideological mission in world affairs. By contrast, chapter 6 (“The Wilsonian Order Project”) argues that the new ideological threat posed by radical socialism after the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917 actually played the most critical role in shaping the order preferences of Wilson and his principal advisers both before and during the Paris Peace Conference.


2021 ◽  
pp. 487-526
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad

Chapter 17 examines the Anti-Saloon League’s pivot to pressing for the Eighteenth (Prohibition) Amendment. In 1912 former president Theodore Roosevelt ran as a third-party Progressive against his handpicked Republican successor, William Howard Taft, as Taft had undermined Roosevelt’s signature Pure Food and Drug Act, which included purity standards on alcohol. The electoral split gave the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who was agnostic toward prohibition. World War I and the accompanying “cult of military sobriety” strengthened prohibitionist sentiment, while the election of 1916 secured the legislative supermajorities needed for a prohibition amendment. Once passed in December 1917, the amendment was ratified with unprecedented speed by January 1919, to come into effect one year later. In the meantime, drys pushed for a “wartime prohibition” until demobilization was complete. With prohibition in America secured, activists looked abroad through the World League Against Alcoholism (WLAA) and its chief emissary, Pussyfoot Johnson.


2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eldon J. Eisenach

AbstractAfter summarizing the ways in which Progressive intellectuals attacked individualist understandings of rights and mechanistic understandings of constitutional government, a series of second thoughts on this argument are pursued. The first centers on the ways in which progressivism differed from New Deal liberalism, especially regarding “big government.” Progressive understandings of politics rest on a distinction between “government(s)” and “state,” derived from Tocqueville and Lincoln’s understandings of popular sovereignty. Secondly, this distinction is reinforced by their stress on an articulate and coherent public opinion that would provide democratic legitimacy to all forms of governing institutions, both “public” and “private,” that serve the common good. The Civil War experience was their model, one which they first thought would be reincarnated in the preparation for World War I. Given both private and public assaults on free speech, Progressives in the 1920s often led the movement for protections of civil liberties and for a new respect paid to the First Amendment. The conclusion examines the continuities and discontinuities of Progressive political thought in contemporary political discourse.


Author(s):  
Charlie Laderman

Although the League of Nations was the first permanent organization established with the purpose of maintaining international peace, it built on the work of a series of 19th-century intergovernmental institutions. The destructiveness of World War I led American and British statesmen to champion a league as a means of maintaining postwar global order. In the United States, Woodrow Wilson followed his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, in advocating American membership of an international peace league, although Wilson’s vision for reforming global affairs was more radical. In Britain, public opinion had begun to coalesce in favor of a league from the outset of the war, though David Lloyd George and many of his Cabinet colleagues were initially skeptical of its benefits. However, Lloyd George was determined to establish an alliance with the United States and warmed to the league idea when Jan Christian Smuts presented a blueprint for an organization that served that end. The creation of the League was a predominantly British and American affair. Yet Wilson was unable to convince Americans to commit themselves to membership in the new organization. The Franco-British-dominated League enjoyed some early successes. Its high point was reached when Europe was infused with the “Spirit of Locarno” in the mid-1920s and the United States played an economically crucial, if politically constrained, role in advancing Continental peace. This tenuous basis for international order collapsed as a result of the economic chaos of the early 1930s, as the League proved incapable of containing the ambitions of revisionist powers in Europe and Asia. Despite its ultimate limitations as a peacekeeping body, recent scholarship has emphasized the League’s relative successes in stabilizing new states, safeguarding minorities, managing the evolution of colonies into notionally sovereign states, and policing transnational trafficking; in doing so, it paved the way for the creation of the United Nations.


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