The Stern, Unflinching Performance of Duty

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-179
Author(s):  
John M. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Leadership Style ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
White House ◽  
Limited Support ◽  
La Follette

Chapter 7 analyzes Roosevelt’s career after leaving the White House, with a focus on World War I. It considers his relationship with Woodrow Wilson and argues that, although TR disagreed with Wilson on key policies and regarding Wilson’s leadership style, his attacks on the president were personal and often so extreme that they were counterproductive. The chapter argues that though Roosevelt’s advocacy of two themes, preparedness and Americanism, initially attracted limited support, by 1916 he had begun to play a key role in shaping public discussions about the war. Though Roosevelt’s rhetoric was sometimes incendiary and contributed to discrimination against German-Americans and antiwar figures such as Senator Robert La Follette, by 1918 he emerged as a leading candidate for president in 1920. Only TR’s death, in early 1919, prevented his return to the pinnacle of US politics.

The Mexican-German Conspiracy of 1915

1966 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
World War I ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
German Government ◽  
White House ◽  
Good Percentage

The Zimmermann telegram of 1917, the attempt of the German government to bring Mexico into World War I on the side of the Central Powers, is a well-known diplomatic episode because it is generally conceded to be one of the series of factors which convinced President Woodrow Wilson of the efficacy of abandoning his policy of neutrality. In return for her co-operation, and upon the successful conclusion of the war, Mexico was to “recover the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” On March 1, 1917, when the incident was recorded in the United States press and before either the State Department or the White House issued a confirmation or a denial, many congressmen and a good percentage of the United States public considered the note to be a brazen forgery and a great hoax. Had they realized that Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann’s proposal to Venustiano Carranza was not a bold and newly devised scheme but rather the climax of several years of intrigue with various Mexican officials and exile groups and had they been aware that the idea of restoring the territory lost in the middle of the nineteenth century was a Mexican rather than a German idea, there would have been but little reason to dispute the validity of the document in question.

Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917-1921

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

The Wilsonian Order Project

2020 ◽  
pp. 132-163
Author(s):  
Kyle M. Lascurettes
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
International Order ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Paris Peace Conference ◽  
At Home

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.

The Battle for a Dry America

2021 ◽  
pp. 487-526
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Third Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
One Year

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.

Interlude

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Riley
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Food Aid ◽  
World War ◽  
White House

Modern American food aid cannot be understood without understanding the plight of the rural farmer between the two world wars. At the end of World War I, these farmers, responding to Hoover’s call to “plow to the fences,” were suddenly producing far too much for a world rapidly returning to peacetime. Farmers had bought additional land on credit. Now they lacked sufficient income to make payment of the loans. Defaults mounted; rural banks padlocked their doors by the thousands. Presidents Coolidge and Hoover sought private rather than public remedies, but without success. Bills sent to the White House to provide relief to farmers were vetoed. When Roosevelt arrived in the White House, millions of tons of grain were rotting in storage across the country because consumers were too poor to pay enough for basic foodstuffs to enable farmers to earn enough to survive.

The League of Nations and the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Laderman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
International Peace ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
New States ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Global Affairs

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.

Woodrow Wilson and Business-Government Relations During World War I

1969 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Cuff
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Federal Trade Commission ◽  
Regulatory Agencies ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
White House ◽  
Government Relations ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Democratic Administration ◽  
Banking Committee

By the spring of 1914 Woodrow Wilson was clearly doing everything in his power to ingratiate the new Democratic Administration with the nation's business groups. He abandoned the Brandeisian spirit of trust-busting as part of his program for corporation control in favor of regulation by commission, a policy more in line with the sentiment among leading businessmen. (Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission established in 1915 soon showed that it would serve as the friend and not the enemy of business.) He directed personal appeals to businessmen both by letter and by informal conversations at the White House, and he made nominations to regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Reserve Board that left no doubt as to his sincerity in attracting business support. One of his choices for the Reserve Board, Thomas D. Jones, was at once a personal friend and a former trustee of Princeton University. But Jones was also a well-known member of the “Zinc Trust” and a director of the International Harvester Company then under indictment as a conspiracy in restraint of trade. Wilson campaigned hard for this appointment against strong Senatorial opposition even within his own party. At the same time, he declared publicly: “It would be particularly unfair to the Democratic Party and the Senate itself to regard it as the enemy of business, big or little.” Wilson was outraged when the Senate Banking Committee rejected his friend. “I believe the judgment and desire of the whole country cry out for a new temper in affairs,” he wrote rather despairingly to Jones. “We have breathed already too long the air of suspicion and distrust.”

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