Woodrow Wilson - on declaring war against Germany (1917)

Barbara Tuchman
"The Zimmerman Telegram"

After World War I broke out (1914), President Wilson saw the role of the U.S. as a mediator rather than a belligerent power, and strove to keep the U.S. out of the war in Europe while communicating to the warring countries his desire for a peace settlement. "Peace without victory", he called it.

"The facts would have forced themselves upon anyone but Wilson, but the armor of fixed purpose he wore was impenetrable. He chose two main principles -neutrality for America, negotiated peace for Europe- as the fixed points of his policy and would allow no realities to interfere with them. ... Intent upon saving Europe, he ignored the mood of the Europeans. Just as he was determined to confer democracy upon Mexicans, ready or not, he was determined to confer peace upon Europeans, willing or not. He had no idea how like condescension his attitude appeared to them. He listened to himself rather than to them. He seemed unaware that two and a half years of fighting a war that was taking the best lives of nations had welded the combatants into a frame of mind in which compromise was impossible. He refused to recognize that each side now wanted tangible gains to show that the pain and cost had been worth while, and each had aims -Alsace-Lorraine was only one, but it would have been enough- that were permanently irreconcilable." (pp. 122-123)

"He felt obliged to be, or at least to act, impartial if he was to have any chace of getting both sides to listen to him. He was convinced that only a negotiated peace could endure, that a dictated peace forced upon the loser 'would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which the terms of peace would rest, not permamently, but only as upon quicksand.'" (pp. 123-124)

Wilson's resolve for peace was so strong that even the German announcement of irrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic against enemies and neutrals alike (to begin on February 1, 1917), was not enough to push the U.S. into the war. However, after the publication of the Zimmerman Telegram (february to march 1917), in which Germany "invited" Mexico to declare war against the U.S. in an alliance with Japan and Germany -with the promise of help to recover her lost territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona-, in view of Germany's open hostility toward the U.S.,  Wilson had no alternative but to ask Congress for a declaration of war (April 2, 1917).  

"The night before he spoke the public words that were to mark a chasm in our history, he spoke other words to a friend, Frank Cobb, the liberal editor of the New York World, whom he asked to visit him at the White House. They have the quality of last words, like Sir Walter Raleigh's poem before his execution. He could see no alternative, Wilson said, although he had tried every way he knew to avoid war. He said that once the American people entered the war, freedom and tolerance and level-headedness would be forgotten. Moreover, a declaration of war would mean 'that Germany would be beaten and so badly beaten that there would be a dictated peace, a victorious peace... At the end of the war there will be no bystanders with sufficient power to influence the terms. There won't be any peace standards left to work with.' And even at this moment a cry broke from him, 'If there is any alternative, for God's sake, let's take it!'" (pp. 196-197).